The Other Side of Bad (The Tucker Novels) (5 page)

Paul said he got my name from a patrolman who wanted to remain anonymous. Patrolman Anonymous had said that I may be able to help Paul because I had some friends down at the department. Paul also said he got the impression the patrolman didn’t care much for the arresting officer.

I didn’t know what I could do. Not being a private investigator, I was at a loss, and told Paul the same. He literally begged me to help him and had already arranged for me to see his son.

I heard the ache in Paul’s voice and not knowing what else to do, I went to see Ryan.

When I arrived at the jail, it was obvious Ryan had been crying. I thought the cops had been grilling him. But after talking with him, I found he was frightened and completely devastated over having killed Uncle Ray. Ryan didn’t seem at all concerned about what was going to happen to his self. He swore he looked in all the mirrors and looked behind him at least twice before backing out. He’d said, “There must be a blind spot or something in the truck.”

As I left the interview room that had been set up for us, I ran into the arresting officer. A splotchy red-faced porcine man named Poteet.

Poteet wasn’t happy to see me. Although I didn’t know him, he seemed to know me and didn’t like me. I asked him why an 18-year-old boy was charged with negligent vehicular homicide for accidentally backing into someone.

He informed me, “It wasn’t any of my fuckin’ business. But if I really wanted to know, the kid had a reputation for playing loud music in the vehicles he moved. And if he hadn’t been playing the loud fuckin’ music, he would have seen the old fart, and besides, he backs out too fast. He’s just a spoiled rich punk who doesn’t give a fuck about anything but himself.”

I saw why cops were sometimes called pigs. Poteet was a real jewel. Yes, sir. A jewel shaped just like an asshole.

Through Spain, I got copies of the arrest report and pictures taken at the scene. I got the feeling Spain was Patrolman Anonymous. When I called him on it, he denied any connection, but did say Poteet was getting ready to retire and might be trying to go out with a bang.

As far as I knew, once a cop makes an arrest he doesn’t try to prove the perp is innocent. Not all cops, but many consider it is their job to prove them guilty. It’s the politics.

So, I found myself down at Davis Dodge asking questions just like I had a right to. It helped that Spain called the manager and asked them to cooperate with me.

Everyone was very cooperative. Everyone liked Uncle Ray. Everyone liked Ryan. It was a tragedy.

In the arrest report, Poteet said Ryan Macino showed no remorse for what had happened.

Co-workers of Ryan’s and Uncle Ray’s said that after it happened, Ryan didn’t talk much, just stood there looking around. The cop would ask him questions, and Ryan would answer in a low monotone, then look around. When Poteet arrived at the scene, music could still be heard through the closed door of the truck and when he opened it, the music came blaring out.

One of the salesmen used to be a medic and said he thought Ryan was in shock. Sounded reasonable to me.

I was shown to the scene of the accident. As I looked around, I had the pictures taken at the scene, one of which was of poor Uncle Ray laying on his left side, facing away from the impact. What bothered me was he was lying perpendicular to the bed of the truck. It seemed to me if he was walking or standing behind the truck when it hit him, he would have been laying parallel to the bed. I looked at the pictures with a magnifying glass and saw small smudges on the palms of Uncle Ray’s hands and the knees of his pants looked slightly soiled. It just didn’t look right. There wasn’t any blood. There were no eyewitnesses to the accident.

As I walked around the lot, I noticed small dusty paw prints on some of the vehicles. Kitty tracks, I know all about kitty tracks. My orange tabby, Miso, tracks up my truck with a vengeance. I also noticed some of the vehicles had been recently dusted. Not washed or cleaned, but dusted in places, places where a kitty might walk.

I got with the manager and asked him what Uncle Ray’s duties were. He told me Uncle Ray was a custodian of sorts, kept the offices swept and vacuumed and sometimes waxed the floor at night after the dealership closed. I then asked him if Uncle Ray had a room or a place he kept all his things. He showed me to a small room between the offices and the garage. The room was about 8x10 and contained a cot.

The manager explained that Uncle Ray sometimes stayed over when waxing the larger areas or would come in late to work through the night. I snooped around and found a bag of cat food under the cot.

I showed it to the manager. He frowned and said, “I told Ray no pets allowed.”

“Did you have a problem with Ray and pets?” I asked.

“Yeah, it was the kitty litter. You could smell it in the hall. Ray wasn’t punctual about cleaning it out.”

Anyway, it all came down to the fact that Uncle Ray had been looking for his cat, crawling around on his hands and knees looking under the cars and trucks. Uncle Ray didn’t hear so well and hadn’t heard the music or the running engine.

There was no way Ryan could have seen him.

Once these facts were pointed out to the Assistant District Attorney, the charges were dropped and Paul Macino got his son back. Ryan went into therapy to help him with the trauma of what had happened.

Poteet’s jewel was exposed for everyone to see. He retired, reeking like something from his jewel.

I was just glad I could help, but felt badly about what had happened all the way around. I admired Ryan for going to work for someone other than his father, he was a good kid, and Uncle Ray was dead.

A week later, I found out that three years before, Paul had lost his wife to cancer. Like myself, he too, was a single father.

Chapter 8

Nashville, TN-December 11
th
Present Day

Nashville can be confusing for tourists and transplants. The roads on the west side of the Cumberland River aren’t set in a square grid like most cities. The streets on the west side of Nashville are laid out more like a lopsided wagon wheel. The roads emanating from downtown moved out like spokes, with the rim of the wheel being Old Hickory Blvd. about 10 miles away, give or take a few miles, depending on how lopsided the wheel was at that point. The same street may also have up to four different names, again depending on how far out you go. For instance, Broadway, Nashville’s main downtown drag changes to West End, then Harding Road, then Highway 100. That’s how you get to my place in Hickman County about 40 miles out. The closer you are to downtown, the closer the spokes are. At one point in downtown Nashville, West End and 21
st
Avenue are only two blocks apart. By the time you get to Old Hickory Blvd., 21
st
has changed its name to Hillsboro Road, and is five miles away from West End, which has now called Harding Road. It’s simple as long as you know. If you don’t then you’re lost.

I was in my blue Ford F150 Super Crew 4x4 Lariat going south on 4
th
Avenue, towards Lafayette Street, where I would turn left to go out to Gun World. By the time I get there, Lafayette will have changed to Murfreesboro Road.

Every year I find this day one of retrospective confrontations, so while driving toward one of the spokes, I thought of the Major. Maybe it was the orientalness of the restaurant.

Alexandria, Louisiana-1962

The Major was a highly decorated fighter pilot of two wars, World War II and the Korean War, a real live fire-breathing war hero.

I didn’t know about that until one spring day when I was 12, not too long after he retired from the Air Force as a Lt. Colonel. But he was still the Major.

He ordered me to go out and clean up the storage shed next to our carport. Inside was his old service foot locker. Being naturally nosey, I started looking through it and found underneath a neatly folded uniform, a locked metal box about the size of a cigar box. I shook it and heard what sounded like money. Of course I pried it open with a screwdriver, one of the many tools hanging neatly on the wall.

When I raised the top expecting to find a horde of coins, much to my amazement and general state of pre-teen bewilderment, I found medals instead. There were medals with rotting ribbons attached, medals with no ribbons attached, medals from other countries, and a  lone Zippo lighter. It was engraved. On one side it read:

Tuck

Squadron Leader

The Fighting 395
th

On the other side:

We can beat any man

From any land

At any game

That he can name

For any amount

That he can count

My feline curiosity won over any judgment I may have had at that age. The Major happened to be at home. I rushed in and laid the box in front of him like I had every right to break into his private locked up memories and demand to know what they were about.

The fact he didn’t cuff me meant it must’ve really taken him by surprise, and from his ashen face, the contents of the box took him somewhere other than the kitchen table.

As he looked into the box, I felt time flutter. He reached in and took out the lighter. He turned it around a few times, clicking it opened
 and closed with his thumb, put it in his shirt pocket, gently closed the box and quietly said, “Take this back and put it where you found it.”

I wasn’t so dense I didn’t know how much I had just screwed up and how lucky I was to get off without some sort of corporal punishment. It was a pivotal moment. I had learned a valuable lesson on privacy and respect without a hand being laid on me or the offense of a vituperative tirade.

I later decided it would be the way I would raise my children.

And unbeknownst to me at the time, I caught my first glimpse of the demons that tormented the Major to the abuse of alcohol that would unleash the anger and violence for which I would become the main recipient.

I took the box back where I’d burgled it with a reverence that wasn’t there before, then sneaked next door to Steve Fleck’s house and called Uncle Roy, the Major’s oldest brother.

“Unca Roy, I jus founa buncha medals from te war in de Maja’s ol foo locker an he jus tol me to pu em ba. I mean, like I bro’ nto de box and he din’t even git mad… really. Jus tol me t pu em back and I did, bu’ I’m scared to ax him abou’ ‘em. Ya shoulda seen da loo on ‘is face.”

I had a habit of talking so fast most people couldn’t understand a word I said the first time around. I think it was due to the fact that I had a Filipino mama-san from birth to 3, then a Japanese mama-san from 3 to 6. I spoke very little English until I was about six-and-a-half.

My Uncle Roy was a wonderful guy. He just laughed and said, “Slow down, boy, and run that by me again.”

On more that one occasion I remember my grandfather, Paw Paw Tucker, asking the Major after I had been telling him something, ‘Don, what language is that boy speakin’ now?’

The Major’s exasperated reply with a sigh was, ‘That’s English, Mr. Dee’ (that’s what the Major and my uncles called him). At which point Paw Paw would look sternly over his glasses and down his nose with a dubious glare.

After I was through turning gibberish into a somewhat comprehensible language, Uncle Roy said, “Look, buddy, your old man had a tough time in the war. He flew a lot of missions and lost a lot of friends. He’s got more medals than any of us, more medals than anyone I know, but he’s never been able to talk about it. He won’t even talk to me. One time I made him watch an old movie with me, one of those where they show some real footage of aerial dogfights. When I looked over at Don, he was white as a sheet and was gripping the chair so hard his knuckles were white and we couldn’t pry him loose. Hell, we had to call your stepmom, and after giving me a good cussin’, she called the flight surgeon out at the base. By the time he got to my house, your dad was talking a little, but the flight surgeon had to talk to him alone before he’d let Don drive home. I gotta tell you, it was quite an ordeal. We never brought it up to him, and he never said a word about it.”

“So that’s why he’ll never watch those kinda movies with me,” I said in monkey jabber.

Uncle Roy must have understood some of what I said, because his answer, after a deciphering delay, was, “That’s right. Now when you get a little older and can drive yourself over here, you come see me. I’ll get your other uncles together and between us, we will tell you what we know. We all have stories about your Dad that we’ve heard from friends of his in the service. There still may be a few letters around explaining some of those medals.”

That’s just what I did.

Chapter 9

Nashville, TN, December 11
th
, Present Day

While navigating through the Nashville traffic on my way to Gun World, I thought about my grandmother, Gran Gran. Ten years ago, just before her death, she gave me some memorabilia she’d found in her attic. Among them was a newspaper clipping from the Alexandria Daily Towntalk. The Headlines read “Five Tucker Brothers Fighting On Four Different Fronts,” with service pictures of them all. The Major was the only officer, only a Lieutenant at the time.  

They were a bunch of tough bastards, because they all came back, alive.

When I arrived at Gun World there were no parking places in the front. There are only eight spaces, but they were full. I drove down a side street next to the building and found more cars parked on both sides. Some were Metro squad cars. This was very suspicious. Gun World closes at six. It’s not uncommon for us to shoot after hours, but there shouldn’t be this many cop cars here.

I parked about halfway between the Three Little Pigs and Gun World, opened the console, retrieved the extra magazine I kept there and slipped it in the left front pocket of my jacket.

I had to knock on the door to be let in as it was about 6:05. A young short-haired patrolman opened the door.

“Mr. Tucker, my name is Walker, Richard Walker,” he said, with a nervous grin as he put out his hand.

“Patrolman Walker,” I said shaking his hand.

Seemed like a lot of hand shaking going on today. I felt like a politician. That’s not good.

Over his shoulder, I could see eight or ten men milling around the gun racks that filled the room between the front door and back counter. Most of them wore uniforms. They were all looking at me.

Leaning against the counter talking to Spark was Brad Spain. I’m always surprised when I see him. He’s a very dapper guy.

Spain was wearing a gray light-weight wool pinstripe. The stripes were very thin lavender and pink with a cream randomly thrown in. Under the suit coat was a lavender shirt with a cream tie, with just a sliver of his tie-dyed suspenders showing. Black tasseled Damoni loafers grounded out his attire.

His black hair was shiny and parted down the middle, with braids lying across both shoulders, resting on his chest.

He grew them years ago while working undercover and upon returning to regular duty got to keep them because of religious practices. He’s the Water Pourer for the Cherokee Sweat Lodge.

In a way, Spain looks like the actor Andy Garcia with long braids, the broken hawk-like Indian nose and his teeth being the only dissimilarity. Spain’s teeth were a little bucky.

As I walked between gun racks containing a variety of long guns, the men moved to form an aisle.

“Am I busted?” I asked Spain, while more hand shaking was going on.

“Spark,” I said, acknowledging him on the other side of the counter from Spain.  

“Tucker,” he nodded back.

“I guess somehow the word got out about you being here to shoot it out with me,” Spain droned.

“Yeah, right,” I said.

Then pointing my thumb over my shoulder at all the cops, I added, “You little Injun, I know you’ve been practicing for this or they wouldn’t be here. I also know, you know I haven’t been shooting much, what with the remodeling of my place downtown. It’s not going to help you. Now I’ll show you no mercy.”

“The truth is, Tucker, since your Wyatt Earp act, you’re quite the talk of the station house. These youngsters just want to get a look at you.” Spain said, with an air of innocence you could shovel.

I looked over my shoulder, around the room, and found all eyes were on us. No one was even pretending to look at the displayed guns.

“Spark, give me a box of Winchester .45 hardball,” I said, as I took out my Colt and released the magazine into my left hand, ejected the hollow point round in the chamber, setting it on the rubber mat on the counter.

“That’s it,” I heard someone whisper behind me.

I thumbed out all the hollow point rounds in the magazine, took out the spare magazine and thumbed those out, and started reloading the hardball rounds from the box Spark had laid in front of me. Both mags were eight-shot extended mags (original 1911 mags hold seven),and with one in the chamber gives me nine. Not as many as some of the new 9mm’s that held 15 and 1, but I found it adequate.

There was a lot of murmuring going on behind me. Spark was looking like an amused catfish.

“That gun of yours is famous now,” he said.

“It’s just a gun,” I said.

“Yeah, right,” Spark said. “If you did as much work on a customer’s .45 as you did on yours, it would be a two thousand dollar gun.”

“Well, I don’t know, Spark,” I said, doing a fair imitation of him.

“Not to mention you iced two bad motherfuckers with it,” Spark added.

I felt my mouth move while holstering the gun on my right hip.

“Did you just smile?” Spain asked.

“What’s that mean?” Spark asked, looking worried.

“It means shut the fuck up, Spark,” Spain said, about as fast as I’ve ever heard him speak.

“Let’s get this show on the road, I’m hungry,” I said, walking past Spain towards the door of the lounging area that contained a couple of couches along with some old and badly done taxidermy. You had to pass through this room to get to the basement where the range was housed.

“Hey Tucker!” Spark yelled from behind me. “The bullets are on the house!”

I wasn’t far enough away to warrant the volume in his voice.

I turned to speak to him and ran into a wall of uniforms that had fallen in behind Spain and me. They parted allowing me to see Spark,

“It’s okay, Spark. Just put them on my bill. I’ll pick up the rest on the way out. Now, come on down here, I understand you’re supposed to do the counting.”   

“Yeah. I’ll be there in a minute, everything’s all set up,” he said, sounding relieved.

I bet, I thought. Something shady was definitely going on.

There were so many cops standing around, I could smell leather and after shave. When they moved, the creaking leather reminded me of riding horses. I could smell guns too, but I
was
in Gun World. I felt sure, even if I weren’t, I would’ve smelled the same thing. Guns and leather, like kids playing cowboys.

I turned back to the lounge door and found Spain holding it open for me. He looked apologetic. As I stepped into the lounge, I saw why.

The lounge couches were full of cops. Some in uniform, some not, but I could tell they were all cops. Every non-uniform was wearing a jacket or a sport coat, concealing their weapons. As I walked in, I had to turn right to get to the basement door, and before I had made the turn, the couched cops were on their feet shuffling around. Some seemed a little nervous. Others were timidly curious. I recognized a few of the plainclothes. One was Larry Rizzo, a compact, thirty-ish yellow-haired, crewcutted detective with homicide.

“Tucker, how’s it going?” he asked without extending his hand. He knew I wouldn’t let anyone hold my right hand with this many armed strangers around.

“Rizzo,” I nodded. “You know all these yahoos?”

He looked over my shoulder and eyeballed everyone that came in the room behind me.

“Yeah, everyone but him,” he said, gesturing over his left shoulder with his head.

Sitting in an old battered armchair under a revolting stuffed elk head, reading a newspaper, was a man about my age. He looked up at the room in general without showing much interest in what was going on, then went back to his paper. Even from a sitting position, I could tell this short-cropped, salt and pepper haired man was very fit. He too, was wearing a leather jacket, almost as nice as mine.

I don’t think even the dimmest of hit men would try anything here. He must be a customer of Spark’s, here to pick something up and Spark hasn’t had time with all the hullabaloo.

When I got to the doors that led to the basement containing the range, I would have to turn left, and that would put Mr. Mysterious behind me. That didn’t worry me, because he’d have to shoot through a covey of cops.

“Tucker, we’ll use the two lanes in the center,” Spain said from behind me, as we walked down the narrow stairway.

I pictured him on his toes with a knife between his teeth. Ambush was imminent.

There were signs on the walls of the stairway reminding everyone to wear eye and ear protection. I knew both would already be laid out for Spain and me.

There were ten shooting lanes. At the bottom of the stairs, was lane three, which meant the remaining seven were to the right. That’s the way I turned, putting the firing lanes to my left.

It was dungeon-like, but adequately lit, with more light down the 75-foot shooting distance to the inclined backdrop that absorbed and deflected the lead. Each lane had its own partitioned alcove, separating the view of the person shooting to either side. This was a safety precaution. It helped keep hot ejected brass from the person in the next lane, from going down your shirt or getting stuck in your collar. That was another reason I liked to wear a hat while shooting.

I worked on my own guns and could change the direction in which the brass was ejected with just a few minutes’ work on the ejector. It’s the other person’s gun that worries me. I’ve been burned more than once.

I went to lane six and stepped in to look down at the targets that had been set up.

Normally we would shoot at the regular bad guy silhouette target, but I could see this was not the case today.

I heard men jockeying for position. The targets were paper plate sized, black bulls eye targets. The type when the bullet struck, a very bright florescent chartreuse spot would appear, leaving no doubt as to your aim.

The targets had been attached to pieces of cardboard, supported on a hanging metal frame that could be moved backward or forward by pushing a button on the right-hand wall of the shooting bay. Attached to the same wall was an empty gallon coffee can, with the word BRASS stenciled across a strip of masking tape.

I felt Spain step into my alcove, which was just big enough for us to stand side by side without touching.

“I thought you’d like these targets, what with your age and all, your eyes must be going,” Spain said matter-of-factly.

I knew Spain had had trouble seeing at distances, so I said, “You must be worried to be pulling this sophomoric psych crap.”

My eyesight problems were the common trombone playing kind, that was easily remedied with reading glasses from Walgreen’s.

The vying for positions was coming to a standstill. It was time to get on with it.

“Okay, Spain,” I said. “What’s the surprise rule I don’t know about?”

“What
do
you mean, paleface?” he said angelically.

“Let’s just get it over with so you can buy me dinner.”

Spain sighs, then brightens up, like he just got a great idea. I saw a cartoon light bulb over his head.

He said, “I know, let’s make it interesting. What you say we put five in each gun and a spare mag, then do a speed load with the extra mag when we run out of the first. The first one through puts his gun back in his holster, then yells red (“red!” is what you yell to your partner when out of ammunition in a firefight). Any shots outside the black, we take a half second off the time.”

I looked behind us where there were two uniforms standing with stop watches. Not only was Spain out to ambush me, he was planning a massacre, and if he said that many words in a row again, I was going to fall asleep. I wondered if that was part of his strategy.

“Just got that idea this moment, did you?” I asked dryly, hoping for a short response.

“What do you mean? You don’t think I planned all this, do you? How dare you, for as long as you have known me, how could you think I’d do something that despicable? I can’t…”

“Spain,” I interrupted. “I don’t believe there were any Cherokees at the Little Big Horn.”

It took him a moment to get it, then he looked around. Yes, I was definitely outnumbered. He gave me his handsome bucktooth grin and said, “Yeah, well I can see you’re intimidated.”

“What’re you shooting?” I asked.

He pulled aside his suit coat, allowing me to view a Colt .45 almost identical to mine. It had definitely been Tucker-ized. I had accurasized so many 1911’s, there was no way to put a face to the gun.

“Whose is that?” I asked, knowing it wasn’t Spain’s.

“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” he said, straight faced.

“I suppose you’ve been shooting it for a while, getting ready for this.”

“You’re getting ready to find
that
out,” he said, with a leer.

Spain is always psyching, but for the first time since the challenge earlier this afternoon, I saw myself buying dinner.

“Let’s do it,” I said.

Spain walked into his shooting station. I walked forward into mine and started loading my mags with the correct number of cartridges. I put five in the extra mag, pulled the mag out of the gun and ejected four into my hand, leaving four in the mag, one in the chamber. I always carry it chambered, cocked and locked; that way, all that had to be done after drawing the weapon, was to thumb down the safety and pull the trigger. The Colt has two safeties, one being a grip safety at the back of the grip that if wasn’t depressed, the gun wouldn’t fire. I remember the Major referring to it as, ‘the lemon-squeezer’.