Sears Island
Copyright© 2012 by Howard Faxon
Chapter 9: Assault With Intent to Kill
Late February the damnedest thing happened. Someone tried to shoot me! They were pretty stupid about it, I must say. I heard the reports and 'spang' noises off the front of the house. I wasn't about to stick my head out there and get it shot off. I looked through the window and spotted a boat out on the water, a few hundred feet away. I'm not Johnny Rambo. I didn't go all ghillie suit and try to sneak up on 'em. I called the Coast Guard to come and arrest their asses. Well, I tried to. The cell tower was down. This was getting serious!
I'd been fooling around with internet phones before I moved. I'd purchased a Skype account and had a headset with a microphone on my computer. I started calling around to get bloody anyone to answer. I got a fish market to pick up, just down the coast in Belfast. I asked him to call the Coasties as someone was trying to shoot my ass. He took down my Skype number and promised to call it in right away. Pretty soon I got an incoming call. It wasn't the Coast Guard, but it was the next best thing—the State Police. I described what was happening, including the fact that my cell phone service was down. They wanted to know the registration numbers on the boat. I had a spotting scope (that had seen better days) in my office. I laid it on the window casing for stability and took a look. I got 'ME-ARJ' then the trees blocked the rest. I told the nice man what I'd seen and verified that they were still shooting at my place. They thanked me and said someone would be right out.
Not forty minutes later a Coastie smuggling interceptor laid a line of machine gun bullets before the bow of the boat. The one that had been using my place for target practice. I wandered down to the beach and yelled out, "Don't kill the bastards yet! They haven't paid to have the bullet holes in my house fixed!" I got a wave and watched some guys get handcuffed. I wrote down the full boat registration number when I got back to the house. I called the fish market that had helped me out and told him what happened, and then thanked him again. Guess where I was going to buy my fresh fish from then on?
It turned out that the guys that were shooting at me were worried that I'd catch 'em brewing their moonshine on my place and turn 'em in. Hell, they got in more trouble for disabling the cell tower than for shooting at me. I took the bill for fixing the bullet holes—all four thousand-odd dollars of it—and turned it over to a lawyer. I didn't care what he made, I just wanted my four grand back out of it. He took it on.
To read this story you need a
Registration + Premier Membership
If you have an account, then please Log In
or Register (Why register?)