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Flying Blind
by R.P. Dahlke
Mystery, Amateur Sleuth

Chapter One

I like having a man at my feet. Tough guys who grovel are my favorite, though I’m not adverse to a little toe kissing when appropriate. I leave the toe kissing for those uneven date nights when my sweety, Caleb Stone, is not on duty, and I’m not neck deep in summer time work. Summer is hell for a girl crop-duster, or lady aerial applicator, to be PC. That’s when farmers beg, whine and threaten so they can be first in line to have their fields sprayed or dusted before the next rain or blight or bug infestation hits.

All of which had nothing to do with the man who was presently draped across my feet. In the gusty twilight his intricate paper snowflakes swirled along the grimy alley and flattened themselves against mismatched and dented garbage cans. Dead drunk, I figured, looking down at the disheveled lump. The red, white and blue ribbons that held his long, graying ponytail falling across his face

The snowflakes were Billy Wayne’s odd way around Caleb’s gentle, if unofficial, visit to a fellow marine, and the poetry, oft times straying into the bizarre, theaded between the holes of the white construction paper that spilled across his lap.

Caleb had warned him that any poetry left on the windshields of either my classic ’58 Caddy, or my farm truck, was not appropriate, and to persist in this behavior would be ill advised and considered harassment—his words, not mine. Caleb’s belief that a marine could always pull himself out of the fire didn’t take into mind the concept that Billy’s schizophrenia mixed with alcohol was not conducive any such persuasion.

His poetry stopped for about a week. Then, in the SaveMart parking lot, I came out of the store with a load of groceries to find my candy apple red El Dorado surrounded by curious shoppers. I shoved through the crowd and gawked at the red Caddy now polka-dotted in white snowflakes. Upon closer inspection I could see that the paper cut outs were as unique as the real ones. Indeed, there were no two exactly alike. And written in tightly printed words around the edges were the rambling sentiments that passed for poetry by none other than my very own admirer, Billy Wayne.
Groaning aloud I removed five or six with a swipe of one hand and shooed off the curious spectators with a wave of the other. “Practical joke, folks, nothing special.”

I didn’t have the heart to report this latest infraction to Caleb. Billy Wayne I knew, was shy, easily startled and would panic and run if Caleb should feel compelled to make good on his threat of a restraining order. Instead, I decided that I would confront him myself. Make him understand that his attraction to me, though flattering, was never going to go anywhere.

I found him where I thought he would be at this time of day, at the end of a grimy alley behind Mr. Kim’s a Chinese restaurant in an otherwise abandoned city block of downtown Modesto. “Billy Wayne? Wake up! Come on now,” I said in disgust. “This is getting out of hand. You’ve got to stop this nonsense,” I waved at the mess of incomplete artwork all around him. I knelt down and shook his shoulder. He rolled away onto his back. That’s when I saw the blue handle of the scissors clutched to his chest. The same scissors he used to make the offending snowflakes, The ones that had caused me such embarrassment.

“Lolla,” He gurgled oddly, a bubble of ruby red at the corner of his mouth. I followed his eyes down to where his hands clutched the scissors sticking out of his chest. His dog-tags stuck to a dark stain spreading across the chest of his nearly new white T-shirt.

Reflexively, I jerked my hand away, the air I sucked into my chest syncopating in an unlikely rhythm to the obvious death rattle in his.

I turned away, aimed for help, the end of the alley a long dark miles long tunnel, but he caught at my ankle. He was whispering, his breathy whisper in quick, choppy gasps. I squatted down next to him, my hand on his shoulder. “What’re you doing! I gotta get you some help.”  

“Too late. You’ll see. The more there is the less you see.” Then Billy Wayne Dobson, troubled soul that he was, gave a woofing sound, oddly like a laugh, and fell across my feet, his long neck stretched out and his unkempt head of grey falling in his eyes.

Fighting the mpulse to pull my foot away and run for help, I leaned over and felt for a pulse in his neck. There it is! And then it was gone. I sobbed a strangled cry and pulling myself together turned to go for the help I didn’t think he’d be needing any longer.

Coming Soon!