WALKABOUT - Taking a Mulligan (Part 18)

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Jared Mulligan (aka Ty Hamilton)

I couldn’t quit thinking about the developments back home. I was officially dead. Soon I would be cremated, my ashes spread into the four winds. Well, not mine, really . . .  Mulligan’s. Except now he was me and I was him. You know what I mean. I was still having a bit of identity crisis.

Life would go on. Dianna would not have to wait seven years to get a nice check from my life insurance. Now she could stay in her nice big house. Sell my motorcycle. And my airplane.I loved that airplane. It was great, getting paid big bucks to fly big jets all over the world. But if you want the feel, the exhilaration of really flying, then you have to fly small airplanes. And for me, it didn’t get any better than doing water landings in a seaplane. I always dreamed of taking my Cessna up to Alaska, dropping in on a pristine lake, and fishing all day.

That day not so long ago when Dianna and I were arguing about our spending habits, she had not mentioned that the airplane had been sitting idle in the hangar for more than a year. Surprising, really, that she hadn’t zeroed in on that as a prime example of my propensity for waste. I think she knew it was a sore subject, and maybe she didn’t want to remind me of why it was so.

Long story short, I had enjoyed flying my seaplane following my early retirement. Right up until the day my temporary blindness returned. As always, I was stressed beyond my limit. Rocky had just informed me that she wanted nothing more to do with me. Ever. I decided to blow off some steam, take the plane up to do a few touch and goes. Relax. But, then, with only about forty-five minutes of fuel remaining, I lost all peripheral vision. Couldn’t see up. Couldn’t see down. Nor left, nor right. Only straight ahead. You try landing an airplane sometime when your field of vision is equivalent to what you could see if you were looking through a drinking straw. I didn’t have the luxury of staying airborne, waiting for my vision to return. I was low on fuel, and I had to land. Now.

The Cessna was an amphibian, meaning I could set it down on either water or land. The wheels retract into the pontoons. For water, you keep them up. For land, you lower them. I dropped the gear and lined up for the north runway on our grass strip out behind the barn. My depth perception was totally inadequate, and I pranged it in pretty hard.

Whoever said that any landing that you walk away from is a good one never had to pay to replace or repair damaged pontoons and struts. I had somehow managed to allow my hull insurance to expire, and paying out of pocket was cost-prohibitive. I winched my Cessna onto a flatbed trailer and pulled it into the hangar with my tractor. My intentions were to repair it and fly again. It has been sitting there ever since.

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Sydney, Australia

Kingsford Smith International Airport

The black Holden Commodore Calais-V braked to a stop at the T1 International departure parking bay, and all three occupants got out. The driver could pass for a cover girl or movie star if not for the scar than ran from just below her right ear to the corner of her mouth. She made no attempt to conceal it, keeping her raven hair pulled tightly in a ponytail. She was trim and fit, and watched with steely grey eyes as her two male passengers retrieved their luggage from the trunk. “Your passports, gentlemen,” she said, handing the documents over. “And boarding passes. You’ll fly to Auckland, change planes, and then on to Papeete.”

“Ah, Tahiti!” Archer, the younger, obnoxious one, said with a grin. “The tropical land of enchantment and half-naked women!” He was of medium height, with the look of a prize fighter, with a cauliflower ear and a nose that had obviously been broken a time or two. His powerful arms were tattooed from wrists to shoulders.

“I needn’t remind you this is a business trip,” she said. “When you land in Papeete, you are to go directly to the port and board the ship. And remember, Archer, Peter is in charge.”

“Yes, mother,” Archer said. Pressing his luck, he leaned in for a kiss goodbye. With her index and middle fingers, she sharply jabbed his solar plexus, and he abandoned the effort.

The other man, Peter, stood taller than Archer by half a foot, and was by far the more responsible of the two. He rolled his eyes and sighed. “I’m used to working with Jocko,” he said. “I’ll have a time of it, keeping an eye on this one.”

“Jocko couldn’t pull a greasy stick out a dead dog’s arse,” Archer said.

“Yes, well, be that as it may,” the raven-haired woman said. “You have two things to focus on. Protect Daniel Seton, at all costs. And eliminate Jared Mulligan.”

Archer asked, “Jared Mulligan?” He held his hands out, palms-up, and shrugged. “Never heard of ‘im.”

“He’s not one to take lightly,” she said. “He’s a pro. Learned his trade in the U.S. Marines. Works freelance. Has a reputation for always getting his man.”

“Like Dudley frikkin’ Doright,” Archer scoffed. “How will we know the bugger when we come upon him?”

“Mid-forties. Medium height and build. Sandy hair. Marine tattoo on his left arm.” She held up a photograph. “This is rather old, I’m afraid. Mr. Mulligan is very good at not drawing attention. You likely won’t see him, though, unless he wants you to. And then, it will be too late.”

“Well, if we won’t see ’im, ’ow we gonna kill ‘im?” Archer demanded.

Peter placed a hand on Archer’s forearm, “Steady, mate. That’s our job. Find him and deal with him. We’re pros, too.” He turned to the woman. “This Daniel bloke, he knows we’re comin’, and why?”

“No.” She shook her head. “Flynn says he’s not to know.”

“You ask me, it’d be a bit easier doin’ our job if he knew,” Archer said.

“Well, no one asked you,” she said. “You have your instructions, gentlemen. Archer, you can take it up with Flynn upon your return if you have a problem with his decisions.”

“Oh, no, nothing like that,” Archer backpedaled. “No worries.”

“So I thought.” She glanced at the security officer walking toward them.

“Cooee!” The officer called out. “Two minute parking limit, miss,” he said, pointing to his watch.

She smiled warmly and waved to him. “Yes, then, I’ll be on my way.” As she climbed back into the car, she looked at Archer and Peter, lowered her voice and said, “Do not cock this up, gentlemen.”

She closed the door and started the engine, then powered down the window. “One more thing,” she called out to them.  They turned to look back. “Mulligan frequently works with a partner, whom we know nothing about. So beware.”

She backed out of the parking bin slowly, keeping an eye on the two men that had been sent by Dexter Flynn, president of the Death Adders Motorcycle Club to dispatch a professional hit man. Were they up to the task? She knew better than to question Flynn’s judgment, and quickly dismissed the thought.

112

Jared Mulligan (aka Ty Hamilton)

I was still trying to wrap my head around how they could fail to notice the gunshot wounds during an autopsy and rule his cause of death accidental drowning.

Or how they could possibly misidentify the real Mulligan as being me, even with all the circumstantial evidence, like my truck and my boat. Had they found my clothes and wallet on the island? I hoped not. If so, then they might also found the hole I’d dug to bury Mulligan in.

Okay, so it had been roughly three weeks since I’d killed Mulligan and dumped his body into the river. How badly decomposed would it have been? How hard would it have been to identify him?

What did we ever do before Al Gore invented the internet? How did we ever conduct research? Especially out in the Pacific Ocean, hundreds of miles from the nearest library? Thank God for Al Gore, smartest man on planet Earth, Thank God for satellite communications, and Thank God for Google, where I learned that the tissues of a body floating in water that is less than seventy degrees Fahrenheit for about three weeks will develop what is known as “grave wax”, a soapy fatty acid, halting bacterial growth. Fish and other river-dwelling critters would have been feasting on the soft parts of Mulligan’s face, like the lips and the eyes.

I also read that bodies recovered after twenty or so days tend to be badly decomposed. DNA and dental records are the only reliable ways of identification in such cases. After about a month, the bodies could in some cases be completely skeletonized.

So is that what happened? Did the body completely skeletonize? Or maybe enough that the gunshot wounds weren’t so obvious. I’d aimed for center mass when I fired the gun. I would have expected some bones to have been shattered. And speaking of gunshot wounds, my own were healing quite nicely. Still a little sore, but no infection.

What about the anchor I’d put around the body? It was hard for me to believe that even a skeleton would make a clean break from it. Equally difficult to imagine that the anchor would have prevented the body from coming to the surface.

There were four possibilities:

1—They had found someone else. Not Mulligan. The coroner was sloppy.

2—It was Mulligan, and the coroner was, again, sloppy.

I didn’t really know Perry Winters, other than from having met him occasionally at church, back when I used to attend. He seemed anything but sloppy.

3—This was a trap designed to get me to lower my guard. Make me think that I was in the clear, come out of hiding. This might actually be the case. It made more sense. Sorry, guys. Not gonna happen.

Or, most unlikely of all:

4—There was some sort of cover-up. I almost laughed at the idea of me being chased around the globe by professional killers hired to prevent me from reappearing and blowing the lid off their scheme.

I was tired of thinking about it, so I grabbed a pen and a few pieces of paper from the desk in the cabin, and went out on the deck to scribble an outline of my novel, maybe meet some new writer friends.

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I walked three laps around the ship, carrying the iPad, enjoying the sea breeze, the sunshine, and the relative solitude, even among so many hundreds of people. I say I enjoyed it, but the truth is I was constantly on the lookout for Alex. I had failed my first real test as the reincarnation of Jared Mulligan, and I wanted to avoid another encounter at all costs.

I could see Alex’s point of view. I actually agreed with it. A person should earn the right to wear the Marine Corps emblem on his arm.  But, my reason for getting the tattoo was purely from a standpoint of survival, nothing more. The tattoo was insurance against being found out for pretending to be Mulligan, and I saw no reason to beat myself up because of it. I wasn’t going around claiming to be a war hero, despite Alex’s accusation. Think what you will.