The death tax, p.1
The Death Tax, page 1
The
Death
Tax
S.A. Hogan
The
Death
Tax

Addison & Highsmith Publishers
Las Vegas ◊ Chicago ◊ Palm Beach
Published in the United States of America by
Histria Books
7181 N. Hualapai Way, Ste. 130-86
Las Vegas, NV 89166 USA
HistriaBooks.com
Addison & Highsmith is an imprint of Histria Books. Titles published under the imprints of Histria Books are distributed worldwide.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publisher.
This work of fiction contains graphic language, violence, gore, brutality, and sexual violence, including racial epithets used in historical context.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021953421
ISBN 978-1-59211-141-1 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-59211-286-9 (softbound)
ISBN 978-1-59211-290-6 (eBook)
Copyright © 2023 by S.A. Hogan
“Few are guilty but all are responsible. Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself.”
–– Rabbi Abraham Heschel
“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”
–– Henry David Thoreau
“You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know.”
–– William Wilberforce
“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.”
–– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“All it takes for the triumph of evil is for good men to stand by and do nothing”
–– Edmund Burke
To eight-year-old Maelys de Araujo, whose body was found six months after she was abducted from a wedding reception in Pont-de-Beauvoisin, France. Having prayed for this little angel’s safe return to no avail, I feel as if I have lost my daughter, joining her family in grieving her loss.
To my mother and fellow author Judith Ann Hogan (‘Shrooms; The Shade), whose first book inspired mine.
In loving memory of Donald R. Schuster of Richmond Heights MO, my Replacement Dad.
Chapter I
Wanda Smith smiled as she gazed at the hummingbird feeding outside her window. She was an early riser and, though the sun had yet to rise, the bird’s plumage — red or green depending on how the light caught it — added a splash of color to a watery backdrop indistinguishable from the sky this time of day. Watching the hummingbirds feed was a comforting ritual, strange given what had happened eight years ago. Despite the violent jostling of as many as half a dozen of them, watching them feed was a chance to confront these creatures and somehow be at peace with them; indeed, it was part of the healing process. Nowadays, she was able to convince herself that what had happened was a fluke, courtesy of the global warming phenomenon nearly everyone was saying was turning the laws of nature on their collective ear.
Another hummingbird entered the scene, and even through the glass she could hear the buzzing of their wings. Lots of people fed the hummingbirds at Lake Tanaka, her neighbors marveling that her feeder should get so much more traffic than theirs, to the point she was filling it every night. The reason was simple enough: While they did the usual four-parts-water-to-one-part-sugar, her ratio was two-to-one. While hummingbirds needed insects for protein, it was nectar (including in manmade form) that gave them the carbs necessary to maintain a metabolism so voracious as to make starvation seem imminent. Thus, the ferocious battles that raged around the feeder, she supposed. She thought about getting more than one feeder, but more than one made it a commitment. It owned you, just as Thoreau had warned about the plight of too many possessions in Walden Pond. She also preferred a single feeder for purely selfish reasons: It made for better entertainment as she watched the show in her robe and slippers, drinking coffee mixed with chocolate malt powder.
A third hummingbird entered the scene, dive-bombing the first one as a smudge of pink smeared the horizon. Many told her she had the best view on the lake, and she couldn’t disagree. Her house faced slightly southwest, affording her glimpses of both the sunrise and sunset from her window, a near-panorama from her deck. Then there was the swimming platform forty yards out, crawling with kids in the summer, with an unimpeded view of the dam and the crowns of trees peeking above it. Given the right attitude, mornings like these gave her a pleasant feeling of solitude. The day’s first precious half-hour: before the machinations of breakfast and preparations for her half-days at the used clothing store on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Not that she needed the money. Between Social Security and her pension from the care center and Roy’s railroad pension, she had plenty. Rather, it was the sense of purpose that so many of her retired friends lacked. As much as anything, the job was a way to escape their griping, the disproportionate significance medical problems had taken on in their lives — as if living had become an endurance race, with an absurd measure of pride taken in surviving the blows it dished out.
When she didn’t have the right attitude, such mornings were tinged with melancholy and regret, usually involving memories of her husband. Roy going past in the boat with his buddy Ambrose, cheerfully shrugging his shoulders and shouting that once again they’d caught more beers than fish on this hundred-acre lake. Roy chugging up the hill with the mower only to swing it around and go back down; “When I need a ridin’ mower for this little yard it’s time to pack it in,” he’d say, smiling and waving as she watched from the window, she miming with raised eyebrows and a finger pointed at her glass and he, ever macho, shushing her with his raised hand. He’d be through soon enough, and then beer would be his beverage of choice. Roy sitting on the big, smooth log by the lake, playing with the tomcat that was so much like him until a coyote — the first anyone had ever seen on the lake, and this, too, they blamed on global warming — dispatched him one night with a terrible squalling. That was three years ago, and it hurt her almost as much as losing Roy. Both of them had loved that cat; losing him was like severing the last physical connection to her husband. The bridge she had built to his memory was becoming ever more rickety. More and more she could see only his back as he pushed the mower down the hill, his body lost in the shimmer of the late afternoon sun on the water. God, how she missed him! How desperate and hopeless and suffocating her longing, like trying to reach back into a past she could never retrieve! That was another benefit of this job: it gave her less time to think about Roy. In some ways a full-time job would have been ideal. Everyone at the shop loved her and, the wages being as low as they were — certainly not enough to support herself, even in a small Missouri town an hour south of St. Louis — it was conceivable she could have worked full-time. She tried working half-time, adding Tuesdays and Thursdays to the mix, but even then it was too much. She found herself needing a recovery day in between. Sometimes it alarmed her how much stamina she’d lost since her nursing days.
The day was gaining momentum, the pink smudge on the horizon turning to orange, then a flaming red that turned the underside of the clouds into rumpled cloth soaked with blood.
Red sky at morning…, she thought.
This morning she saw blood in the clouds. Drawn as irresistibly as her tongue to a loose tooth, her mind went back eight years.
Anniversaries were like this; she knew it well from her work at the care center, for older people especially. They became more agitated, more depressed, and all it took was a glimpse at their charts to see why. Then, the mental health people would be called in, a little extra TLC doled out, and it would pass… until the next anniversary. Funny how acutely aware people were of their anniversaries when they were so out of it in so many other ways. Something instinctive about them. The Anniversary Clock, it seemed, kept on ticking on long after most others had stopped.
As if to prove this to herself, she glanced at the calendar. It was a hummingbird calendar (what else?) her daughter had given her. She marveled at the skill it must have taken to capture one hummingbird after another in mid-flight. Depending on the effect the photographer was after, sometimes the wings were frozen, sometimes blurred. Always the birds had a jewel-like quality that couldn’t help but elicit a smile of admiration for God’s handiwork. The circled dates, the filled-in boxes of birthdays and get-togethers, the Special Event that seemed to occur every month or so, distracted her as she turned the pages, for the moment forgetting why she had picked it up. She smiled as she remembered, turning the calendar to the current month. The date was not hard to find because this was the month: April. Today was the 14th, and it had happened on the 15th.
A shudder went through her as she remembered this date eight years ago. It had happened, right here, as Roy was getting out of his car. She was making a salad, the potatoes already scrubbed and a couple of steaks tenderized and smeared with fresh garlic and ready for the grill. It was Friday, and dinner was an Event on Friday: the day of the week they made love, both of them surprised by how good it still felt, with no need for those little blue pills; Friday, that glorious day of transition from week to weekend. That day she had lost two of her favorite patients, with the social worker attending
“Ah!” he cried as they went for his eyes, despite the fact he was wearing glasses.
She still had his glasses, wondering why she’d bothered to save them; another way to keep his memory alive, perhaps? Their shattered left lens with missing shards of glass, bloody cracks long faded to brown. The coroner had said this was the fatal blow, that the bird had gone through the lens and, at the cost of shredding its own body, plunged through his eye and into his brain. Only its rear legs and tail feathers emerged, and the ER staff shook their collective heads at something they had never seen before.
Two birds went for his right eye, and soon Roy was no longer yelling, he was lying on his back convulsing as the neighbors retreated to their house and peered from the safety of their window. For a long time, Wanda had hated them for that. She did not think, she only reacted. Storming out the door. Swatting at the birds with a broom. They converged upon her, and she nearly stumbled over the threshold as she backed into the house, shielding her eyes with her forearm.
One of them got into the house, and she raged after it. Closing one door, then another, the bird panicking as the playing field shrank.
Too bad, you little bastard! This is for Roy! her mind cried.
She smashed a lamp, broke old china, and knocked half a dozen pictures off the wall before she connected, slamming the bird against the wall. Bringing the part of the broom where the bristles met the handle down on its eggshell head. Her heart was thudding, hot tears streaming down her face. Rage made her fearless, ready to go outside and have at them, no longer caring what happened to her as long as she could take out as many of them as she could. Not bothering to look, she burst outside, the world flushed by her anger — only to find them gone.
Roy lay across the grate that separated the carport from the driveway, some of the blood that bubbled out of him soaking into the gravel, looking as if he had died of lingchi, or death by a thousand cuts. No area of exposed skin was untouched, with many new areas created through the tears in his flannel shirt and his denim coveralls. His eyes were reduced to bloody holes, his glasses lying nearby. But the thing she could never forget was his mouth. The same laughing mouth that could spin one yarn after another, tell dirty jokes with the best of them, yet still kiss her with a softness that belied his gruff exterior. A mouth that was reduced to that of a badly carved pumpkin, his teeth visible in spite of it being closed. Giving him the appearance of laughing even as he was dying…
Whomp!
A hummingbird hit the window, hard enough to jolt her from her reverie and form a bloody spider web in the glass. Not being the world’s brightest creatures, birds tended to fly into windows, sometimes hard enough to break their necks. The fact her kitchen window lined up with the picture window that overlooked her deck gave the illusion of clear sailing. Every couple of months, a bird hit the window, but never a hummingbird and never like this. She watched as it peeled off the glass in a splash of red and green that seemed a cheerful irony to its death.
The sun was up now, red giving way to purple ranks of clouds that streamed across a pale, blue sky. Six birds were buzzing around the feeder now, with them the notion her morning ritual was about to change. What had just happened brought back a memory of Roy that wasn’t content to remain in the past, a memory that was actively reaching for her in the present.
Drink up, you little bastards. Tonight this feeder comes down… and stays down!
The rest of the day passed without incident, as most of her days did. True, it did make the time go faster, but that was how she wanted it. Since Roy’s death, it seemed she was only marking time, just wanting her life to pass as comfortably as possible. Sometimes she was afraid a sort of living rigor mortis was creeping into her and that she might be clinically depressed.
I’ll cross that bridge when I can no longer will myself out of bed in the morning, she decided, secretly detesting all the smiling mental health cheeseballs she’d been forced to deal with in her days as a charge nurse.
That night she dreamed, a variation of the dream she’d been having for ten years now. It was a curious dream because the visual — hummingbirds at a feeder — never matched the aural: a man talking to a girl. She’d once shared the dream with Roy, and damned if he could make any sense of it:
“Come, join me on the couch, love,” the man said. “Our show is on.”
“I cannot,” the girl said, in an accent that sounded French. “I have a paper due tomorrow, and I have not even started.”
“What is the paper about?”
“Hummingbirds.”
“Surely there is plenty of information about hummingbirds on the ‘Net,” the man said. “Come, spend some time with me, and I’ll run something off for you first thing in the morning.”
“But that would be cheating,” the girl said. “My English is not so good. The teacher will know I cheated.”
“You will not get in trouble, I assure you. Come.”
“But…”
“Come! There, that’s better. How about you sit on Papa’s lap, and we watch some TV together?”
“I am still sore. Can we not just cuddle?”
“I miss my girl. She looks so pretty tonight! I want to be close to her.”
“Well, OK.”
“Slip off your panties. Lift up your nightie. Lower yourself; I’ll help you. Don’t worry, I’m lubed. He’ll go right in. Ah, there we go. Nice and easy. Just ease yourself down. That’s my good girl, my pretty girl. I’ll be gentle, I promise. See, isn’t that nice?”
“It hurts a little.”
“It will be OK. Now relax, and let’s watch the show.”
“Ow, it hurts! I am not ready!”
“It will be OK, love. We’ve done this before. Just relax.”
“Ow!”
“There we go. See, it’s not so bad. I’m all the way in. Now just move up and down. Pretend you’re on a merry-go-round. I'll help you. Up and down. Slow and gentle. Doesn’t that feel good?”
“Ow, it hurts! It feels like I am on fire!”
“It will get better, my dear. I promise.”
“No, it hurts! I want to get off!”
“You will get off when I say so! Don’t forget whose house this is! Don’t forget I can send you to the best college in the country or send you back home to grow potatoes with your family! I’m sorry, love. I don’t mean to get upset. I just want to be close to my girl, that’s all.”
Sound of whimpering.
“Relax, love. Ah, we’re almost there! Ah! Ah! Ah! Oh yes, love! Yes! Oh, yes!”
“Ughhhh!”
“Shh, it’s OK. Here, let me help you off. You can go work on your paper now. Oh, are you bleeding? I'm sorry.”
Sound of sniffling. “I told you I was sore.”
“I’m sorry, love. Really, I am. Tell you what, this Saturday we’ll buy that dress we were talking about and a pair of shoes to go with it. And maybe even a necklace. Then we’ll have a nice dinner. You pick the place. OK?”
“OK.”
“That’s my girl.”
Chapter II
Things move too fast at a big city newspaper, so fast that the stories that seem insignificant go whizzing by without a second thought.
So thought Paul Mahr, editor of The Harper Gazette. A pattern was emerging, one he wondered if anyone else saw. Every April 15th for the last ten years, other than taxes being due. That was the problem: Taxes overshadowed everything else, including big things that sometimes lurked in the shadows.
