The Sand Trap (43 page)

“People could describe us the same way Doug.
This is a pretty nice place to live and I’d say she has a great job
if you like flowers and cactus. So I don’t think it makes her too
strange to want to be here.”

“Oh that’s the normal part, mostly normal
anyhow. So how about this.” He started ticking things off with his
fingers. “Despite the efforts of half the more mature male
population of San Jose del Cabo she has never accepted any
invitation for dinner or anything else.”

“That may just be good taste,” Burt
interjected.

“There’s more,” Doug suggested moving to his
second digit. “She lives by herself in a casita by the beach eight
kilometers up the East Coast Road, right where the road leaves the
sea. That is OK I guess, but she drives back and forth on an old
Honda XL250 and goes so fast she apparently scares the shit out of
all the roadside chickens between here and Cabo Pulmo. Fifty-two
year old women are supposed to be grandmas that their grandchildren
drive around!”

“Ah, your Latino macho is showing Doug! I
think you’re just upset that she’s slender. An obvious rebellion
against Mexican female tradition.”

“True. We do like a little meat on our
bones, but there’s more,” he continued moving to the third digit.
“One of the bus boys who lives up there was on the beach fishing
one morning and he watched her doing some sort of weird martial
arts thing. Apparently she does it each morning before she comes to
work.”

“Well that is weird,” Burt agreed, suddenly
very interested in this lady.

“In the nude!” Doug choked the words out
through a fit of laughter. As the other dining room patrons looked
over at him, he leaned over to Burt and in a conspiratorial tone he
whispered. “But here is the worst!” He paused for effect. “She
plays golf!” And they laughed so hard the tears were running down
their cheeks.

Over the balance of their coffee, Burt was
able to extract the information that Maria had asked for permission
to use the range during off hours. She apparently comes in the
middle of the night and hits balls from the lit tee boxes into the
dark range. One of the security boys secretly watched her one night
and reported back to Doug that her swing was the ugliest thing he
had ever seen on a golf course.

“Strange lady that,” were Doug’s last words
as they stood up and left the dining room.

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Doug went to his office and Burt went back
to his apartment. He had not had time to unpack much of his
personal things yet since he had been focusing on his first morning
of teaching. He thought the morning’s lessons went well. From his
own study and the lessons he had from Bruce, and many others
earlier in his life, he had developed both a teaching philosophy
and some teaching strategies.

The philosophy came in many ways from his
eastern martial arts training and was simple. The first part of his
teaching philosophy was that the object is for the club head to
meet the ball with the desired effect, distance, accuracy or
whatever; not to follow a large set of swing rules that golf
instructors make up to keep their profession going. Everybody is
different so you should do what feels right for you. That is why he
gave John videos of Lee Trevino, Chi Chi Rodriguez, Arnold Palmer,
Moe Norman, Jim Furyk and Freddy Couples. These are great golfers
that most modern instructors would tear apart. John’s problem was
he was trying to be too perfect rather just letting his swing take
him to the right place. The second part was that the game was
supposed to be fun and the rules of golf were ruining the game for
far too many people. He would teach Joanna a new game. One where
you teed it up for every shot, picked the ball up when you had had
enough, and throw the ball from deep sand traps.

In terms of technique, once someone had a
good stance and grip, he would really only teach two maxims, find
your rhythm and see the club head strike the ball. The rest would
take care of itself without too much thinking. He agreed with Ben
Crenshaw when he said he was “five inches from being an outstanding
golfer – the the distance between my two ears.”

“This teaching gig is going to be fun,” he
thought to himself as he sat down on the chesterfield and looked
out over the Sea of Cortez and the golf course. “I’ll have time to
heal. The weather is wonderful. The accommodation is superb. It is
only November so the heaviest tourist and teaching season had not
started yet, and I have my afternoons free to work on my own game.
I can practice down here until May and head up to California to
practice on the course where the qualifying tournament would be
held. No problem.”

Most of his things had been shipped down
from Canada earlier and it all had been piled in the corner of the
living room. He decided he would spend the afternoon getting his
apartment in order. He wanted to practice some Wing Chung, but that
was part of the old Gord, not the new Burt. So he had yet to figure
out how he would let yoga replace the energetic and stress
relieving martial arts workout. He was already missing his bass
guitar and karaoke stereo set up. But those were also part of a
previous life. He had gone to some “Beginner’s Blues” workshops
back in Ottawa to see if he could learn the blues harp. How hard
could it be? Three inches long and only ten holes to choose from.
He had found that while playing “Oh Susanna” on a diatonic harp was
a good way to start, real blues playing was far more complicated
than he had figured. He was fascinated by the instrument and had
brought some harps and some instructional books with him. He had
selected a few songs to try and learn from the blues pieces that
were loaded on his iPad, so this at least let him do some music.
There was a good stereo in the apartment and he went over and
hooked up the iPad to the amplifier and picked out his “harp songs”
playlist and started the music. He began to unpack his belongings
to the wailing of Little Walter’s ‘Juke’.

He started with the easy part, the clothes.
Mary had bought the clothes she thought he would need and they were
all packed and sorted neatly, so it was easy for him to put them in
the drawers and bedroom closet. Most of it was golfing attire;
shirts, pants and socks. There was a week’s worth of underwear and
three sets of light cotton pajamas. She knew he liked to work out
so there were two sets of workout clothes; shorts and top and a
tracksuit. She had put in a couple of nice cashmere sweaters and
even a hoodie. For footwear there were two pairs of golf shoes, one
traditional two tone Foot Joys and the other an Ecco “Freddy
Couples” style. She had packed a nice pair of Nike track shoes for
the gym, a pair of sandals, and a pair of dress shoes. He opened a
suit bag and found a tropical suit that matched the shoes, with
white shirt and tie to match the suit. He wondered where she
thought he would be using that in San Joe del Cabo but he hung it
in the closet anyhow.

He moved to the other personal items that
were shipped down. He already had the iPad with the preloaded
music. The stereo had now moved on to Downchild Blues, “A Feelin'
so Good.” He discovered that Mary had shipped down a whole
collection of harps, twenty three of them, sometimes two in each
key. There was also one chromatic harp although he hadn’t tried it.
Again, he wasn’t sure how Mary thought he would need all of these
harps, but from her perspective it was part of the new life. He
couldn’t be a blues harp player unless he had the instruments.
“That’s fine,” he thought to himself as he put them away in a
cabinet under the stereo, “but what do I do when someone asks me to
play?”

Mary had also picked out a library that she
thought Burt should have. From the details that old Gord had been
told about the old Burt, he wondered if Burt read at all. Mary
argued he would have to be able to at least provide a partial
explanation as to why a college dropout had Ph.D. level knowledge,
so avid reading was the answer. As he put the over one hundred
books on the shelves he was amazed at the breadth of titles.
Apparently he was a regular reader of prize-winning fiction; the
titles included all the books shortlisted for the Booker prize for
the last ten years. He liked biographies and even had a copy of the
most recent biography of Steven Jobs. He had quite a collection of
books on Eastern philosophy, supposedly, he figured, to explain his
mystical teaching methods. Of course, he had most of the top books
ever published on golf. He came across a 1964, signed copy of Jack
Nicklaus’s “Golf my Way.” And all of the books he put on the shelf
were used.

He was impressed. “I might even read some of
these for a second time!” he chuckled to himself. He stood back and
admired the full bookshelves as Charlie McCoy’s version of “Walkin’
After Midnight” came on the stereo. He listened for a moment and
wondered if he could ever get that good.

He moved on to the hardest part that he had
left to last.

As Mary had promised, most of the materials
that were stored behind his stereo wall at the house had been saved
from the fire and ingeniously hidden in various ways in his large
golf bag. She had told him the methods and he now started
extracting them all from their hiding places. He had stored all of
his ingredients in some sort of powder form so they could be
indefinitely preserved. This made both the hiding and the recovery
easier. His bags would have been given a cursory screening coming
into Mexico, but since not many people smuggle drugs into the
country the screening was not very thorough. Combined with Mary’s
ingenuity in disguising things, all the things he had ever needed
to fulfill his role with the Agency were here in the bag.

He had several requirements for the products
he had used over the years.

First, they had to come from a natural
source, mostly either a plant or an insect. The reason for this was
simple. As organic products they had necessary and useful
properties such as being dissolvable in water, often naturally
occurring in the human body and designed by nature in the first
place to kill or maim.

Second, they had to be something he could
‘cook’ to a higher concentration than normally used in a natural
setting. Some of his extracts were deadly without manipulation but
most required some basic kitchen chemistry to prepare.

Thirdly, the powders had to be disguisable
as an everyday item, especially one that could be taken as a carry
on item on an airplane. He had used antibiotic capsules, pain
pills, and even foot powder as disguises in the past.

Fourth, they had to produce a naturally
occurring collapse of some part of the human body that led to death
in varying amounts of time. Some deaths occurred instantly while
others could take as long as a week to transpire. The toxin had to
be rendered undetectable in the human body by the time someone got
around to doing a toxin screen on the body, if they ever did.

With these requirements as filters, through
extensive research, sometimes travel to strange places and private
experimenting, he had put together a collection of 24 poisons that
he used to practice his trade and all were hidden in some fashion
in his golf bag. The Advil was really Ricinus Communus from the
castor oil plant. The deodorant Veratrum, the Corn Lily. The
sunscreen was Puss caterpillar venom. The hand cream Oenanthe
Crocata, Hemlock Water Dropwart. An energy bar was really Machineal
sap. The handle of the golf umbrella contained the sap of Mexican
coral snakes. The red tees in the bag were the genus Galerina of
the little brown mushroom group. The Top Flite balls were actually
Actonitium, Wolfsbane. A ball marker from the Moose Jaw golf course
was Atropa Belladonna, Deadly Nightshade. And so on until he had
all twenty-four spread out over the kitchen table. He knew what
they all were by memory and now he just had to put them somewhere
where they would be hidden and available. It would look odd if he
put them all in the same place, so he spread them out, putting them
in places in the apartment where they would appear natural; golf
with the golf stuff, medicine in the medicine cabinet until
everything was in its place. He knew what it all was but he had a
fleeting and humorous thought that there would be an interesting
series of disasters if he were to suddenly get Alzheimer’s and
forget which one was the real deodorant and which one would kill
you.

There was some comfort in having his
materials around him after the events of the last few months. Now
it made him think about why he even had them. He had told Richard
he was through with that business, but the Agency had set him up
down here in paradise for a reason other than his recuperation and
his preparation for the Champion Tour Q School. They would contact
him at some point and give him the details of a job. But for now he
was just going to enjoy his new life. Reality could hit later.