“I tell yer, Huck, there ain’t no risk in it,” said Linus, voice quivering with excitement. “That ol’ shanty there’s been sittin’ like yer mama’s ducks, just there for the tak’n.”
“What’s my mama’s doctor got to do with anything?” Huck asked.
Linus and Huck had wasted away their teenage years chasing dames, mostly unsuccessfully. This was partly because an extended habit of chewing tobacco had wreaked havoc with the boys’ set of dentures, and partly because they had an annoying habit of cracking a joke every so often and clapping their audience on the back with an uncomfortably hard slap. Some lasses may go in for that sort of stuff, but there certainly wasn’t a surplus.
Now approaching the age where their parents were starting to get fidgety and were beginning to hatch plans to turn the boys out of the house to fend for themselves, Linus and Huck realized that they needed some sort of gameplan to provide for their luxurious habits, albeit temporarily. For weeks, their unimaginative minds had come up with nothing, barring a few brutish plans to mug passerby’s or to con the residents of the old age home into paying them for some ponzi scheme.
It was only now that Linus had spotted his opportunity and hatched a plot that would have put Mata Hari to shame.
“All right, let’s give it the ol’ run o’er one more time,” Linus said, “Do you got yer notebook on yer?”
“I don’t know how to write, Linus,” said Huck.
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Tom Finnigan’s star had been rising fast within the Police Department. He had everything going for him. He was married and settled with two kids, something the experienced Sheriff of that precinct always encouraged. He had a good, honest face and he could piece the puzzle together quicker than most. An all-rounder would be the colonial term for it.
At home, his wife was as satisfied as a wife could be in those parts. She had her hands full with the kids all day, and when Tom returned from duty, on the days he didn’t put in extra hours, he made sure to spend some time with her and the kids.
All, in short, was as well as could be hoped with his life. And yet, if one caught Tom in an unguarded moment, when he was unaware he was being watched, one would see a forehead wrinkling away to make way for his furrowed brow. One would see his eyes shift suspiciously, and hear a low, worried muttering. A stream of consciousness soliloquy aimed at oneself. A stream of self consciousness.
The reader would be forgiven for asking what cause Tom had to worry. The cause, as it so often is, was that Tom had dipped his pen in more than one inkpot. There was another woman, who, if the metaphor was not clear, was the second inkpot.
The “extra hours” he had been putting in were real enough, he had just lied about where he had been spending them. And he had taken to accepting bribes in order to account for the additional income that comes with working extra hours.
All these factors lay heavy on Tom’s conscience, almost as if they lay on his brow, weighing it down.
He was not worried about getting caught, he had made sure of that. He had found a neat, old shanty in the suburbs, sufficiently dilapidated from the outside to not warrant a second glance, or to not warrant a warrant; and sufficiently neat on the inside to avoid the second inkpot from spilling over with consternation.
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“Now, listen well, Huck. That shack over there has more to it than meets the eye. Why just yesterday I seen Tom Finnigan lug a dress’n table in there. And I tell yer, where there’s a dress’n table, there’s a woman, and where there’s a woman, there’s sure to be jools. And it’s the jools we’re after, Hucky boy.”
“But how are we to get inside,” Huck asked, “I sure as hell don’t know how to pick locks, and isn’t old Tom a policeman?”
“Now don’t you worry your wee noggin about tha’ ol’ chestnut, Hucky boy. Why, we have the dirt on Tom, now, don’t we?”
“We do?” asked Huck, uncertainly.
“Huck, youse is dumber than an inbred platypus that been smacked upside the head with a broadsword. What do you think Finnigan does in that shanty with a lady that ain’t his wife? I can tell yer they sure ain’t calling on the Lord, that’s for sure.”
The light of knowledge flickered on inside Huck’s head. His interest piqued, he now listened in earnest, eager to bring the plan to fruition.
“Now, as I was sayin’, there’s sure to be jools in there. But we can’t get at ‘em while Tom’s away, since none of us know a darn thing about lock-pickin’, and Tom sure as hell ain’t gonna appreciate us walkin’ out with the jools while he’s in the house. So what we gots to do is, we gotta spook ‘em outta there so quick they won’t have the time nor the wits about ‘em to lock the door behind ‘em as they make a run for it. Then we walk in, nice as you like, and get what we came for. But here’s the important part, Huck. Yer can’t let Tom get his eyes on yer. Get that fact wedged into your think-box. He can’t lay his eyes on yer. If that happens, it’s all over.”
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On that fateful day, Tom and Stacy, which was the name of his second inkpot, whom he thus affectionately called st-inkpot, met as usual at the shanty, unaware of the storm that was about to disturb the calm waters of their romance.
The lovebirds had just sat down to dinner when they heard a large crash right outside the bedroom window.
“MAKE SURE TO GET A PICTURE!” shouted Linus, in an intentionally loud and artificially thick voice.
Inside the house, Tom and Stacy shot out of their seats in an instant, Stacy screaming incoherently while Tom strained to stop his knees from trembling as he saw his world crashing down around him. Stacy fled, pell-mell, in a state of undress, uncaring, unheeding and scampered down the street into the night.
Tom took the same approach, but in a slightly more sober vein, taking quick, measured steps towards the door. It was his calmness in the face of disaster that was to prove his undoing.
Linus watched with glee as Stacy reacted exactly as he had predicted she would, but his laugh died halfway as his eyes sought in vain for a glimpse of Tom Finnigan.
Huck, who had whipped himself into a state of frenzy, did not stop to observe these events, but ran, cackling diabolically, into the shack before Linus could utter a word of warning. Three steps into the house, he stopped short, having run straight into Tom, who was on his way out.
The silence was broken by a belated patter of footsteps that brought Linus to the door, confirming his worst fear.
With the situation as it was, Tom’s mind was swamped by a whole spectrum of emotions, thereby hampering his usually sprightly speed of thought. Huck, at the best of times, was never quite quick on the uptake. And thus it was that Linus’ mind was the first to jump into action and arrive at the solution.
“Yer gotta kill him, Huck. That’s all there is to it.”
“Huh?” Huck balked at such an extreme course of action. His mind was still recovering from the shock of seeing Tom Finnigan face to face.
“He saw yer, Hucky. You gotta kill him. He saw yer.”
Huck, still coming to his senses, asked, “Who saw me?”
“Tom. Tom Saw-yer.”
Once again, the spark of understanding flamed the haystack that resided between the ears of Huck. And, without a further moment of delay, he raised his pistol and shot Tom Finnigan.
Linus and Huck stood staring at Tom’s body. Once again, Linus’s mind reacted first.
"All right, all right,” he thought to himself, “Just a li’l snag, that’s all. We can still get what we came for. I’ll go in and start searchin’ around for the jools, and Huck’ll bury Finn.”
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