Murder of a Creped Suzette

As Wally and Skye drove toward the Doozier property, she recalled a program she had attended her senior year in high school about the history of the town. The speaker had explained that the community had initially been confined to a fork between the two branches of the Scumble River but had eventually spread along both banks and beyond. That overflow was where they were heading now.

Skye remembered the historian talking about the two groups of people currently occupying the acreage along the south bank of the river. The newcomers had moved there from Chicago in the 1980s, and built summer cottages or retirement homes along a forested stretch of land. While these outsiders helped line the pockets of some Scumble Riverites and were welcomed by those town folks, they invaded the privacy of others. The others, who believed a good neighbor was one who lived far enough away to never be seen, were the original settlers known as the Red Raggers—of which the Dooziers were the ruling clan.

For the first couple of years, the interlopers and the Red Raggers had tested each other’s mettle, and eventually an uneasy alliance had been formed. Apparently, since shots had now been fired, that peace treaty must have been breached. Skye hoped it could be renegotiated without bloodshed.

Wally turned the squad car onto Cattail Path. They were entering Red Ragger country, and the first property they came to belonged to the Dooziers. It was shaped roughly like a right triangle, with the hypotenuse resting along the riverbank and the house situated at the smallest point. From the road, Wally and Skye could see only this tip, and from that limited vantage point there was no evidence of any disturbance.

But Skye wasn’t reassured. She was fairly certain the real action was taking place in the woods to the side of the house, as this was the land where the shortest leg of the triangle formed the boundary between the Dooziers and their nearest neighbor.

Wally parked and said to Skye, “Keep behind me until we know what’s going on.”

“Definitely.” The Dooziers might be her friends, but there was always the danger of getting shot by accident. And Wally was the one wearing the Kevlar vest.

He got out of the cruiser and Skye followed suit. The uneven ground in front of the run-down shack was covered with weeds and rocks. The carcasses of junked pickups, shells of old appliances, and a recently acquired troop of garden gnomes added to the obstacle course and forced them to pick their way gingerly toward the backyard.

At the gate, a crooked sign painted on a flattened carton read:

Paintball Advenchore!

Gauranteed Fun! Fun! Fun!

Yer very own rifle, shotgun, or uzi!

$5.00 fur haf hour/$25.00 fur haf day.

Skye was not surprised that the names of the weapons were among the few words the Dooziers had spelled correctly.

She and Wally peered over the fence. Several feet back, where the yard merged into the wooded area, a folding table with a pyramid of guns piled in the center teetered on crooked legs. Sitting with his cowboy boots propped up on the table’s surface was a skinny, densely tattooed man wearing a pair of jeans and several ammo belts crisscrossed over his bare chest. A camo bandanna tied around his head had slipped down over the upper third of his face, and empty beer cans were strewn next to his lawn chair like shiny red and silver leaves surrounding a scrawny maple tree.

Skye closed her eyes, praying it was all a hallucination. She could think of no positive outcome in a scenario that included a drunken Earl Doozier pretending to be Rambo.

Skye glanced at Wally and whispered, “What now?” It was never a good idea to startle an armed Doozier, especially an inebriated one.

Wally tried the gate; it was unlocked. Clearing his throat, he stepped over the metal threshold and said, “Earl, are you awake?”

A snore that sounded like a backfiring leaf blower erupted from Earl’s open mouth, and he screwed up his face, then turned away from them.

“Earl?” Wally inched closer and raised his voice. “Wake up, Earl.”

There was no reaction from the sleeping man, but the dogs penned nearby jumped against the steel mesh of their cage, bouncing off it while barking and baring their teeth at Skye and Wally.

Skye spotted a bamboo fishing rod leaning against a dilapidated shed. She whispered her idea to Wally, who shook his head no, but she ignored his instructions and squeezed past him. Giving the furious animals a wide berth, she grabbed the pole and inched her way toward Earl.

Once within reach, she used the rod to tap the sleeping Doozier on the shoulder, saying in her outdoor voice, “Earl, wake up.”

He leaped from his chair, wrestling with the bandanna that was blinding him, and yelped, “I wuz jes’ restin’ my eyes, honey pie.”