Al Campbell relaxed and in a beach lounger beside a phone booth on the northwest corner of a middle-of-nowhere intersection in Nebraska. His eyes went from his Rolex to the setting sun and back, as if checking his watch and the sun were in agreement. Corn stretched skyward in all directions, and the stalks rustled and chittered in the gentle breeze like disobedient children told to stand quietly until called. The western road shimmered in the day’s fading heat, and Al sometimes cocked an ear in that direction, a cat outside a mouse hole, and squinted into the fading daylight, waiting. Behind him and facing away from the setting sun, Blanche cut up vegetables in their Winnebago.
He checked his watch and called into the RV. “Are you sure about this, Blanche. This is Friday night. You’re sure he comes by here every Friday night?”
Blanche glanced at the digital clock on the stove and sliced her right index finger. “Damn.”
“Damn we have the wrong day? Damn we got here too late? Damn what?”
“Yes, no, no, and I cut my finger. You send Quarrals his check?”
Al stood, walked to the center of the intersection, checked the roads in all four directions, shook his head and sat back down. “Yes, I sent Quarrals his check.”
A state cruiser crested a rise on the western road.
“My apologies, dear sister. Here comes our friend. You ready?”
The trooper pulled up behind the RV and turned its lights on. The officer, a medium-sized man with salt-and-pepper hair, a roman nose, and a voice pitched half-an-octave than it should’be been, slid his baton into his utility belt as he exited his cruiser and walked over. “You folks okay? Breakdown or something?”
Blanche stood behind the RV’s screen door and held up her hand. “Cut my finger slicing vegetables, but it’s nothing.”
The officer glanced at Blanche’s knife. She held it in a towel and blood dripped from her other hand onto the towel. “A smaller blade might be easier to handle, Ma’am.”
Blanche glanced at the knife, chuckled, and put it on the RV’s kitchen table. “Yeah, you’re probably right. Excuse me for a minute?”
Al stood up, smiled, and hooked a thumb towards the booth. “Called back home. We call from wherever we are every Friday night at seven. They must be out at a game or shopping. We’re waiting for them to call back. Is there a problem, officer – ” Al squinted at the officer’s nametag ” – Audelle?”
“Just saw you folks here, thought you might need some help. If everything’s okay, I’ll be on my way.”
Al cocked his head. “Forgive me for asking, Officer Audelle, but that’s not a Nebraska accent I hear. You a transplant?”
The officer smiled. “Good ears. I’m from New Hampshire originally. Thought I’d lost that Yankee drawl. Guess not, huh?”
The phone rang in the booth. The Audelle and Al stared at each other. Audelle nodded towards the ringing phone. “You going to get that?”
Blanche opened the door and came down the steps. “I’ll get it.”
Audelle kept his eyes on Al.
Blanche thrust a three-sided brown-grayish bayonet upwards into Audelle’s back between his third and fourth ribs. She probed with it until she felt the resistance of the epicardium and the inner pericardial layer, then forcefully thrust it into the myocardium and stopped Audelle’s heart.
He fell lifeless, the bayonet steaming and still in his back.
“I need to practice this more. You’re much better at this than I am. Teach me with the next one?”
“Are you sure he was one of them, Sister?”
She entered the Winnebago and came out a moment later with a green covered yearbook in her hands and a bandaid on her finger. The cover read “Little Green Class of ’73”. She flipped pages, stopped, tapped the bandaged finger on a picture, and handed him the yearbook.
Al looked at the picture. He kneeled beside the fallen officer and rolled the corpse onto its back. “Yeah, and wow, you’re good. Nobody can trace this back to us?”
“They’d have to dig through lots of public records, same as I do, and I only do one lookup in one place at a time, everything’s done on public-use library computers, blind Prodigy, Compuserve, Genie, AOL, and Delphi accounts, and those computerized phonebooks on CDs you got.” She went back into the Winnebago with the yearbook and reappeared at the door a moment later. “Dinner’ll be ready in an hour. I’m making your favorite, chicken pot pie, nice and creamy with lots of vegetables.
He smiled. “You’re too good to me, Sis.”
“We should be gone before then.”
Al glanced at the blood pooling around the Audelle’s body, at the way the setting sun gave it a polished bronze color, and nodded. “Yeah, seal it up.”
Blanche secured the RV’s door. Al got in the driver’s seat. Out of habit, he turned on his directional and checked his mirror before pulling out into the road.
No Responses