Tushhog by Jeffery Hess

Author:Jeffery Hess
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Down & Out Books

Scotland was parked in his Z/28 somewhere in wide-open land out in Cape Coral—land that had been scraped nearly down to the sand. There were few trees to hide behind. His vantage point had shielded him as he’d watched the Lincoln and the GTO play their cat and mouse game. The Waylon Jennings tape played through twice, but Scotland kept it in. It was the only tape he had with him and he liked the guy’s voice better than anything he might’ve heard played on the radio.

As the two cars had gotten parallel to each other with some distance between them, it was the gunfire that made him look over the binoculars as if he’d get a better view. He pulled the binoculars in place again and adjusted the 7x50 zoom and saw a rifle that didn’t look as automatic as it sounded. He dropped the binoculars when the Lincoln crashed into the seawall. Picked them back up again in time to see one of those Italian guys light a rag sticking out of a bottle and toss it into the broken driver’s window.

Flames roared within seconds. The wash of black smoke against blue sky was something he didn’t think he’d ever forget.

Odors of sulfur and burning plastic coated his tongue with the taste of ash. Made it hard to swallow. The cloud of smoke widened the higher it rose and began to fade as a gradient from black to charcoal-gray to white all the way up to join the rest of the clouds in the sky.

When he was a kid, he’d pretend rising smoke was an elevator to heaven. He’d known people in six families who’d lost at least one relative in a house fire, and two more from boat fires. He liked to think people who died in gruesome ways had a free pass at the Pearly Gates and an express elevator right to the top. Maybe the people in the Lincoln benefitted from his concept, no matter the condition of their earthly bodies. It was a waste of time to consider such meaningless shit, but those people were dead and there was no mistaking the fact death is forever.

If anyone had been with him he wouldn’t have known what to say. He rubbed the tattoo on his forearm as nausea rippled through him. It was suddenly important to know if those were good people carpooling to work when they got spooked and finally decided to defend themselves with a warning shot. Or if they were targeted for sport. Or if they deserved to die. Either way, they were somebody’s kids or somebody’s parents and now they were ghosts of violent deaths. He’d never been able to make it sit well, even when he’d narrowly won a battle to the death.

After a minute or two, the Lincoln exploded in real time through his Bushnell binoculars. His heart locked up. He gripped the wheel and every muscle in his body contracted, ready to fight or to flee. He didn’t

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