The Aviary (3 page)

“Stop that noise. Stop that ticking. Stop it!”

He swore and ran to the safe, fumbling with sweating fingers until he finally dialed the right combination. He tore open the manila envelope, read its contents and screamed.

I, Mrs. Stacey Ryan, being of sound mind and body, do hereby bequeath my entire estate and money to my loving husband, Mr. Stacey Ryan, provided he spend the entire amount of my money on enlarging and maintaining the bird menagerie. I’m sure Mr. Ryan will love this as he so appreciates our feathered friends.

Insanity gripped Stacey. He ran for his car parked in the driveway. He gunned the vehicle onto the main highway. He had to get away, anywhere away from the aviary, the birds. Escape, that’s what he would do, he would escape from the birds. Wait, what was that coming toward him? What was it? It had huge eyes glowing at him in the dark. It was a bird, that’s what it was, a giant bird.

“I’ll kill it! I’ll kill it! No bird can stop me.”

The crash happened a second before the car’s speedometer touched a hundred miles per hour. It was a terrible grinding of metal, a tinkling of broken glass that seemed to go on forever before a deathly silence returned.

* * * *

At the state mental hospital, Police Sergeant, Benjamin Raymond waited in the office of Head Psychiatrist, Doctor Garfield. Raymond had waited for an hour and was at the end of his patience when a man wearing a white coat seemingly appeared from nowhere. His sad face answered the question Raymond was going to ask.

“A preliminary examination of Stacey Ryan is not favorable. At the moment he’s suffering from a complete mental breakdown. Whether he can ever be normal again, well, it’s doubtful, but in time perhaps he might recuperate somewhat. At the moment I have few hopes that he will. Who found him?”

“A couple of my officers did. Ryan was perched on a pile of wreckage mimicking a parrot and hollering nonstop,
Well hello there, you son-of-a-bitch.
He was unhurt. Two people in the other car were killed. They were Jim Turner, an Attorney at Law, and his secretary.”

* * * *

Teaser – “All right, Turner,” Stacey said as Turner poured him a second Scotch, “give me the skinny on your latest scam.”

“Okay, six months ago an elderly man walked into my office. His name was Matthew Hamilton. He wanted to make out a will leaving all his worldly possessions to his niece, a one Doris Meadows, age twenty-seven, who was living with him at the time. Hamilton was a retired oil man worth mega bucks and Doris was his only next of kin.”

“Turner, you keep saying Hamilton was. What is he, a stiff?”

The Lawyer laughed. “As usual, Stacey, you’re racing ahead of me. I didn’t think too much of that money at the time as there was no possible way I could latch on to it. Now there is a way. Hamilton checked out, killed in a car wreck two months ago. Doris Meadows has inherited everything.”

“Okay, so how do we get the dame’s money?”

“That’s simple Stacey. You’re going to marry the gal.”

As a snot-nosed kid Wayne Greenough had stories running around in his head. As a wild-eyed-teen-ager Wayne Greenough had stories running around in his head. As a mole-crusted-old geezer Wayne Greenough has stories running around in his head that he sends to publishers.