Shoot to Kill: Reflections on Vodka

At midnight last night one began to hear an electronic beep with a one second period and a 60-second cycle. This sound continued throughout the night causing several awakenings and subsequent forays through the premises to determine the source of this Close Encounters ditty.

Sometime after dawn one determined that the sound was a low battery warning on a cordless phone and just hours later recalled that said phone was at the top of the attic ladder--ready to hand for incoming phone calls which might beckon while one has crawling, Quasimodo-like, round the attic precincts.

Musing over this whilst occupied with one's elevenses, one wrote the following:

SHOOT TO KILL

By JCSTREET ©

Patrick woke suddenly at 3:10am knowing something was wrong but not knowing what. He heard a single 3000 Hertz tone with a duration of one second and 60 seconds later he heard it again. He knew what the sound was but he couldn't put a name to it. He had heard it before and he thought the situation had worked out just fine but he couldn't recall what the situation had been.

He groped out of bed in the dark cracking a shin on an extended drawer, cursed his way to the door and turned on the light. The sound came again. Patrick moved down the hall, preternaturally alert . . . listening; listening; listening . . . and heard the sound again. He was becoming irritated. He moved through the house turning on lights, listening for the sound; trying to identify from whence it issued. But it seemed omnidirectional.

He assumed a plains Indian crouch and moved his head slowly from side to side using the space between his ears as the base of a vector triangle and the sound came again. But from whence it came he knew not.

Now that the problem had assumed more serious proportions Patrick thought he might as well have a drink. He went into the kitchen, pulled a bottle of Stolichnaya out of the freezer, smugly aware that it was pronounced stalichnaya, like all Russian 'O' words, bolshoi/balshoi, horosho/harasho. It gave him a feeling of comfort to dwell on this picayune detail because the sound was beginning to drill into his brain.

Patrick decided he didn't really need a glass and moped into the living room with the bottle. He turned on the TV, watched 11 commercials for Motrin, turned off the TV and took a long pull on the bottle. He listened for the sound. The sound had stopped. That made him nervous. Now he was agog with waiting for the sound. It's only when the Chinese water torture drops stop dropping that the senses reach their most hyperalert state; begging . . . yearning . . . for just one more drop.

He got up, moved to the stereo, picked up TB Sheets, by Van Morrison and placed it on the deck. Just as he was about to press. . . the sound came again.

Patrick went back to his chair and took a slightly longer pull from the bottle.

The vodka was oily from its arctic incarceration and send a shooting pain down his neck. he leaned back and said to no one in particular, 'FUUCCKKK', and then listened to the sound for another 10 minutes.

By this time the bottle was down well below the shoulders. But his empiricist bent left him no option but to try, try, try and try again to locate the source of the sound. He began to wonder if the sound could be associated with some hitherto undiscovered intelligence service; laughed at his paranoia and took another long pull of Stoly, or was it Staly . . . who gave a shi shi shi shit (burp).

He got up holding the bottle, blundered into a side table knocking over a lamp and then lurched obliquely onto the carpet. He giggled, realizing that this gave him a new vantage point from which to vector in on the sound . . . to scope it out . . . to radar it. He imagined he was at the controls of a combat information center, master of all known means of acquisition.

The sound came again and he lay somewhat discomfited for several more minutes as the sound ticked away the minutes of his life. He pushed himself up to his knees and experimentally raised one knee to plant his foot firmly on the carpet. He pushed upward with both hands and one foot but his body failed to rise. He fell over sideways and giggled.

The sound came again and he yelled 'ARRRRGGGGHHHHH'. He could do that. The nearest house was several hundred yards away.

His next attempt to rise was relatively successful leaving him in unstable equilibrium but bipedal once more. He reeling round the room giggling until he realized he had lost the vodka bottle. The room dimmer had been set on low. He couldn't remember which door (there were three in the living room) the dimmer was beside.

The sound came again and Patrick wondered whether a Zen meditation might help but when the sound came yet again he wondered if he would recapture enough serenity to ever do a Zen meditation again.

The sound came again.

Patrick moved from the living room, toward his den, passing a family room that was in the process of becoming a library. It was a jungle of ladders, paint cans, decorators' canvas tarps, baulks of wood, sheets of paneling and all the detritus from which the alchemists would transmute chaos into clublike tranquility.

When he entered the den he navigated round a large antique globe and headed for his gun cabinet. He felt out of focus and realized he needed glasses. He always needed glasses after a few drinks. He turned around, tripped over a partners’ chair, groped for the desk and slammed both hands down on a keyboard which slipped off the desk causing him to lose his grip and fall.

This time he sat for several minutes. The sound continued its plangent footfalls on his limbic system. Eventually, with the desk for purchase, Patrick was able to lurch once more to his feet.

He moved over to his gun cabinet and considered his choice of weapons, deer rifles, varmint plinkers, a 1916 Springfield 30-06, shotguns . . . shotguns . . . yes; where was his Federal Arms blue-steeled pump. A second cabinet, this one lacking a glass front, contained Patrick's more exotic armory. Being a respectable citizen of not insubstantial means he had managed to acquire licenses for an arsenal of weapons of which the boyz in the Hood could only dream. Alas . . . it was secured by a combination lock whose cryptic number scheme momentarily escaped him . . . but then he remembered . . . 38-26-38; not much chance of a stranger cracking THAT one . . . forgetting for a moment that his society wife's much publicized figure was a matter of public record and, coincidentally, accorded to the gun cabinet's high security algorithm.

He fumbled with the lock, eventually prised it open, removed it from the hasps and grasped the doors, only to fall back, still holding the door handles and gasping as the cabinet tilted dangerously toward collapse. In a momentary shudder of terror he was reminded of the decimations possible from coke machines when pulled and shaken by discontented patrons. He managed to let go the handles before this endgame played out and the gun cabinet crashed back against the wall. Patrick would have crashed once again to the floor had not the thick Wilton turned his fall into a less fracturing collapse.

Patrick needed a drink. He groped along the wall of the den, down the hall and back into the living room where his hand miraculously fell on the dimmer switch, serendipitously turning on a thousand points of light.

Bolstered by the Stalag intensity of the glare, Patrick's eye quickly fell on the prostrate bottle which, mercifully had its bottle cap well closed. In a sudden flash of insight he realized that capping the bottle after each pull had become a vegetative function. He might well be capable of it even if decerebrate.

Not willing to push his luck he fell to his knees and crawled across the carpet. He fumbled with the cap, spilling an ounce or so and then raising the bottle sideways at an awkward angle and spilled out a double; some of which ran into his mouth. He fell over sideways and then turned on his back giggling.

A dollop of vodka splashed onto his belly but it had already warmed up to the freezing point of water. He forgot temporarily what mission he had been embarked upon but staunched his puzzlement by reflecting on whether water truly WAS the universal solvent, being that it was immiscible with most, perhaps all, petroleum fractions . . . uh . . . for starters.

But then the Federal Arms mantra asserted itself like a rap record and he recalled his search for the shotgun. This impelled him to crawl out of the living room, down the hall, into the den and over to the menacing gun cabinet. He was able to raise himself to his feet by grasping the projecting base on which the cabinet stood; the base which contained the ammunition drawers, the targets, the cleaning materials . . . the . . . whatever. The deadly weapon was racked next to a Thompson, minus its drum magazine, but he had sticks for it.

Knowing that handling firearms was serious business, Patrick took a deep breath and incanted, 'I am as sober as a (giggle) . . . I'm as sober as a, a, a . . . sober guy', and satisfied with this concession to responsible citizenship, managed to unrack the weapon, heft it into his right hand and half pump with the left to check the chamber.

No shells.

He put the weapon down on the cabinet base, gouging a small sliver of woodstain from the hitherto pristine furnishing, and began wrenching drawers open and palming his way through a pot pourri of ammunition. Birdshot or slug? His mind began to toy with the term '20mm grenade' but he forced himself to be sensible and decided on 12 gauge birdshot. At six to 12 feet it would cut a goodly swath through any fucking sound generator alive.

He opened a box of 50 federal 12 gauge birdshot cartridges, spilling most of them onto the floor but managing to retain sufficient to fill the magazine. He chambered his loads, spilling several more, until he felt resistance. Then he crept toward the door of the den on the balls of his feet, mimicking what he thought was the proper battle order for a recon mission, though wondering tangentially how he was capable of doing this. The pain of his shoulder thudding into the door jamb reminded him that he was not yet fully alert.

Patrick took a deep breath and essayed the hall, imaging himself to be a VC infiltrator moving on the balls of his bare feet. After all, his feet were bare. He felt his senses suddenly supernaturally aware and when the sound came again he pumped a round up into the breech with a satisfying 'slock' sound. 'Igot a hard-on for this sucker now,' he reflected.

But when the sound suddenly came again--not 60 seconds later but more like 30--he let out a terrified squeal and discharged his load into a tall, slim cherrywood cabinet holding a King's ransom in Orrefors and Christofle glassware. Frosted shards floated ominously through his gaze before raining onto the hall carpet. Terrorstruck, Patrick chambered a second round, heard the sound again and knew suddenly it came from the soon-to-be library.

He turned in what felt like a lightning reaction and cooked off a round which left the barrel at 2850 feet per second to dispel its kinetic energy on a tall stepladder holding a large can of red paint.

Bloodmist occulted his vision and he threw both bands in the air shouting 'YES' causing the Federal to leave his grasp, fall buttfirst onto his toe and discharged yet another round into the'library' where it blew out a large thermal window commanding an uninterrupted view of an ornamental lake.

Patrick howled and screamed and reached for his lacerated toe before falling backward, banging his head on the hall wall and falling in a heap, moaning and mewling. 'This is not fair' he burbled into the carpet, 'this is just NOT FAIR.' and girded by the realization that none of this was HIS fault, Patrick lurched to his feet, fueled by adrenalin, and strode purposefully back into the den.

This time it was the Thompson which fell to hand when he reached half-blindly for any ballistic weapon which might be capable of pretty significant serial killing. He knew where the stick mags were and they were preloaded with .45 ACPs. He yanked open the relevant drawer, grabbed a mag and slammed it into the receiver with a satisfying 'CLICK'. He slammed another mag into his pocket, but realized as it gouged into his side, that he had no pocket. He hurled the magazine dementedly through the den window, where it became entangled in a rhododendron bush and fell to earth.

Patrick grasped the Thompson's pistol grip with his right hand, pulled back the cocking lever with his left and grasped the forward pistol grip.

He advanced remorselessly into the living room and with a scream of 'I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more' he fired a short burst into the TV set--no more Motrin commercials. Elated with his Godlike power he raked the stereo unit with a sizzling burst. No more Van Morrison. Foaming at the mouth from previously suppressed saliva he giggled insanely and cooked off the balance of the magazine into a white, French provincial desk.

'I hate fucking French provincial,' he screamed. He tried to trigger more mayhem but there was no more firepower. He hurled the Thompson impotently into a tall bamboo and glass stand, housing a rare collection of Chinese lacquerware.

Susan Leete (she had retained her maiden name for purposes of pretension) heard the last long burst of nearly 20 shots as she turned her Lamborghini into the endless curved driveway. Her attitude in the low vehicle was only slightly less prone than that of an astronaut, bleeding from the eyeballs in a 12g fugue.

Susan knew Patrick only as an agent of entropy in whose hands all order must eventually return to chaos. However, the comforting feeling of nearly three million dollars in her series of Cayman bank accounts had inured her to Patrick's monthly rampages . . . he was a metaphoric Bhowani Junction, rogue elephanting through a pristine world of objets d'art.

Susan had achieved this enviable position (and that was before counting her inheritance--unfortunately heavily-taxable) by staging a series of heroic cocksucking jamborees with Patrick's accounting team, a reasonably affable and fairly incompetent crew of young East Coast patricians. She had, indeed that very night, been pursuing her interest in penile mouthfeel with the connoiseur's relentless zeal. When she deigned to speak at all it was in permanently teeth-clenched mode such that her over-developed cheek and jaw muscles bulged out like those of a mutant chipmunk.

Indeed Richard had once referred snidely to 'The Attack of the 50-foot Chipmunk.' Fortunately she had been in the process of opening a bottle of Cristal and had managed to bop him in the temple with the cork, inducing several minutes of staggering lability in the asshole.

'Oh what is it this time', she sighed histrionically in a rather clichéd womens' magazine fictoid.

Goosing the Lamborghini in a graceful drift round the pink-pebbled final turn she skidded to rest under a Porte Cochere, accented with Italian marble and Swedish glass.

She opened the gullwing door and debarked from the four-foot high vehicle in a parody of every boy scout's dream--long slim legs, revealing as her split skirt parted, a seamed silk stocking leading to a delicate black garter--garnished with a red bow--running up her ivory thigh to the lacy edge of her off-white Chinese silk, camisole panties.

She pushed the door which retracted with hydraulic Star Trek elegance, and processed languidly to the heavy double doors; lately come from a former English baronial seat. Fortunately they yielded soundlessly to her electronic door opener, revealing a thousand points of light which sparkled brilliantly on a million shards of irreplaceable glass.

Picking her way delicately through the carnage she came upon what she first took to be a large white jellyfish until she recognized the familiar weeping and handwringing of the husband she had vowed to love, honor and obey.

'What is it this time, Patrick,' she demanded, paying no court to the dozen lacerations from which blood seeped relentlessly in a barbershop pole frieze.

Patrick responded with a keening wail which found resonant harmony with two fillings which Susan's dentist had pumped into her molars several days before. There would be no bill. Susan never had to pay for anything. Connoisseurs never did.

Patrick said 'the horror . . . the horror' and subsided into bathetic weeping.

'What fucking horror,' shouted Susan, temporarily rattled.

'That sound . . . that evil sound,' wailed Patrick pointing nowhere in particular.

Susan stood for several seconds, ear cocked, until the sound came again and suddenly aware, emitted a braying laugh.

'You mean the low battery warning on the cellphone? Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear."

'Waaaaaaaaagggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!," said Patrick.

'Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!' said Susan and, turning on her heel added, 'I think I'll stay at the club tonight' underlining the statement by sashaying out the door swinging a small jeweled purse.

-30-

July 11, 2002