Say, how’s about you playing around with me? You can give me a lift on those chip shots.”
“Sorry, Mr. Harlow.” The regret in the pro’s voice was genuine. “Sprained an ankle yesterday and I’m on the shelf.
I’m a clubhouse fixture for about three days.”
Carl Harlow stared down the inviting fairway gloomily.
This course, like a lot of other small, private courses, was never crowded Saturday afternoons, because Saturday afternoon was proverbially busy and no one came around unless they’d made reservation. Like he and Doc had done for two o’clock.
If he waited an hour, there’d be Owen and Pryor — but that was a full foursome already and he could not butt in.
Well, now that he was here and dressed for it, he might as well play around alone. The exercise would do him good.
Playing alone wasn’t much fun; there’s little satisfaction in a beautiful approach, with just enough back spin to hold the green four feet from the pin, when there’s no one watching you make it. And, paradoxically, it’s even more disgusting to flub a would-be explosion shot out of a sand trap when there’s nobody around to tell you how lousy you are.
He’d just flubbed that explosion shot — with a sweet new No. 9 iron which, for its effectiveness at that moment, might as well have been an umbrella handle — when the bullet came.
The first sensation was like somebody drawing a sharp-edged piece of ice across his side. He jerked involuntarily and said, “What the—” And looked down and saw the horizontal rip in his sweater, along the course of the rip, begin to turn red instead of white.
Then, and only then, did he realize that he’d heard the sound of the shot.
He looked up in the direction from which the shot had seemed to come — up on the hillside that flanked the fairway ahead, past the green he’d been approaching out of the trap.
Up there near the top, in among the scrub pine maybe two or three hundred yards away, he thought he caught a gleam of sun on metal that might have been a rifle barrel.
Somebody up there was being damned careless with a rifle, shooting out over the golf course! Some fool hunter, and that wasn’t hunting land, anyway. Carl Harlow yelled, “Hey!
You with the gun—” wondering if his voice would carry that far.
And then that second bullet whined somewhere between his shoulder and ear, and he knew that he was being shot at.
Deliberately! Probably by someone with a gun with telescopic sights, if they were shooting at that distance.
The first bullet, the one that had raked his side, could have been an accident. But that second shot was something else again.
Carl Harlow had never been shot at before, but it didn’t take him long to figure out the best thing to do. He dropped flat into the sand. There wasn’t a bunker to duck behind, but the sand trap itself was a slight depression, maybe eight inches in the center below the fairway.
He dropped down flat, trying to accomplish two things.
First, to fall naturally, as though that second bullet had been a fatal hit, and second, to fall so that most of him would be in the deepest part of the trap and would present as poor a target as possible to the distant marksman.
There were two more shots, but he didn’t know where the bullets went except that they didn’t hit him. Then, for a space of time that was probably twenty minutes but seemed like hours, nothing happened and there weren’t any more shots.
Carl Harlow lay there, not daring to move, scarcely daring to breathe. His side hurt him, but not badly. The bullet had taken off a streak of hide and ruined a good sweater, but that was all.
Then there was a yell, “Carl!” and there was Doc Millard running toward him. Doc’s golf bag lay a couple hundred yards back along the fairway, where he’d dropped it when he’d seen the prone figure in the sand trap.
Then Doc saw the crimson streak on the sweater, and he said, “What the hell?”
Carl Harlow got up slowly. His first glance was at the hillside, but there was no gleam of sun on metal, and there was no further shot.
Millard said, “Stand still,” and pulled up the sweater and the shirt underneath it, and looked at the wound and said, “I’ll be a monkey’s uncle!” Then he commandeered Harlow’s handkerchief and his own to improvise a bandage. The story and the bandage got finished about the same time.
“Superficial,” said Doc. “Have to clean it and put on a decent bandage when we get back to the clubhouse, but—
You say you heard four shots? Listen, Carl, it must have been some kid up there with a twenty-two, whanging at a target on a tree or something. You stroll on in to the clubhouse; I’ll go over there and take a look around.”
“No,” said Carl Harlow, who was getting his nerve back,
“I’ll go with you. This scratch doesn’t amount to anything, and it certainly doesn’t stop me from walking. Besides, the guy’s gone.”
Then he looked at Millard strangely. “Doc, I don’t know anything about guns, but would a twenty-two carry that far?”
“A twenty-two long rifle’ll carry a mile, would kill at about two hundred and fifty yards. That’s what it must have been. And you could have imagined hearing that second bullet whiz so close. Maybe it was a bee or a hornet or something you heard. And the third and fourth shots might have been fired in the opposite direction.”
“Can’t you tell from the wound what size bullet—?”
Doc shook his head. “If it’d gone in, sure. But not from just a scrape.” He stopped suddenly, looking at Carl Harlow.
“Say, is there any reason why somebody would be taking pot shots at you?”
Harlow shook his head. It did seem absurd when you put it that way, particularly now that he was almost at the fence that bounded the course and within a hundred yards of where he thought the rifleman had been. Hell’s bells, why would anybody be taking pot shots at him?
He said, “Well — no. But, damn it, I did hear that second bullet whiz by! It wasn’t a bee!”
They were climbing the fence. Doc Millard said, “Well, if you’re that sure— But people don’t go around shooting at other people without some reason.”
They were going up the hill now. Carl said, “Of course, the guy could have taken two shots at a sitting bird and both of them missed the bird but come pretty close together.”
They found nothing of interest or importance on the hillside. Reaching the top, they saw that a side road wound by just beyond, but there were no cars, parked or moving, in sight on it.
Carl said hesitantly, “Do you think we ought to report it, just in case—?”
Doc Millard snorted. “Report it? You’re darned well right we’ll report it! I’d lose my license if I treated a gunshot wound of any kind without reporting it. Golf’s off, of course, so we’ll go back to the clubhouse. Don’t take any exercise for a few days. Walking’s all right, but I mean nothing that uses your arms.”
Carl Harlow grinned. “No two-fisted drinking, huh?
Well, it’s my left side, and I guess I can make out with one hand. Gosh, I could use a drink right now! My nerves are playing ring-around-the-rosy!”
After the clubhouse and the inevitable explanations and not too many drinks, because they’d have to go to the police station, Carl found himself talking about it to Captain Wunderly.
By that time, Carl was sure it had been a kid with a twenty-two and it sounded silly to admit that he’d been scared enough to lie there doggo for nearly half an hour. But Captain Wunderly, just the same, sent a couple of men out to look around.
And then Carl and Doc stopped in at a bar and had a few, and Carl wanted to keep on going. But Doc Millard insisted that Carl was drunk already — although it was only dusk —and that he should go home and sleep it off. Especially because he was wounded, and that made him a patient.