The Other Side of Bad (The Tucker Novels) (14 page)

Chapter 27

About a week later

It was 2:30 in the afternoon when he swaggered in, in full uniform, night stick and all. Five-feet-seven inches of him, covered in leather and steel. That’s how it looked. He couldn’t have weighed over a 145 pounds. His revolver and all the police regalia took up most of the space he occupied.

He walked up to the counter as I was putting a freshly polished handgun into the display case.

He sauntered up to me like he was 10 foot tall and bullet-proof, stuck out his hand and said, “My name is Robby Gray. I saw you shoot at the
 Alexandria P. D. range a couple of years ago. You were shooting western quick draw. It was fuckin’ unreal.”

He had cold, clear slate-colored eyes, that didn’t go with his youngster’s grin. He looked about 13 and exuded something akin to Irish charm. Everything but his eyes wanted to make you laugh, so I didn’t feel too bad about the smile on my face.

“I’m Tucker,” I said. “Good to meet you.”

“Shit, I know who you are. I saw you draw and shoot six rounds out of single action revolver faster that I could shoot six times with a semi-auto, fuck the drawing. We have a mutual friend who’d been telling me about this kid who could outshoot anyone on the force, so I had to go see for myself.”

Two years ago I was 19 and had been married for two years, had a 2 year-old daughter, and had been shooting guns for more than half my life, and shooting very seriously for six years. I didn’t feel like a
kid
.

But…his charm and enthusiasm was irresistible.

“I hope I didn’t disappoint you,” I said, closing the display case.

He turned away and started roaming around, looking at the guns and their new display. I had rearranged quite a bit in the week I had been manager.

“I’ve been coming here for years. I didn’t know Sawbuck’s had this many guns. Where did they all come from?” he asked.

“They’ve always been here. It’s
 just a little trick I do with mirrors and crushed pecan shells,” I said seriously.

He looked around carefully and said, “I don’t see any mirrors.”

“That’s because of the pecan shells,” I said, proudly.

He looked around and when his head was turned away, I saw by the small shrug of his shoulders, the sudden tilt of his head and a jerk that ended in stillness, he just got it.

He turned slowly around and looked me straight in the eye and said, “You’re a funny fucker, aren’t you?”

He wasn’t smiling. I could see this little guy was dangerous.

In a blink he was once again, all smiles and charm. He laughed and said, “I like that. It’s hard to get me. But, you got me.”

“I have my moments,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest. “They’re far and few between, so I hope you won’t mind if I savor this.”

We both started laughing and were instant friends. Robby would come by three or four times a week while on duty. We started shooting down at the Shreveport P. D. range and within a couple of months, I’d met almost the whole department.

I started having special sales for just the Police Department. I did some exhibition shooting for the Department to help raise funds for charity. I took my beautiful wife to the Policemen’s Ball and hung out with everyone from the top brass to the man walking a beat. Robby Gray and I double-dated with our wives, and everything was good.

Then one day Robby was in the store telling me how his partner had shined a light into a car and caught a couple of teenagers going at it. They weren’t fighting. They were doing that other thing.

“Man, it was embarrassing,” he said. “I mean the girl was buck naked, and the guy was about half way there. I had to shine the light around to make sure there wasn’t a gun around, and she started crying and all. I told them to get dressed and get out of the car. We don’t have to do that, ya know, we can just make them get out naked, but man I just couldn’t do that, she was crying and all.”

I wondered what ‘and all’ meant. I think it meant ‘real hard’.

“Well, anyway,” he continued, “we did a routine search, and we came up with a lid of grass.” His face looked like Christmas. “You ever smoked any weed, Tucker?” His posture suggested confidentiality.

About a year before, I had tried grass for the first time. While my other friends had gone with the long hair and beads, smoking pot and hash, I had stayed with the blue jeans and cowboy boots. When one of my friends showed up back home during spring break and offered me a joint, I declined and started asking intelligent questions like, ‘why are you smoking that shit? Why do you think they call it dope?’

His response was to use my own words the day I got him to drink his first beer, “Don’t knock it unless you’ve tried it, Tucker.”

I looked at Robby and said, “Yeah, I’ve smoked a little.”

The truth was, from the first time I tried it, I liked it. My wife liked how it mellowed me out. Calmed my temper and ‘those Tucker ways,’ as she put it.

Pot left no hangover, and the only down side was the munchies. For the past year I had been getting my pot from Wayne, a high school friend who now lived in Baton Rouge.

During my senior year, Wayne had transferred from Los Angeles. In the
cool
department, he was a few years ahead of us hicks in Alexandria. He had long hair, he was a hippy and I don’t like bullies. All of that translates into I came upon Wayne and Richard Pollard in the hall in front of the lockers. Wayne’s locker was close to mine. Richard was just starting to push long-haired, skinny, hippy Wayne around when I arrived. Richard Pollard was a big tall strong mean, bully. For two years, we’d managed not to get into it. We didn’t move in the same circles, and he seemed to usually stay clear of me.

I ‘d already met Wayne. After all, he was from California and cool. I was a big athlete and tough and handsome and cool, so we had been introduced by someone who knew how to get the cool people together. He seemed like a nice guy, but we didn’t have much in common; until that day. We had Richard Pollard in common. Wayne was being bullied and I didn’t like bullies.

When I came up on them, I told Richard not to push Wayne again. He sneered at me and pushed Wayne again. I tore down his meat house, right there in the hallway of Bolton High School.

Within a few seconds he was on the floor leaking red fluid from three or four different locations on his face, and having a hard time breathing. After ascertaining he wasn’t going to die, I turned to Wayne to make sure he was all right. His look was one of fear and wonder. We never really “hung out,” but we became friends. No one ever pushed him again, at least no one who knew me.

Years later when I wanted to buy some pot for myself, I was told Wayne was a big dealer down in Baton Rouge. I got in touch with him by phone and let him know what I wanted. He was astonished, me being such a straight guy and all, but said he would take care of me. He used code words, like herb and rope. He asked for my number and said he would be in touch.

A few days later I got a call from a friend of Wayne’s, Cutter. He sounded black. Cutter said he was in town and had something for me, from Wayne. I met him in the back parking lot of a Burger Chef. I thought I was going to maybe have to buy a whole lid or maybe two. I didn’t know what to expect. So I took $50 with me just in case he had three or four lids. Lids were going for $10 in those days.

He gave me a brown paper bag that felt awfully heavy and disappeared. There was no talk of money. I opened the bag, and there was a package about twice the size of a cigar box wrapped in red paper and covered in plastic wrap. I took it home and opened it.  It was a kilo of grass. I later found out it was called Columbian Gold. It was very good.

After telling Robby I smoked a little, he nodded his head knowingly and said, “I knew you were cool. You’re just too mellow for someone who has a reputation as a bad ass.”

“What’re you talking about?” I asked.

“Look, Tucker, I’ve been checking you out since the day we met. I know all about your high school days and some of the shit you were into after school down in Baton Rouge. You’ve got a reputation of being very quick with your temper and your fists.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

After furtively looking to make sure there was no one around, he said,
 “Yeah, right. Well, look, what you say you and I blow a joint after work tonight?”

I gave him a hard look and said, “You’re not a cop, are you? You have to tell me if you are, it’s the law. If you lie, it’s entrapment.”

He looked back just as hard and sincerely said, “A cop? Not me. I hate cops.”

“Okay, I’ll see you after work.”

He picked me up in his squad car. I couldn’t believe it. We drove down an isolated road on the edge of the city. He called in a code that he was going to eat. We sat in his squad car and smoked pot and listened to the radio dispatch.

When he said after work, I thought he meant his, too. He was still on duty, and there we were, getting stoned. It was freaky to say the least. We ended up laughing our asses off. And unknowingly, I was being groomed to ride shotgun, literally, for future drug runs to Mexico that were financed by the Commissioner of Public Safety.

Chapter 28

Nashville, Carr Mansion-2:55 PM

I looked first at Carr, then over to LeCompte, and said, “I take it Robby Gray was in a loquacious frame of mind. That surprises me.”

Carr looked at LeCompte and shrugged.

LeCompte said, “He wasn’t at first. He seemed reluctant to talk about you at all. He wouldn’t talk to the first man we sent down to interview him. So I went down to Shreveport. He’s got a house out on Lake Bistineau. It’s not a big house, but it’s very well built and has the finest furnishings money can buy. No way he could afford that kind of place on a cop’s retirement. I talked with him for awhile. When I told him about you snuffing those two hitters, he laughed and said something like ‘those stupid fucks didn’t know who they were fuckin’ with.’ He asked me why I wanted to know about you. I told him the truth. We were thinking about hiring you for a job and were just checking you out. He asked what kind of job, and I told him it was none of his business. He wanted to know who was hiring you and was surprised when I told him. He left the room and came back in about ten minutes. I figured he was checking out Mr. Carr. After that I didn’t even have to offer him money, as I was instructed to do if need be. Before he started talking, he informed me that the statute of limitations was over and the Commissioner of Public Safety, a man named Darvoyce, had killed himself while awaiting trial. Gray told me he was retired, and nobody could touch his ass. He seemed quite proud of himself.”

“Now, that sounds like Robby,” I said. “Don’t let his charm fool you, he’s tough. And he’s not afraid of anything.”

LeCompte got up and walked over to George’s desk and opened the humidor and got himself a cigar. It helped me define their relationship.

After lighting it and blowing a cloud of smoke towards the ceiling, he said, “Yeah, well, after talking to him, I realized his reluctance to talk at first, had nothing to do with him being afraid of the law. But, he was afraid of something, he was afraid of you. It was like he didn’t want to tell me anything that might get you to come looking for him.”

“I try my best not to think about him or those days,” I said.

After another pull on his cigar he said, “He told me how he set you up as a small time dealer to make sure you were ‘cool,’ as he put it. And something about testing your mettle, by asking you to go with him while he had a chat with a guy.”

As I thought of the implausible justified mendacities we adopted to cloud our lives, I heard a train coming down the tracks.

Chapter 29

Dealing pot in 1972 was like bootlegging whiskey during prohibition. At least that’s what we used to tell ourselves. Our main angst was it would be legalized before we could make our big score.

Everybody smoked pot, I mean everybody, or so it seemed. It was as if the people who didn’t smoke it, were the minority. Selling pot was cool, the money was good, and besides, I was a small-time dealer.

That’s what I was that summer night when Margie and I were at the dining room table in an apartment we were renting in an upscale complex in south Shreveport. She was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved denim shirt with the tails tied in a half-hitch that showed her flat midriff. We were listening to John Denver singing ‘Rocky Mountain High’ and bagging up lids from a kilo of Columbian gold spread out over newspaper.

Suddenly, through the curtains appeared the flashing lights of a cop car, sending their red, white and blue illumination dancing across the walls of the dining room.

Margie looked up at me over a triple beam scale. Her blue eyes like large planets in a white sky. Her face was floured with fear. My heart leaped, and I jumped up with my .45 in my hand.

“Don’t, Tuck, please,” she said quietly. She always spoke quietly to me when it was important or when she really meant it. It always caught my attention.

I walked over to the couch, stuck the pistol under a cushion and said, “Don’t panic, it may not be about us.”

I looked at the dining room table that was in plain sight if someone came in the front door. There wasn’t any sense in trying to clean it up. If the cops were coming for us we were busted, definitely.

Margie got up and went into the kitchen and came out with a large table-cloth, I could tell she was going to try to cover it up. I smiled at her, what a trooper. It wouldn’t do any good. The room reeked with the hash-like aroma of quality marijuana.

There was a heavy pounding on the door, followed by a deep voice, “Open up, Police!”

Well, so much for it not being for us. I went over to the peep hole and looked through. All I could see was the back of a cop’s head, his patrol hat, and part of a shoulder.

My stomach turned and I wanted to puke; the blood was rushing in my ears. I thought, ‘This had to be what it felt like just before you died’. My life was almost flashing  before my eyes.  I looked back at Margie and said, “Sorry, Babe, we’re busted.”

I opened the door.

Robby Gray was standing there with a leering grin on his face.

“You son-of-a-bitch
 . . .  you son-of-a-bitch!” I yelled, jerking him into the room and slamming the door.

“I got you . . . I got you!” he said, laughing, pointing at me and dancing like a leprechaun, his police gear jangling and creaking.

“Damn, smells good in here,” he said, looking over at Margie, who had her face in her hands, shaking her head.

I had gone over to the couch and pulled out my .45. Robby was looking at Margie, suddenly realizing what he had done.

He walked over to her, put his hands around her shoulders and said, “God, Margie, I’m sorry, I didn’t know you would be here. Honest to God, I thought Tucker would be here by himself. I thought you were out with the girls tonight.”

Robby knew my pot was coming in today, and I’d told him earlier that Margie was going shopping with some friends. It was Thursday, and all the stores stayed open until 8:30. Being the manager, I’d scheduled someone else to work, so I could bag up the pot. Margie, at the last moment offered to stay home to help.

Having tested the new shipment, we were both stoned. This just added to what would have freaked us out even if we were straight.

Robby was hugging her now and saying, “There, there, it’ll be all right. I’m sorry, Margie, really.”

When she started to shake, he turned around and looked at me. He saw me standing with the pistol in my hand, and his face started to turn white.

“Look, Tucker, put that thing down. Jesus, I was just fuckin’ around. I didn’t know you’d still be fuckin’ with it.”

I was thinking maybe I should walk over and hit him a few times, it would feel so good. Then I heard Margie, she was laughing.

She had this funny habit. When she was laughing hard, she wouldn’t make any sound. She would just stand there with her mouth open, with tears coming out of her eyes, and smiling for all she was worth. You could tell she was about out of air, and when she finally caught her breath, her sweet laughter was so contagious, no one was immune.

It only took a couple of seconds, and we were all laughing. It was really good pot.

After we settled down, Robby pulled back the tablecloth and began picking up buds and smelling them.

“Damn,” he said, “this smells better than that last shit you got. Tucker, that connection you have is great. I can’t even get Columbian Gold.”

He sat down and rolled a joint. He fired it up, took a couple of hits, and after all the coughing was done, sat back in a chair at the dining room table. Talk about ludicrous, a cop in full uniform sitting behind 2.2 pounds of pot, smoking a joint.

“How’s Mickey Archer working out for you?” he asked.

A few months before, Robby had introduced me to Mickey Archer. Mickey lived in Oil City, about 15 miles north of Shreveport. He was a dealer of lids. The first night I fronted him 30 lids, stacked in a shoe box, at $10 each. In less than three hours he was back with $300 in the shoe box, wanting another 30 lids. I told him to come back in an hour. Margie and I worked fast to accommodate him. He returned the next morning wanting another 30. I was paying $75 a pound for my grass and could make 26 lids out of 16 ounces. Cha-ching!

“Marijuana Mick?” I said, “he’s doing great. I front him and he’s never ripped me off. He sells pot like he’s killin’ snakes.”

“Of course he doesn’t rip you off,” Robby laughed. “After what I told him about you before you met and after your first meeting with him, he wouldn’t dare. He thinks you’re the baddest motherfucker in Shreveport.”

The first time I met Archer, he brought his wife with him. He asked me before-  hand if that would be all right. I said yes. It was perfect.

At the time, we lived in an old thirteen roomed house on Kirby Street. When they got there I was in the bathroom taking a bath in a claw foot tub. There was a wooden stool next to the tub with my father’s hand engraved Colt 1911 .45 sitting on it.

As prearranged, Margie sent him back to the bathroom, telling him to just go in.

Archer walked in and there I was, naked in the tub with a gun only inches from my right hand. I wasn’t smiling. I’ve been told that when I’m not smiling, I look like I’m pissed off, I have a turned down mouth.

“You Mickey?” I asked.

He was about five-nine, skinny with shaggy blond hair down to his shoulders, a scraggly blond goatee and very pale from lack of sun.

He said, “Yeah,” looking down at me and . . . the gun.

“Gray said you could move some grass,” I said.

“That’s right,” he said with shifty hesitant eyes.

“I’ll front you the pot. If you ever rip me off, I’ll find you and kill you, understand,” I said, trying to sound like I meant it.

All he did was nod his head.

I stood up in the tub, my six-foot 225 pounds of muscle towering over him. He looked down at my left leg and saw the large round scar from a bullet.

I said, “Hand me that towel, will you?”

He found the towel hanging on a hook next to him and handed it to me with a shaky hand. I stepped out of the tub onto the bath mat and started drying myself off, still looking at him and never letting the Colt out of reach.

Something that didn’t go unnoticed by Mickey Archer.

After I was about halfway dry, I pulled a pair of Levy’s over my nakedness and said, “I want to hear you say it.”

He swallowed and said, “I understand.”

I didn’t want this guy to think he could rip me off.

Then I took him into the living room, where there was a nice warm fire and two beautiful women.

His wife was a small, attractive, large breasted woman with long straight blond hair. She wore hip hugger jeans and a tight sweater that showed her belly button.

I never met a drug dealer with an ugly woman on his arm.

We smoked some grass and laughed a lot. I let him see the fun side of Tucker. He never ripped me off.

“Robby, what’d you tell Archer about me, before we met?” It just occurred to me, we had never talked about it.

“That you were the baddest motherfucker in Shreveport and if he ripped you off, you would kill him. I told him he wouldn’t be the first either.”

Well, that was a lie.

“What’d he say about the night we met?”

“Other than you had a big gun,” he said laughing.

“Yeah, I let him see my .45.”

“Tuck, sometimes you can be so dense,” Margie huskily laughed.

“He said he would never, ever, think of ripping you off,” he said, still laughing.

“So far so good,” I said, wondering what was so funny.

Margie caught my eye and smiled a smile that said, I needed to get rid of Robby and fast.

God, she was sexy, but her timing was baffling.

Before I could think of a way to get rid of him, he said,
 “Tucker, come take a ride with me. I need your help with something.”

I looked at Margie with a “get me out of this’ expression.

“You two go on, I’ll finish up here and clean this mess up,” she said, giving me the same smile, knowing there was no need to tell me to hurry.

“Okay, just
 a second,” I said and walked back to the couch to get the .45 and stick it between my jeans and the small of my back. An untucked t-shirt could conceal it in that position, and I had practiced getting it out.

After Robby and I were in his squad car, I said, “What’s up?”

“You remember me telling you about that big redneck that kicked me in the balls to where I pissed blood for three days after?”

One night while off duty, Robby came out of a restaurant and walked right into a fight about to erupt. He went to break it up, not identifying himself as a cop, and the big guy didn’t cotton up to it.
 He caught Robby off guard, and kicked the little guy and walked out.

“Yeah, about a month ago, wasn’t it?” I asked. I noticed we were headed south on Highway 71. We would be out of the city limits in just a few miles if we kept this direction.

“Well, I know where he is, and I want to go have a chat with him. I found out he has a bad habit of drop-kicking little guys. I want you to watch my back.”

“Where is he?”

“There’s a bar about 10 miles south of here called Pop’s. You know it?”

“I’ve seen it, never been in it,” I said, thinking it wasn’t my kind of place.

“It’s a pretty rough place. A buddy in the Sheriff’s Department called me about an hour ago and said the guy just pulled in. Maybe he’s still there.”

There didn’t seem to be a graceful way for me to get out of this. I figured Robby would take my silence as a sign of compliance. I was in fact praying. I prayed this turned out all right, meaning I would walk away, and be able to be with Margie later.

We pulled into the gravel parking lot of Pop’s, and Robby said, “That’s his truck there, the red Ford with the dent in the door.”

He took off his hat, badge, gun belt, everything that said ‘cop’.

“You’re cocked and locked, right?” he asked.

It was a stupid question, so I didn’t answer. Besides I wasn’t finished praying.

“Okay, right, just watch my back,” he said, reaching across me and opening the glove box. He pulled out an ominous black cylinder about eight inches long and a little thicker than a roll of quarters.

It was a kel-lite stick. Hand forged airplane aluminum and deadly in the hands of someone that knows how to use it.

He put the stick in his back pocket, rolled up the sleeves of his blue uniform shirt and slicked back his hair. It wasn’t long enough to stay back, but it gets the sweat off your hands. I did the same thing, the hair thing that is.

I wore a t-shirt over a pair of Levi’s and was wearing cowboy boots. Robby now looked like any blue collar worker going in to get a beer after work. And I looked like your typical short-haired, bearded, muscle-bound redneck. All I needed was a pack of cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve of my shirt.

We walked into the smoke-filled bar. No one turned to stare at us, the music didn’t stop, a quiet hush didn’t settle over the room like it does in the movies. We were just a couple of Bubba’s out for a drink. Other than a couple of curious glances, we were invisible. Well, that was sure as shootin’ getting ready to change.

We walked up to the bar, and Robby said to the skinniest bartender in the world, “Two beers please.”

The bartender gave us the ‘I’ve never seen you guys before’ look and said, “What kinda beer ya want?”