Crime x 3 = Zero

Chapter 1

The Assassination

The tractor made its way across the creek ford and followed the winding road toward the small house built against the rock bluff. To someone observing this setting from the hillside overlooking the house and yard, it might have looked like a picture out of a child’s storybook. Perhaps, it was from a Hansel and Gretel or a Mother Goose story. There was something about this cottage, with its low roofline of moss covered shingles, and the winding stone path leading from the drive way, coupled with the backdrop of a shaded, vine-draped stone wall, that gave the observer a sense if its belonging in a child’s fantasy tale. This was a setting in a time capsule where change didn’t exist. Even the well in the yard near the front door spoke of yesterday. The circular stone wall and four wooden posts that supported the little conical roof and the hand cranked spool with a rope and a wooden bucket tied on its end, were all mute testimony that this was a place not interested in change. It could have been a Rockwell scene from the turn of the century had it not been for the 1965 Dodge pickup in the driveway and the John Deere tractor now making a U-turn at the edge of the yard.

The echoes from the tractor’s exhaust were just fading off the walls of the hollow as the stocky woman came out of the house, letting the screen door behind her bang against its jam. The grimace of her face indicated a disposition akin to contrariety rather than of some congenial manner more suited to her otherwise, grandmotherly appearance. She walked with a splay-legged gait and hunched shoulders like one accepting, but reluctantly bearing the burdens of her life. The man sitting on the tractor was a larger, carbon copy of the woman, in a switch of genders. He was only a few inches taller than his mother, who stood five-feet one-inch , but at two hundred pounds, he only outweighed her by forty. While still sitting, he took off his gloves and laid them in the box adjacent to the seat and blew the dust out of his nose by pinching first one side, then the other, expelling the mix of dust and phlegm onto the ground below. Taking hold of the top of the steering wheel, he raised himself off the tractor’s seat for the last time in his life of thirty-five years.

The crack of the rifle took a full second to reach Raymond’s ears, but by that time, the bullet that entered his chest directly in the center of his breast bone, had already exited through his left buttock and smashed into a dozen pieces at his mother’s feet. Raymond never heard the sound. The second shot, which followed about a second and a half later, passed just beneath his ribs on his right side and cut a neat hole through his left kidney, ending up like its predecessor on the rock drive. The third shot, two seconds later, caught him as he was thrown backwards and spun around by the first two impacts. It entered at the top of his right buttock, bisected through both lungs and his heart, and exiting under his left arm, passing through that arm, breaking the humerus. Again, the bullet smashed into the rock drive by the woman’s feet. Raymond was dead several seconds before his body fell with a thud in front of his mother.

The rifle shots echoed off the rock walls of the little hollow and were punctuated with the screams of the woman. She started to run toward her son, but a fourth shot rang out and the woman was knocked to her knees as her simple floral dress exploded in the middle of her belly. The bullet entered almost in the center of her naval and punctured two holes in the large intestine before exiting through her back. With the instincts of survival that had carried her through fifty-eight years of living a hard-scrabble existence, she got to her feet and ran the twenty-odd yards back to her house. She threw the screen door open and started to escape inside when the rifle cracked a fifth time. The final bullet hit her in the back, passing through her right kidney and exiting at her lower right abdomen. It stopped when it hit the wood burning stove, splintering the iron front.