New Beginning 202

The man whose intestines would be on my floor in less than an hour walks out of the brick house. I watch from my car as he descends the steps sprightly and struts down the sidewalk.

I grit my teeth at his strut.

I put my car into drive and accelerate the new Audi with the headlights off. The car glides quietly into the dying night. He is whistling. I can hear it. He's happy, but he doesn’t have the right to be.

I turn on my lights and drive past him. He looks at the car but he doesn’t know who I am. I smile at him, but he doesn’t see.

I turn left a few blocks ahead, into a greasy alley. I get out and open the trunk. I grab my son's aluminum tee-ball bat. I crouch behind shrubs hugging the apartment building next to the alley. I hear his whistling louder now. I smell his arrogance. I hear his breath.

I see his shadow.

He walks past the shrub and I spring forward. He stops, perhaps hearing my knee crack as I spring from my crouch. I am faster, though. Such is the advantage of surprise.

I swing the bat down on his head just above his left ear. The crack sounds just like it did when my son hit a double with this very bat only a few weeks ago. Identical except that no one cheers me on.

The man drops. I don’t know how many blows it takes to knock a man out cold and how many to kill one. I guess that three might be somewhere in between. I swing down two more times, a little softer. The metallic plinks sound like my son’s ground out and single later in the game.

The man does not move.

I drag the lifeless body to my car like an infield drag mat and stuff it into the trunk. I'll need some privacy for what I'm going to do.

My home is a half-mile away. I pull into the garage and drag the body through to the kitchen. I get out a butcher knife and gut the bastard like a pig.

“Freeze!”

I look up and a cop levels his gun at me. I lunge toward the living room, but there’s already another cop, a tall one, blocking my path. They’ve got me in a rundown, like when my son got picked off first last week.

As the tall cop approaches, his eyes widen. “Mitch?” It’s Brian, the Bluejays coach. He looks at the pool of blood on the floor and back at me. “Say it ain’t so, Mitch.”

I drop the knife and hang my head, like my son did when he took that called third strike. My son, he’s only six, but he’s gonna be in the majors some day.

“You have the right to remain silent.” Brian slaps the cuffs on me and spins me around. “Just for the record,” he says, jerking his thumb toward the dead body, “Lou makes some bad calls now and then, but your kid was out by a mile.”


Opening: Chris Rylander.....Continuation: blogless_troll