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Fallen Pawns Chessville readers can follow the light-hearted chess adventures of “The Kennedy Kids” – Mary Elizabeth, Jon and Matt – in two dozen short stories written by their dad, Rick Kennedy. In another world, though, the one called real life, “The Kennedy Kids” have grown up – Matt has his Masters degree, Mary has her Bachelor’s degree, and Jon is a senior at the University of Notre Dame.
Although there are plenty more tales to tell of the younger Kids, Rick thought it would be interesting to update the trio and check in on their adventures, chessic and otherwise.
“You should be able to figure it out on your own – you play chess, don’t you?” rumbled a voice across the desk. With that, Frankenstein strode off. I guess that should be Mister Frankenstein to me, since that’s my boss: two hundred and eighty rude, crude pounds of Queen’s Gambit, if you recall your Santasiere.* Sigh. Actors and actresses in the Big Apple and Hollywood have their menial and skuzzy “day jobs,” waiting for the one special casting call that will free them to do what they were truly born to do. Writers, too. Until I sell my first novel, I’ll be working where I’m working, for what’s-his-name, for at least a little while longer. The boss was a true internationalist: Roman hands and Russian fingers from day one. Groan. That’s ok – he still has eight unbroken digits to shuffle paperwork with. Under-employed writers are not to be messed with. Anyhow, five o’clock came, and I went. The agenda for Friday night was laundry and some “Dr. Who” DVDs. Welcome to life in “the All American City.” Saturday morning was bright and sunny, though, and I hopped the COTA bus to the Mean Bean Caffeine Lounge, for my next game at the Mulligan Chess Club. I was facing my new chess friend Tina, a detective with the local police department, and I was ready to share what I had worked up on the Rosentreter Gambit. As the chess clocks ticked, I learned Lesson Number One: don’t go all aggro on a cop, even over-the-board. Tina deftly countered my moves, stumped my pieces, and forced a draw without much effort. Still, the coffee afterward was good, and the scone was a treat. While catching up on the local gossip I even came away with a decent tale to tell. Tina looked exhausted, and it certainly wasn’t from my chess play. She’d been working an odd case – a series of homicides by a pawnbroker downtown – at Aunt Sammie’s, down the street from Louie Liver’s Liver Emporium, not too far from Uzi Alley. Tough neighborhood. Heard they even had some pedal-bys. Three times in the last month a different nondescript, nameless character had come in to rob the place. Three times the owner had exercised her Second Amendment rights and sent that intruder to the Great Beyond. It didn’t make any sense, and none of it looked right, but so far Tina had found no connection between the shooter and the shootees. Targets. Victims. Bodies. Whatever. As I pushed away from the table, picked up the check and patted my pocket for a bus pass, I had a thought: maybe the targets were linked – to each other. What if a third party (or set of partiers) was blindly insuring the riffraff – not too hard to do, I knew from my “day job” – and setting themselves us as the beneficiary? It wouldn’t take much to wind that person up with a bit of “opening preparation” on how to act when confronting the pawnbroker – say, exactly the kind of moves that were known to cause instant panic at Aunt Sammies…? It could all add up to a lot of money when the insurance claims were paid off. Sac, sac, mate, as Bobby said. And who said they were stopping at three? A preposterous idea, really, but I mentioned to Tina as we went our separate ways. She had work to do. I had a garden to tend. That was that, although mid-week, I got a call at work from Tina. There’s nothing like a cop on the phone asking for you by name to keep The Boss docile for an hour or two. This weekend, Tina told me (among other things), after the Mulligan World Open, the coffee and scones were on her. Must have been something I’d said. Maybe I could work the whole thing into as story or something.
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