The Courier: Chapter 14

Vol. 1; Issue 15
by Melissa B.

Rosie couldn’t believe it. All the blood, and the gore, and the edge-of-my-seat terror for this?

Lillian lifted the latch on the box she’d been carting around for what seemed like multiple eons. The one that had, presumably, caused Rutherford’s death in the limo; the package that, apparently, held the key to her sister, Mae’s, life; the reason, really, that Lillian was facing Rosie right now. Lillian had grown to think of the bulky box as her burden–and her release–plain and simple.

Both young women looked down at the heavy metal contraption lodged in Lillian’s lap. The top came off, and their eyes bulged out.

A .30-.30 Winchester Model Lever-Action Rifle gleamed in the dimming light. Cleaned and broken down, nestled down deep in the container, its 24-inch barrel and other parts wrapped in hot-pink tissue paper. The neatly enveloped contents mirrored a gift one would pick up at the Vicky’s Secret out at Tyson’s Corner Center.

Older than the .30-.30 that macho Teddy Roosevelt had used to bag his antelope at the turn of the last century. Probably manufactured it the ’20s. Like the one Uncle Lewie tracked down his deer with up in Wisconsin’s North Woods. The same model that her dad had unloaded and propped up in the dark corner of the mud-room closet, back in Chippewa Falls, after her little brother had bought the farm in that hunting accident.

The expression on Lillian’s face put Rosie in mind of an old Wisconsin cliché . The petite young woman definitely resembled a “deer in the headlights.”

“What the f…” Lillian gasped, almost choking on her own outrage.

“Looks like a gun from back home,” Rosie offered. “My Uncle Lewie had one. We hunt.”

She thought of the moth-eaten bucks hanging on the wall of The Tune Inn, just down the street. Hell, they even had a fuzzy deer butt mounted in that dive. But all of this was so far away from Wisconsin–from Grandpa Olsen’s dairy farm and Jake Leinenkugel’s hometown brewery.

Lillian pulled the slender, almost feminine, rifle barrel out of its girly packaging. Rosie figured the weapon must be a collector’s item. You couldn’t find hunting rifles of this age at Wal-Mart or Dick’s Sporting Goods.

“But I don’t understand,” Lillian said, reaching for the solid stock of the repeating rifle. An efficient tool for bagging everything in the forest, from Bambi to Baloo. “What does this beat-up old gun have to do with me? With my sister?”

Rosie squinched up her Norwegian ski-slope nose. Wrinkled her Nordic blue eyes. She had a thought, but was almost afraid to volunteer.

“I’m thinking you need to explain some of this to me,” Rosie said. “I’m willing to help, but I need to know your situation, first.”

“I’d love to tell you,” Lillian confided. “But I’m worried that they might have followed us here. I’m afraid I’m putting you in danger. I need a place to hide. Accessible to you, if you’re not too terrified. Somewhere near here, so I can think about what to do about Mae and her situation.”

Rosie pulled another ciggie from her battered pack, lit the end with a Bic-fueled flourish. “I actually do have an idea.”

Rosie recalled a conversation she’d had a while back with Dar in the back booth at the Tune. Where the dueling smells of a greasy kitchen and the dank, poorly ventilated bathrooms competed for a customer’s attention.

Dar was even more of a Tune Inn regular than Rosie. She could remember back to the old days, when the old owner, Tony, would pull out a shotgun from behind the bar when he thought a client was acting too out of line.

Tony’s “Pops,” Joe, had bought The Tune Inn from the original owner in the mid-’50s. The Tune, in its present incarnation, had been “founded” just after the war, 10 years before.

But the crumbling brick façade was decades, if not centuries, older than WW2. And Rosie knew for a fact that the Tune had been a speakeasy during Prohibition days, complete with a “secret room” to hold the primo hootch.

In fact, the new owner, Tony’s daughter Lisa, had shown Dar the hidden cubby between the back wall of the bar and the Exxon station next door. Rumor had it that Al Capone used to hold court back there. And even if it weren’t true, the tale of Capone’s cigar-perfumed poker marathons sure did make a good story.

Lillian caught the glint in Rosie’s eye. A combination of trepidation and lust for the hunt.

“What do you propose?” Lillian wanted to trust her new “friend,” such as she was. But she’d been burned an awful lot of times, hadn’t she?

“Follow me,” Rosie urged. “I’m more than an everyday Cheesehead, you betcha!”