Gary Clifton, Murdering Homer

excerpt

Murdering Homer

Author: Gary Clifton
Publisher: Crossroad Press
Date: June 24, 2019
Length: 195 pp.
ASIN: B07SJX6T82

Chapter 1: Old Face, Wrong Place

The sparse crowd of hardscrabble patrons at Tubby’s Fine Food froze in horror as the Giant Pink Rabbit sprang to his feet, his glassy eyes as wide in horrified shock as 1905 silver dollars. “Glub, glub, arrrgh” He choked, spitting a wad of half-chewed cheeseburger down the back of the long haired, tattooed man in the next booth.

Kobok and Bush watched somberly. This was it. Too many cholesterol stuffed grease burgers, and rancid, foot long cigars had finally rung the bell. The Giant Pink Rabbit was about to drop dead on the floor of Tubby’s from rancid grease ingestion poisoning.

Always ready to Serve and Protect, Kobok asked, “You want I should call an ambulance.”

Chapter 2: Homer Wayne and Eula Jo

Forty years later, Homer Wayne was still wrestling that rig down narrow alleys, still six days a week. However, he now owned the whole sixty-acre operation on South Industrial, 37 state of the art trash compactor trucks, more dumpsters than he could count, with 79 full time employees, a multiple bathroom mansion on Newmanshire Drive in far north Dallas, and a hundred million dollars of downtown Dallas real estate. Homer Wayne DuPree, who still couldn’t read worth a nickel, was indeed a genuine American success story. A shy redneck, who had begun life with an outhouse and two

The men in Eula Jo’s life: her father Elrod, and two brothers, Cleo and Claude worked at menial jobs or more often at no jobs at all when they weren’t locked up. They were mostly burglars, an occupation at which they were not very good. When Eula Jo was 14, brother Cleo was shot and killed by a Texas Highway Patrol officer while fleeing after robbing the Drover’s Bank of Kemp, Texas. Daddy Elrod and brother Claude got arrested for the same robbery. Both got life without parole—at a time when life meant life.

Chapter 18: The PLAN, Revised

At 7:41 A.M., the little clock carried home its mission and the bomb exploded on the window ledge of Homer Wayne DuPree’s bedroom. Eula Jo had heard the blast five blocks away, instantly exhilarated with the knowledge that Homer Wayne had been blown all to Hell. As she ran joyfully back to the mansion amid a throng of others drawn by the noise, she began screaming.

“Call the Goddamn police. They done kilt mah husband.”

Homer hadn’t been blown all the way to Hell, however, only part way -- about 22 feet as well as they were able to later calculate The black powder had, predictably, “low ordered”. The two separate cardboard boxes had been the first problem. One box, the one with the blasting cap, had fully blown. The second, insulated by the cardboard wall of the two boxes, had merely spewed raw black powder all over Homer’s bedroom and the ground outside.

One of the first officers to arrive thought she saw movement by the mattress. She lifted it and found Homer Wayne lying nude, dazed, and bleeding from minor cuts, under the devastated mattress. The mattress had acted as a cocoon, carrying its passenger safely through a solid brick wall. Incredibly, a fragment of air conditioner, clock or brick had not penetrated the mattress and torn off his head. By the time a neighbor had found one of Homer’s bathrobes in the shattered closet of the bedroom and helped wrap him in it, Homer was frantically searching the house, crying aloud for Eula Jo.