Shooting at
Loons, the third in my Judge Deborah Knott series, is now an eBook, available
from www.BN.com (Nook) or www.Amazon.com (Kindle). This one takes her to Harkers Island so that she can hold
court in Beaufort and get a decent bowl of she-crab soup. It’s also where she meets Kidd Chapin
for the first time.
As with all
the books, she immediately runs into a case she might not have heard further
inland:
About
mid-morning though, I hit something that could only occur at the coast: Felton
Keith Bodie and James Gordon Bodie. Brothers. Twenty-two and nineteen,
respectively. Charged with driving while intoxicated, impeding traffic, and
unlawfully discharging a firearm to the public endangerment.
In
simple English, according to the trooper who testified against them, he’d come
across a small traffic jam off Highway 70, heading for Gloucester, shortly
before midnight last Tuesday night. I’m familiar with that road and I know that
stretches of it can get pretty dark and deserted. Too, there are deep drainage
ditches on either side, so if anything blocks the road, it’s hard to
get by.
“Please
describe to the court what you found,” said the assistant district attorney.
“Well,”
said the trooper, referring to his notebook in a distinctive Down East accent,
“these two were operating a 1986 F-150 Ford XL pickup. At the time I arrived on
the scene, the pickup was skewed across the road and blocking traffic from both
directions. Mr. Felton Bodie was trying to aim a spotlight mounted on the side
of the truck and Mr. James Bodie was shooting at something on the edge of the
road.”
“And
did you ascertain what their target might be?” asked the ADA.
“Well,
I didn’t have time to see anything at first, because as I was heading over to
the driver’s side of the truck, Mr. Felton Bodie yelled, ‘You got him!’ and
then he jumped out of the truck and ran over to where Mr. James Bodie was
wrestling something out of the ditch. They’d just got it th’owed in the back of
the truck when I stepped around to the side where they were and asked them what
was going on.”
At
that point, the trooper glanced at me and slipped into automatic pilot. “There
was a strong odor of alcohol on and about the breath and persons of both
suspects. Both were glassy-eyed, talkative, incoherent of speech, and unsteady
of motion.”
I
nodded encouragingly and the ADA said, “Then what?”
“Then
I relieved Mr. James Bodie of his rifle and took them both into custody.”
“Did
either defendant make a statement?”
“Mr.
Felton Bodie said they were driving home to Gloucester when they saw an
alligator on the side of the road and decided to shoot it. Mr. James Bodie said
they were going to skin it out and sell the skin.”
The
two Bodie brothers sat at the defense table with egg-sucking looks of
embarrassment on their faces.
Puzzled,
I asked, “Aren’t alligators protected?”
“Yes,
ma’am, they sure are, Judge,” said the ADA, waiting for me to step all the way
in it.
I
ran my finger down the calendar. “Are they being separately charged for that
offense?”
“No,
Your Honor,” the trooper grinned. “’Cause it worn’t a alligator they shot and
put in the back of their truck. It was a four-foot retread off’n one of them
big tractor-trailer tires.”
I
was laughing so hard I had to pick myself up off the floor before I could gavel
everybody else in the courtroom back to order.
“Put
up a big fight, did it?” I asked when the two Bodies rose to speak in their own
defense.
In the end, I judged them guilty of a level five
offense and gave them sixty days suspended, a hundred-dollar fine plus court
costs, and twenty-four hours of community service as punishment for trying to
shoot a protected species to the public endangerment. “And you’d just better be
grateful there’s no law against killing retreads,” I told them.
