Acknowledgements & Author's Notes

CHAPTER 1: Peregrine

Buckshot. It is excruciatingly painful when it rips through your torso. The initial impact stuns you into an instant state of shock, sending you sprawling backward. As the hellfire pellets spread throughout your body, inch by agonizing inch, they are like a thousand little stabs in symphony, crescendoing together into an apex of agony. In disbelief, you reach down for physical confirmation and when you pull away, you can see your life-force slick on the pads of your fingers, warm and wet, a sensation that is not altogether off-putting. Then it unfurls, a dark crimson bloom seeping through your clothes. There's something strangely beautiful in watching the scarlet tide claim each inch of your cotton shirt, a mesmerizing, almost serene progression.

My imminent demise was precipitated by the unfortunate underestimation of a little old lady. Technically speaking, "little" was a misnomer; for a morbidly obese seventy-year-old, Sheila was anything but little. She was also surprisingly agile as she navigated her cluttered home with the stealth and precision of a feline on the prowl.

I was reluctantly forced to concede Sheila possessed a commendable degree of marksmanship, but maybe that was giving her a tinge too much credit. After all, with a shotgun, one needs only to point in the right direction and hope for the best.

I had no one to blame but myself, I was just too awestruck by the sight of it. I’d been planning this caper for the better part of two fortnights. It was a gift from the Gods that landed in my lap after a chance encounter with Sheila’s bitter and estranged son, Billy, at a dive bar I frequented. Slumming it with the locals often paid out handsome returns. You’d be surprised what the uneducated will say once their tongue has been loosened by alcohol.

According to Billy, (yes, you are correct in your assumption that fifty-two year old man named Billy was as childish as the nickname implied) his mother was a doomsday prepper who didn’t trust banks and believed the entire financial system could collapse at any moment. When this happened, the world would revert back to using gold as its preferred currency. She’d been stacking and racking gold bars for decades while she waited for this devastating apocalyptic event to happen. Since it hadn’t yet, and likely never would, I was more than willing to relieve her of her burden.

Billy claimed he’d be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in precious metals when she died. It was a lazy pickup line he thought would green light him into the panties of the bored blond seated next to him. Unimpressed with his seemingly outlandish claims, she got up to leave, passing in a wake of drugstore perfume. I waited patiently, letting the failure percolate from my perch three stools down, knowing with every passing second he was becoming more ripe for the picking. Then I slid over.

“Women never see a good thing when it’s standing right in front of them.”

“Damn straight they don’t.” A grimace twisted up his face into an ugly scowl.

“Let me buy you a drink.” I couldn’t stop the cheshire grin from spreading across my cheeks.

Four rounds of conciliatory shots later, that would guarantee a fuzzy recollection of our time together, I absconded with his wallet. A velcro contraption that was worthless, with the exception of the plastic pocket that housed his driver’s identification.

After tracking down his mother, Sheila, I found her address on the outskirts of the affluent beachside enclave of Aura Cove. From a distance, I engaged in rigorous surveillance. The home was a classic seventies ranch, tucked into the end of an unremarkable side street. I was relieved to see it didn’t feature an ocean view or any of the amenities enjoyed by the more affluent part of town. It was the original neighborhood of Aura Cove built decades before greedy developers sliced up the coast into more lucrative homebuilding lots. Sheila’s yard was sparsely lit and covered with overgrown bushes and palm trees in a state of neglect. I’d had to tread carefully at first, those who were paranoid enough to remove most of their financial assets from banks, were often diligent about security. One phone call to an acquaintance at a well known security company verified that the blue logo on the sign stabbed into the ground near the front door was simply a decoy.

Over the next two weeks, I discovered Sheila never left her house. She embraced the home delivery services with the same kind of reckless abandon of lazy twenty-somethings who use Uber Eats to order fast food. Every two weeks, groceries and bird seed landed on her front porch and disappeared into the dwelling within minutes.

You can learn a lot about a person’s habits by looking through their groceries. Sheila didn’t believe in banks, and also did not believe in tipping. Her regular  driver was more than willing to let me poke through her bags after being stiffed yet again when I handed over a fifty dollar tip.

By week four, it became apparent, in the interest of progress, that I was going to have to break a rule I had never broken before: entering a mark’s house while she was still occupying it.

I took as many precautions as I could. On the eve of the full moon, I parked two streets away and used its natural illumination to navigate through connecting backyards to the rear of her house. I scaled the fence quickly and dropped onto the ground before scrambling toward the sunroom. At the back door, I pulled out my tools and after only a few seconds of work, grinned with satisfaction when the interior mechanism disengaged. I let myself in as quietly as possible walking on tiptoes and gently shut the door behind me. Once inside, I pressed my body into the shadows, straining to listen for movement, and waiting for my adrenaline to calm the racing of my heart. The unexpected rush filled me with overconfidence and resulted in taking larger risks. Another downfall.

According to Billy, Sheila was fond of utilizing the ductwork to hide her treasure and behind most of the vents in the house gold bars and coins were tucked away. I started in the sunroom, two sides of it were composed of glass and the moonlight flooded tracing the lines of three dwarf lemon trees and other planters and buckets of vegetation. The air was musty with a slight citrus scent and buzzing with fruit flies. From the corner of the room, there was a rustling sound and a soft squawk that drew my attention to a large cage draped in a dark black sheet. During my month of surveillance, I knew there would be an African Grey Parrot sleeping inside.

“Who’s a pretty boy?” The bird mumbled and churred between soft clicks and squawks. I froze in silence, waiting for the bird to calm back down counting my breaths in the darkness. Eventually, he did and I located the first vent, resting on my knees in front of it. Outside the house I heard the ancient air conditioner power on. It squealed and hissed to life, the fan blades screaming in protest. I was grateful the loud rumbling helped settle the bird and disguised the electric whirring of my portable screwdriver.

After a few seconds, the metal vent was resting on the floor with its screws rolling in it from side to side. I bent down, reached in, and patted around feeling a rush of euphoria when my hand connected with something cold and metallic. I pulled out the first two bars that caught a sliver of moonlight and made a satisfying grin spread across my face. In astonishment, I held the solid gold in my hands for a long moment imagining the down payment I was going to make on a sailboat, already spending the windfall in my head. My literal ship was coming in and eager to relieve the old woman of all of her riches, I reached back into the ventilation duct to pull out another when my fingers felt the rough edges something strange.

Completely engrossed in my pilfering, I pulled it out and transfixed, I stared down at what looked like a golden sculpture of a miniature parrot only three inches long. In my hand, the cold metal warmed to the touch and I slowly brought it closer to my eyes when a shimmer of golden light distracted me, and then, the wings flapped. FLAPPED. I stared down at it again, completely engrossed, willing it to flap again when with a flash of light, the buckshot sent me reeling.

By the time I whirled around, Sheila was mere steps away. She cocked it again and I tried to dive for cover, but was too late. When the second blast hit, I knew I was in trouble. I squeezed the bird into my fist, the wings were sharp and they cut through my hand, it was a small annoyance in comparison to the mortal wounds I’d already sustained.

“A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” I mumbled under my breath. In those last moments, the proverb’s irony wasn’t wasted on me. I was quickly entering delirium so I cannot tell you if what occurred next actually happened or was a figment of my imagination.

The golden bird began to flutter in my palm, tickling the ridges of my hand until I released it into the air. It flapped its wings and a shower of sparkles drifted from its wings to the floor. Enamored with it, I struggled to my feet, stumbling toward it as it flew over to the cage draped in fabric.

The shotgun cocked again and I felt another shower of pellets explode as I fell forward onto the cage disengaging the lock on the door in one fell swoop. There was a metal clang as the shotgun fell to the ground and then a heavy thud when Sheila landed next to it. She was clutching her chest and moaning, her skin pasty and white. I staggered to my feet again, both hands covered in blood that was now dripping from my mouth in sputters and starts.

“Are you seriously going to have a heart attack right now? Why couldn’t this have happened five minutes ago?” I let out a choked laugh as my blood dribbled onto the floor. The only kind of luck I’d ever had was bad and in my last moments as the circumstances became almost comical my laughter became more crazed.

“Uh-Oh!” The gray bird squawked taking in the scene of his caretaker on the floor as if he could understand what was happening. “Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” He crowed. “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” The catchphrase resurfaced from my childhood memories of commercials for life alert. The bird obviously watched too much local access television.

He bobbed up and down flapping his wings and perched on top of the toppled cage. His eyes unblinking, getting more animated as the golden bird flapped closer to him. His soft head bobbed up and down in glee as the golden bird flapped its tiny wings closer. “Gimme a kiss!” He clicked, now that the golden bird was mere inches away. His flirty demand made with a sassy staccato. The golden bird whirred and chirped as it drew closer and I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the pair.

In my final moments, I reached out to touch my shimmering avian guide. I was desperate to fly away from the pain, when I felt lightheaded and saw a whoosh of black light. There were screams I only recognized as my own as I drifted away, and then my soul took flight.