The Widow's Might
by
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Sheila had shouldered open the front door of the Bo Jingles Night Nursery School and carried her sleeping four-year-old daughter to the car. While Stacy straddled her hip, she unlocked the door and peeked behind the seat for uninvited passengers. Satisfied, she placed her tot beside her and strapped her down. On checking her rearview mirror, she spotted a battered van parked across the deserted lot, lurking in the swirling fog that blanketed San Diego each midnight when she got off work. Someone picked a good place to make out, she mused. At Montezuma Park, four blocks east, she stopped at the light that bugged her each night because it was set to favor daytime pedestrians entering the park. Bright headlamps floated up behind her on the deserted street, and she flipped her mirror. She stabbed buttons on the radio with a long fingernail, searching for relaxing music. Suddenly, there was a tap on Stacy’s window. Sheila spun around and screamed. A man wearing a ski mask held a gun pointed at Stacy’s head, motioning for Sheila to lower the glass. She quickly turned to press the button on her armrest. "That’s quite a story, Mrs. Hollister. I just hate that you, or any woman, goes through it. I can assure you, we will catch those people and see them put away for that horrible crime." "Yes, I believe you’ll do all you can, Sergeant," she said looking at him thoughtfully. "I just hope it’s soon enough to save my daughter from harm." Holding out the short rope for her inspection, he said, "The rapist ties up his victims with this kind of knot." "Then, there are others?" "He has raped two other women while burglarizing their home, and I call him the square-knot burglar because of his rope." "You’ve seen this knot before?" "Yes ma’am, while in the navy. He ties them up with a sailor’s knot called a square knot, according to my old Blue Jackets manual." "So he might be a sailor." He nodded. "If it is who I suspect, he was once a swabbie." Sheila looked at him skeptically. "So you think your square-knot burglar has my daughter?" "Yes, I think he is a suspect, at least he should go on the top of the list, ma’am. He was released from jail about six months ago, after serving only six months of a five-year sentence." She frowned distastefully. "So the liberal justice system has put him back on the streets for us to hide from." "Unfortunately, you are right, Mrs. Hollister."
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About the Book
THE WRIST-SLAPPING AMERICAN JUSTICE SYSTEM SERVES ONLY THE CRIMINAL’S NEEDS, BUT THIS WOMAN FOUND STRENGTH TO DEFEND HERSELF. It was a borrowed gun from a cop . . . Detective Sgt. Otis Mulday and the young widow often argued over her feelings about the foot-dragging, wrist-slapping justice system. Sheila was very bitter because his San Diego Police Department had not caught the man who raped her at knife point and fled across the border into Mexico with her four-year-old-daughter. Now, he wanted half-a-million of her dead husband’s insurance settlement to bring her daughter back. She was not the first victim to complain that the justice system did not work – that was the reason citizens kept buying guns and joining the NRA, Otis told her. Finally, the young mother faced the ransom rendezvous with the knife-wielding bandito from across the border, a man Otis identified as one they had arrested twice before. She carried the money in the trunk of her convertible, in a garbage bag her papa had loaded. Worried before she left, Otis gave her his hideout gun, because he couldn’t stay close in a helicopter. A gun was all she needed, as her father had taught her how to shoot. Bonkers Tortuga was upset when he learned the garbage bag contained a hundred copies of the San Diego Union, but he should not have come at her again with that Rambo knife. Worse, he didn’t bring her daughter. Sheila put all six rounds in his chest, and put Otis in trouble with Internal Affairs.
About the Author
E. Paul Braxton was born during the Depression, the fourth child in a Florida sharecropper family of eleven children. On graduation from high school, he joined the Navy at eighteen. He lives with his wife, Elizabeth in the Florida Panhandle, less than thirty miles from where he was born. A Vietnam veteran, he retired in 1967 as a Navy Chief Petty Officer, having served on three aircraft carriers in the Western Pacific. Braxton attended the University of West Florida, receiving Bachelor of Science and Master of Education degrees. Braxton launched his literary career in the 1970s with a weekly newspaper column, "Early Days in the Panhandle," written for the JACKSON COUNTY FLORIDAN. In 1980, after thirteen years of teaching electronics at a community college, he retired again to write fiction. He has since written seven novels, most of them of serio-comic genre. His first book, THE BUBBLE & BURP MACHINE, was published in 1986; GET OFF MY LAND! in 1993; TRAIL TO RICHES, 1994; TO KILL THE SHEPHERD, 1996, SINKHOLE! in 2000, and YANKEE STATION in 2001 THE WIDOW’S MIGHT, 2002, is his seventh book and is a crime novel, set in San Diego. It continues the humorous activities of Detective Sgt. Otis Mulday, a Georgia Cracker turned cop.