Free Silencing Sam by Julie Kramer

stretched uncomfortably. Then my father swung the ax.
    I tried blocking out the red hue as I rushed to the bathroom to puke. Vomit vapor hit my arms, reminding me of the warm mist of chicken blood on my skin long ago. Then I threw up again.
    â€œCan I get you anything?” Garnett handed me my bathrobe.
    I shook my head, rinsed my mouth, and climbed back in bed. He held me close, urging me to go back to sleep. I cried as I told him about the dream. He called it my “Clarice moment.”
    That made me smile. Instead of screaming lambs, I was tormented by the sound of a whack, followed by frantic, flapping wings.
    â€œWell, Clarice, have the lambs stopped screaming?” Garnett whispered in my ear as our heads lay on a pillow.
    I recalled the mesmerizing final telephone scene he quoted. “Anthony Hopkins,
Silence of the Lambs,
1991.”
    The film opened just as the first Gulf War was getting under way. To take the eerie emotion out of my bedroom, Garnett and I started comparing Saddam Hussein to Hannibal Lecter. It wasn’t the most outlandish stretch. Two psychopaths wielding power. One factual, the other fictional. In each scenario, the government needed to do business with them. Talking politics made the dream seem distant.
    But later, in the shower, I found myself envying Jodi Foster for a couple of reasons. Lambs evoke more sympathy than chickens. And Jodi’s terror was make-believe.

CHAPTER 13
    Neither Garnett nor I mentioned the chicken dream the next morning. While toasting English muffins, I noticed the vase of black-eyed Susans and realized I’d forgotten to tell him about the mysterious bouquet I’d received at the station.
    â€œNot this again,” he said.
    I had a history of strangers, who ending up being genuinely strange, sending me flowers. No good ever came of it.
    â€œI gave them to Noreen,” I said. “Maybe the curse will cling to her.”
    â€œMore likely it’ll slide right off her back, she’s so slick.”
    In a brief domestic moment, we laughed, exchanged a quick kiss, and both left for work.
    Clay’s gun had given me an idea.
    Because of the clout of the Second Amendment, no state keeps a list of gun owners, but Minnesota residents are prohibited from carrying concealed weapons around without a special permit. This allows law enforcement to weed out the mentally ill and dangerous felons, and to require applicants to take special firearms training.
    So I sidled up to Lee Xiong, the station’s computer geek, for a favor. He’d made himself irreplaceable at Channel 3 for breakingnews by matching government databases to obscure story premises, like whether drunks who weren’t allowed to drive cars drove speedboats, menacing any of Minnesota’s ten thousand lakes.
    Xiong had a large library of computer records on voting, vehicles, property ownership, and criminal histories. He was Channel 3’s version of Big Brother and probably sat on some good blackmail material, but as far as I could tell, he only flexed his cyber muscles for work-related projects.
    I figured the names of people with gun-carry permits were probably collected by one state agency or another. That didn’t mean that Sam’s killer was on the list, but it was a place to start. And a place Clay wouldn’t think of checking.
    â€œWe do not own this precise database,” Xiong said. “I will have to get a copy from the state.”
    He was curious as to which local politicians or celebrities might be packing heat. But then I had to tell him why
I
was interested and why I needed him to keep my interest from Noreen.
    I gave him my spreadsheet of Sam’s gossip victims and asked him to match it against the gun-carry permits. Since motives were too numerous and subjective, perhaps suspects known to actually own weapons might illuminate something.
    â€œI do not like it when you put me in the middle of work politics,” he said. But we’d