JONATHAN L. WOODS is a lawyer by training and trade, with degrees from McGill University, New England School of Law and New York University School of Law.  Most recently he held the position of Assistant General Counsel for Nortel Networks.  Mr. Woods has traveled widely in Europe, Japan, Mexico and the Caribbean.  Presently, he lives in Dallas, Texas with his spouse, the artist Dahlia Woods, and a bichon frise named Hazel.  He is at work on a new noir tale set in Mexico.
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The devil’s a sportsman and he looks after his own. W. Somerset Maugham, Up At The Villa.

 

Chapter 1 – The Woman

Ever so slowly I reached out and touched the gun, where it lay at the back of the top shelf above the kitchen sink. I don’t know what I expected. Maybe that it would lunge at me, tearing a vicious gash in my finger with its teeth?

It was cold to the touch. But not the way a lifeless body feels. I knew that feeling from the time when I found my brother Ned’s wife, Amanda, the day after she drank a quart of vodka, swallowed a sixty day supply of sleeping pills and checked out for good. Unlike Amanda the gun lying in my kitchen cabinet was a thing that had never known life, an inert object.

A shiver ran down my spine. I was repelled yet mesmerized by the deadly thing hidden in my kitchen cupboard.

Sure, everyone thinks of Southerners as gun-loving hicks sitting on the front porch, spitting tobacco juice in the dirt and oiling the old pump action shotgun that daddy gave you when you were twelve. Well, Southerner I am – born and bred here in Charleston, South Carolina. But I’d never seen a gun up close before, except in a museum.

I took the gun in my hand. It was small, maybe five inches long, but surprisingly heavy.

A cheap, grooved-plastic inlay covered either side of the angular handle. The base of the handle was hollow where a clip holding the bullets was inserted. A second set of grooves ran along the back of the barrel for gripping the cocking mechanism that inserted the first bullet into the firing chamber. The barrel had rudimentary sights front and back. A nodule of metal surrounded the exit hole at the end of the short barrel. The exit hole was the diameter of a pencil.

The tongue-like trigger was waiting to be pulled.

There was writing on the side of the barrel. Model LT-25, .25 Cal. Auto it read on one side; LORCIN, Mira Loma, CA, USA on the other.

Abruptly I set the handgun on the kitchen counter with the sudden realization that in all likelihood it was loaded. I had been a hair’s breadth away from pulling the trigger, as I squinted into the black hole of the barrel. A little more pressure and I would have been adjudged another Beckett suicide.

I could see the look of resigned unhappiness on my mother Lydia’s face when she heard the news.

"Poor Harry," she would have said to whichever old Charlestonians she was with. "I was always afraid he might take his life. He was so different from Ned. So impractical."

And a tear might or might not have crept into the corner of her eye.

Then she would have sighed a deep sigh and gone into the bar of the Mill’s House hotel and ordered a double sherry and a dish of peanuts.

"Holy shit." I muttered. There was no way that I wanted to give Lydia an excuse to engage in public drunkenness.

But how had this nasty little Saturday night special ended up in my kitchen cupboard? And what was I going to do with it? I couldn’t put it back where I found it. I would always know it was there, waiting to be used for some evil purpose.

I listed the options in my head.

I could call the police and turn the gun over to them. But from a personal experience during my long lost student days, I distrusted anything to do with the cops. It was an event that shattered forever the naiveté of my youth.

After an evening of drinking beer at the apartment of one of my professors, I was walking home through the empty campus of the College of Charleston. I felt looped and carefree. But as Dr. John rasped over the airwaves, I was in the right place at the wrong time.

Two blocks away a coed was being raped. Afterwards, the girl, naked from the waist down, stumbled into an Irish bar on King Street. Her knees and elbows were cut and bloody from their impact on rough gravel when the rapist pushed her to the ground to enter her from behind. Tears streamed down her face. Between deep gasping breaths she repeated over and over about the man in the white t-shirt. The police were summoned. They swarmed like a nest of enraged yellow jackets.

Moments later they found me.

They threw me to the ground, wrenching my hands behind my back to secure the handcuffs. Then I was yanked to my feet again and shoved against an ivied wall. My nose hit the unyielding brick with a force that brought tears to my eyes. Blood gushed down my chin and onto my t-shirt with a portrait of Jimi Hendricks on the front. A police officer screamed obscenities at me.

For the rest of the night two detectives relentlessly sought to obtain my confession to the rape.

At nine o’clock the next morning Julius Dupuis Esq., my father’s lawyer, waltzed into the gray interrogation room where I was being held. He was impeccably dressed in a brown houndstooth-patterned suit, white dress shirt with gold cufflinks and a yellow striped tie. The two interrogating officers clambered to their feet.

"I think these impromptu discussions have gone on long enough," said Dupuis. "Harry, you look like you could use a cup of coffee and a nap."

I stood up, my eyes rolled back into my head and I fainted dead away.

Nothing further ever came of it. I don’t remember if they ever caught the real rapist. But my patriotic zeal for our law enforcement brotherhood was forever tarnished. No. I would not be calling the police about my discovery of the handgun.

Another alternative was to hide it in the glove compartment of Ned’s car and phone in an anonymous tip to the police about the location of an unlicensed weapon. No one deserved to be harassed and embarrassed more than my beloved brother. The whole blue blooded neighborhood would be talking for weeks about the police raid on Ned’s house. But it would only be a short-lived revenge, a mere inconvenience until Julius Dupuis worked his juju legal magic.

Which left one remaining option: get rid of the damn thing as quickly as possible. But where?

I could toss it in the trash after the empty wine bottles and the takeout pizza remains. Or drive to the BiLo supermarket parking lot and throw it in a dumpster. Or drive over the causeway from Mt. Pleasant to Sullie’s Island and drop it off the bridge into the intracoastal waterway where it would sink forever from human view into the tidal mud.

It suddenly felt close and torpid in the house. I needed a breath of night air to clear my head. I stepped out onto the rear deck overlooking the tidal marshes.

The rented house I’d moved into that morning, three days after the fire, was in a new development with only three other houses, one on either side of mine and the fourth, Jimmie Long’s place, at the far end of the subdivision around a curve of undeveloped land. Each was designed in a neo-Charlestonian style with two levels of covered porches along one side. They were built high up on cement block pilings, as protection against the tidal surge of a hurricane.

So far, I had only met one of my neighbors, a divorced woman who lived in the pink house to my right. I had not seen anyone in the house on the left.

Now, as I stood on my deck breathing in the salt air, both neighboring houses were dark and silent. Then the low whine of the downshifting of a finely tuned sports car rent the night. Car lights flickered in the trees. There was the final growl of a powerful engine at close range. Then stillness again. My missing neighbor had returned.

As the car engine died, my mind shifted back to the problem at hand. The simplest solution, considering the late hour, was to pitch the Saturday night special into the primordial mud of one of the marsh rivulets behind my house. But a walk in the marshes at night was an undertaking fraught with hazards. Poisonous snakes, patches of quicksand or the lethal edge of a rusting oil drum lurked in the treacherous darkness, waiting to do me in.

Then I remembered the dank, saline pond on the landward side of my subdivision across the road from my house. The green freaks fought tooth and nail to prevent the developer from draining it for additional house lots. And they had won - something to do with a fresh-water spring and rare speckled newts. The pond was the perfect place for the deadly handgun to disappear for all eternity.

I wiped the pistol perfunctorily back and forth several times on my trouser leg. There was no point in leaving my signature all over the damn thing. Then I slipped it into my pocket, went down my front steps and strolled casually as hell across the road to the sandy berm. I don’t know whom I expected to meet. No one was about. In the parking area under my returned neighbor’s house, the aerodynamic shape of a Porsche cast curving shadows that countervailed the perpendicular slashes of the pylons on which the house was built. A half moon glinted like a cheap trick through the tall pines on the far side of the pond. The surface of the pond was a pitch-black mirror.

Taking the gun out of my pocket, I did a little stuttering run toward the edge of the pond and threw it as far out as I could. There was a dull splash followed by a vast, cosmic stillness. Then the cicadas and frogs and crickets resumed their mindless chatter and life returned to normal.

Cursing under my breath because my Cole Haans had gotten wet at the edge of the pond, I re-crossed the road thinking about a vodka nightcap, the next chapter of the George Pelecanos novel I was reading and then sleep. At the bottom of my front steps I paused at the sound of a cough.

I looked up at the house next door where the sports car had arrived minutes before. A woman stood half in shadow on the second floor porch. The moon cast a dull sheen of whiteness on her still form. The spiked fronds of a palm tree drew a dark, rippled pattern over the figure’s torso. My male instinct told me she was naked. The orange tip of a cigarette glowed with the intensity of a laser. Then the figure slipped into the murky depths of the porch.

When I made my nightcap, I poured myself a double.

Copyright© 2005 Jonathan L. Woods

Read Jonathan L. Woods's review of Robert Stone's Bay Of Souls