May 25, 2017 – Spent brass bullet jacket

        We are in the country and it is not uncommon to hear gun shots.  I have excellent hearing, unlike my husband who is half deaf, and I can decipher between rifle fire and hand gun fire. [In my single woman days I was a member of the pistol team.]

        I was in the middle of reading The Unwitting by Ellen Feldman as I was stretched out on the bed with big pillows propping me up when I heard “BAM”.  I sat up.  That was close. A handgun.  It came from the proximity of my mailbox at the end of my driveway.  It was evening and the sun had not set yet.  There had been no cars driving by as I can hear every one that passes when I have the windows open and the cooling fan on low.  I settled back into my pillows and immediately back to the book as it was a “page turner”.

        It is not unusual here in this country neighborhood.  Someone had probably found a snake and decided to shoot it and be done with it.  We have acres of kudzu behind us and in the fall the owner of that property seeds the tall pine hillside with deer corn and a salt lick and then thinks he is a sportsman bushwhacking the lured deer.  It upsets us, but that is the mentality down here.  

During the various hunting seasons we hear rifle shots while we are sitting out at the gardens closest to the back wilderness property line.  On several occasions we astutely and cautiously move to the house patio so that we are not the unlucky victims of a stray bullet.

But, a few minutes later I hear “Bam, Bam, Bam” – three shots and this made me come to a stand and cautiously go to the bedroom window first and step to the side so that I could not be seen – no traffic – I couldn’t see anyone.  Again, it sounded like it was from the location at the end of my driveway – somewhere between the neighbor’s mailbox and the end of the street.   It was still light out, but we were into the “evening” hours.

I quickly went to the front office windows and again, covertly stepped to the side of the window and peered between the edge of the lace curtains and the window frame not wanting to be seen and become a target.  If it was a typical handgun they’d have a few more rounds available. 

I saw nothing and then went to the living room windows and followed the same protocol.  No sign of any activity in the neighborhood and I could see three houses clearly from my vantage point.  I lingered a few moments, heard nothing else. .  . I was expecting someone to come slamming out of a house and speed off in their car.     [Do I sound hysterical to you?  NO – I am being a realist.  We had a double homicide in the newspaper only this week here in town.  We are not in a Chicago or New York City – we are in the slow paced country in rural North Carolina.  We don’t expect to pull the newspaper out of the mailbox and open it to a front page “two dead” headline.  But, it is starting to become more frequent as we live here.  It brings you to attention.  When you hear gunfire now, it makes you get up and start looking out windows more often.]

The next day my husband is taking his health walk which just happens to be from our mailbox towards the neighbor’s mailbox and proximity of where I heard the gun shots of the night before.   Upon his return he hands me a spent brass bullet jacket he’d found on the side of the road.  He found only one, but he had looked for more. 

“Keep this.  Won’t be any use to the police now, my fingerprints are on it.  But, it’s a .32.” 

“Yeah.  It is, isn’t it.”  I looked up inquiring.

“Right where you said the shots came from.”

It has been a couple of days now and we haven’t seen any police activity anywhere in the neighborhood.  Was it a drive-by?  Was it merely a snake shooting?  Did someone rob a neighbor’s house and the hoodlums decided to test out the piece they had just acquired?

We will keep quiet and watch the papers to see if there was any mischief in our neighborhood and “if” needed for ballistics, we know where there is a spent brass bullet jacket available for comparison.