Invisible Tower Shield Zombie?

[Warchon]

So, because our party druid accidentally disintegrated a bear twice, we have a Tower Shield that nobody in the party wants or can use.
The Duskblade and I were discussing his new spell level and he is picking up Invisibility, and he came up with the idea of handing off the shield to one of my zombies, turning it invisible and having it just stand in front of the bard, who is bow-focused, so she can pump out arrows from behind a portable fortress.
(Our party is super well optimized, I know!)

So obviously this brings up a ton of questions.
Would the (small) bard gain Cover from this stunt? Would he take a penalty to his own shots because he can't see the zombie himself?
Just overall, would this work at all, and how would it work?
I have an idea in my head that it would be for all intents and purposes just an Animated Shield at +4 (the zombie sure as heck isn't going to do much else with a -12 to its attack rolls) but I don't know if that will fly with the DM at all, I'm hoping there are rules somewhere for it to make it nice and simple.

[Jowgen]

Tower Shield rules are not very detailed. The official FAQ goes into the mechanics quite a bit though, and based on that your zombie should be able to use a standard action to make one side of his square count as providing (total) cover. Depending on enemy position, your character could then benefit from total or partial cover, depending. Not that this goes both ways though.

The invisibility itself does nothing to the Cover bonuses granted, but line of sight is not blocked in the case of total cover. A rather odd dysfunction in all this: if you gain cover this way, you are technically still allowed to make hide checks.