Mama Tried (Crime Fiction Inspired By Outlaw Country Music Book 1)

by J. L. Abramo

  BRANDED MAN

  Mel Odom

  I avoided Flatt’s Hardware Store because I couldn’t stand Mrs. Flatt’s grimace of distaste when she saw me coming through the door. Like I was some mess she’d stepped in. Dressed prim and proper and finer than most of the women in town, Mrs. Flatt had a way of looking down her nose that was as sharp as a hay hook and cut just as deep. In her sixties, she still wore her hair in a beehive and dyed it so black that the color sometimes soaked into her scalp. Gray hair wasn’t gonna sneak up on her.

  I didn’t look at her as the bell over the door jangled behind me. I just headed to the brackets and hangers Clint said he needed for the kitchen cabinet remodel we were working on. He’d also texted me a picture of the doorknobs Mrs. Robinson had decided on.

  In all the years I’d come there, not much had changed. Aisles filled with tools, plumbing and electrical parts, transformers and circuit breakers, pipes, screws, bolts, nails and three models of toilets stood in rank and file in the neat rows. Along the top on the west wall, boxes held Currier & Ives glassware that would fill the display windows out front the day after Thanksgiving and be back in their boxes the day after Christmas. A couple of red plastic sleds stood beside a barrel that contained leaf rakes and snow shovels. The smell of oil and varnish and pine lingered in the air.

  The silence in the hardware store when it was just Mrs. Flatt and me was so quiet you could hear grass grow. I felt bad when my boot heels clomped against the varnished hardwood floor.

  She never talked to me while I was picking up things for Clint Harjo and Associates Custom Remodeling. Clint was my boss; I was the associates. It was a small outfit, but it kept groceries on the table and I was learning a trade while keeping a roof over Momma’s head.

  Clint knew I didn’t like going into the hardware store, and he knew why. Everybody in Three Jacks, Oklahoma, knew my story. Or thought they did, anyway.

  They didn’t know the real story. I kept that one hid at the time for good reason that turned out to be no reason later. Life has a lot of twists and turns you don’t see coming.

  My last name carried a lot of baggage even before I’d added to it. My daddy was a hard drinking, hard whoring man who spent Friday nights in the bars picking up loose women and Saturday nights in the pits fighting chickens. Even at thirteen and near man-sized, I couldn’t go to the bars or to the whores, but I could handle his roosters for him during the cockfights.

  Scars from gaffs and Mexican slasher knives from handling those roosters still cover my hands. It always hurt like hell at the time, but Daddy used to tell people I could take steel better than any gamecock he’d ever raised. I had to be fast and do it right, because Daddy whooped me when he thought I’d mishandled a rooster and got it killed, losing him his money.

  Daddy was gone before my fourteenth birthday. He got into a drunken argument with another chicken fighter named Pete Haskell and ended up shooting Haskell stone dead. Daddy lit out that night and nobody’s seen or heard from him since.

  That had left me and Momma at home, and times got hard. Momma talked about me going to college and making something of myself, but we both knew that wasn’t gonna happen. We had no money, and my grades weren’t good enough for scholarships. I was gonna find a job, probably in Latham’s junkyard where I’d been working part-time since Daddy left.

  Mr. Latham called it “part-time” but I was clocking over fifty hours a week on less than minimum wage and getting “bargain prices” on parts I needed to keep my Chevy Nova running. Those “bargain prices” were only there because Mr. Latham wanted to make sure I could get to work, and he got a lot of my wages back on account of that car being a POS.

  Still, me and Momma was making it. Till I went to jail on a meth bust for six years a month before I graduated high school. Mr. Latham repossessed my car from Momma, saying as how I hadn’t paid for all the parts. Which wasn’t true, but I wasn’t surprised he did it either. Everybody in Three Jacks was having a hard time making ends meet.

  Mr. and Mrs. Flatt blamed me for their grandson getting into trouble. Hell, me and Ralph Flatt had never been friends. I’d always been too “other side of the tracks” for him. Ralph got a fire engine red Camaro for his sixteenth birthday. He’d had it made in the shade. He hadn’t had to get involved with Tinker Davis’s meth operation, but he had because he was all set to make money. After growing up so easy, Ralph figured adulthood should come easy too.

  When the trial happened and their grandson went away to prison, the Flatts had needed someone to blame. Since everybody knew Tinker was into drugs even before he’d gotten kicked out of high school five years before, they didn’t think he could have sucked Ralph into the meth operation. They blamed me because I was the only other high school guy arrested that night.

  Ralph got a better lawyer than I did. He spent a year and a day in prison, then got out. Two years later, bikers at a truck stop killed him during a drug buy. Even though I’d been in prison at the time, still having to fight just to survive, the Flatts blamed me for Ralph dying too. According to them, I’d put him on that path.

  I did my whole bit, stacked the whole six-year sentence minute by minute, so I wouldn’t have to report to a parole officer. I also learned how to do laundry and weld, the last coming in handy sometimes working for Clint.

  There was a lot of animosity in the Flatts and the rest of the town. There always is in folks who don’t have much except bragging rights over the others around them. Since I’d been to prison, pretty much everybody had that over me. I only came back for Momma.

  Clint had apologized for sending me to the hardware store that morning, but Mrs. Robinson was being difficult and he didn’t want to leave her alone because she might start thinking of hiring someone else. Clint and I needed that job. We needed every job.

  The bell over the door jangled and I glanced up out of habit. Six years in prison will make anyone skittish.

  I didn’t recognize the three hardcases who walked in through the door, but I knew them for what they were at a glance.

  Trouble, and plenty of it.

  Standing at least six feet four, the biggest man had dirty blond hair down to his shoulders, and a red beard down to his chest that squirrels could have made a winter home in. He wore an OU sweatshirt that stretched tight across his shoulders and even tighter across his belly. He looked around, nervous, and I knew he was looking to see who else was in the store.

  The smallest man snuffled through his nose and had watery, bloodshot eyes, telling anyone who knew about such things that he was a meth junkie. He was mostly bald on top and the fringe of dark hair cut short at the sides of his head hung past his shoulders in back. His jeans and belt were too big for him. So were the boots. He wore a sleeveless denim jacket over a ribbed wifebeater that had gone gray from age. Full-sleeve tattoos ran from his wrists to his biceps, all of them biker-oriented. He glanced at me for a minute, then looked away, but his hand dropped to the folding knife sheathed on his belt.

  “Good morning,” Mrs. Flatt said sweetly as the third man walked up to the counter. “May I help you with something?”

  “Why, yes, ma’am. My name is Darrel Clement.” The third man grinned broadly, showing wide, white teeth. He oozed charm like a used car salesman. Clean and neat, wearing pressed jeans, sand-colored Nocona ostrich-skin boots, a starched snap-front Western shirt and his dark hair gelled back from his face, the man looked like he had money. His sports coat fit right and looked good, but it didn’t completely conceal the hard lines of the pistol tucked in the back of his waistband. “I’m doing some repairs on a house I just bought, just moved into Hiram, you see. My wife is insisting on some upgrades. Bless her heart, I just couldn’t turn her down. Ain’t that right, boys?” He glanced over his shoulder.

  The two men with Clement nodded like bobbleheads.

  Hiram was a town over, twenty-three highway miles away.

  “A good wife wants to make a house into a home,” Mrs. Flatt said.

  Cleme
nt slapped the counter with his hand and smiled even bigger. “Why, yes, ma’am, mine is a good one, and she surely does. She’s bound and determined, and she told me she wanted the best I could get. Since I moved in, I heard that Flatt’s Hardware Store is the place you want to come if you want to get good materials at a fair price.”

  Unless you wanted to drive seventy miles to reach a Home Depot or Lowe’s Home Improvement store, that was true. The Flatts didn’t mind making a profit.

  “We handle quality merchandise,” Mrs. Flatt said.

  “That’s what I want to hear,” Clement said like he’d just hit the lottery. He pointed at the As for Me and my House, We will serve the Lord sign hanging in the front window. “And I purely do like doing business with God-fearing Christians.”

  Mrs. Flatt smiled. “There’s nothing like the Good News.”

  “No, ma’am, there is not. God bless.”

  My gut was crawling, and I figured I knew what was coming. I didn’t want to be any part of it. I stuffed what I’d found into a basket and walked to the front counter.

  Mrs. Flatt didn’t speak to me. She just reached into the basket, took out the items and rang them up. I paid her in cash even though Clint had told me to use his account. I used the money in my front pocket, moved from my wallet while I’d been in the back and totaled up the cost, because you didn’t open your wallet with three guys like those at the counter standing around. All of them, even Clement, watched me count out the cash.

  I took my three dollars and thirteen cents in change and sacked up my own purchases. Mrs. Flatt never provided any kind of service.

  “Well, sir,” Clement said, looking into my box, “that is a lot of cabinet knobs.”

  I nodded, polite and quick, making like I was shy to talk, not that I was avoiding talking with him. I’d met a lot of guys like Clement in prison. Guys who were narcissistic and took on slights without warning.

  “Make sure you put them on the outside of the cabinet doors,” Clement said, and he laughed at his own joke. “Makes it easy to get to them.” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder at the big man. “I’m still working with Virgil here on that. Ain’t that right, Ronnie?”

  The little man nodded and smiled, showing ugly, brown-stained teeth. “That’s right.”

  Virgil frowned and folded his arms across his chest. Evidently he didn’t like being the butt of the joke, but he didn’t protest.

  I just nodded, took my box, and left.

  Behind me, Clement said, “I’ve got a big list of things I need, ma’am. Do you have anyone here who can help Virgil and Ronnie get them?”

  “My husband’s out back. I’ll go and get him.”

  “I don’t mean to put you to any trouble. Do you have anyone else?”

  “Not this morning. Let me fetch my mister and I’ll be right back. Between your men and him, I’m sure we’ll be able to take care of you.”

  Outside, some of the crawling sensation left my gut and my chest didn’t feel so tight, but I knew things inside the store were gonna go bad. If they’d just been there for the contents of the register, Clement would have already had that pistol out in Mrs. Flatt’s face.

  I set the box in the back of the Dodge pickup I was restoring and worked on taking a deep breath. What happened inside that store wasn’t my problem. I told myself that again and again. I told myself that no good deed went unpunished. That’s what the business with the meth dealers taught me.

  I even managed to open the door and pull myself behind the steering wheel. But I glanced over at the only other car in the small parking lot under the red, white and blue triangular flags flapping from lines tied between the building and the lampposts.

  The dark blue Chrysler 300 looked like it was fresh off the showroom floor. A fine rime of red dust coated the sides, and it had Texas tags on the front. Oklahoma is one of the few states that only have rear tags. I figured that Chrysler had a story to tell.

  If Mrs. Flatt just looked out the window and spotted the car, she’d realize those men hadn’t come there with any intention of driving off with materials. She’d know she was in trouble.

  But she was too interested in making money.

  That was one thing the Flatts had always done: make money. Herschel Flatt had grown up a farmer’s son, and he still held onto the fears caused by the Depression his daddy and granddaddy had gone through. He’d kept the farm, rented the land out, and become an agriculture teacher, finding a way to turn that farmer’s knowledge into another paycheck. And in his evenings he’d opened the hardware shop, running it with his son until he’d died of a heart attack a few years after Ralph had been born.

  The story went that Ralph’s mom had never been any good and had run off the first chance she got. The story also went that Mrs. Flatt had never cared for her and had chased her off.

  I took a breath and watched as Clement and his two thugs followed Mrs. Flatt to the rear of the store. The Flatts were judgmental people, and maybe prone to disparaging others, but they didn’t deserve what was about to happen to them either. Clement and his men hadn’t bothered hiding their faces because they didn’t intend leaving anyone behind who could testify.

  I knew I was lucky to get out the first time. I even started the engine and shifted into reverse. Then I thought about the kind of men I’d been locked up with, the stories I’d been told by murderers and rapists who had told me tales to scare me, and sometimes because all that evil couldn’t stay bottled up in a man. It had to come out.

  But when men like them were through paying penance, if ever, they went back to the violence that was the only thing they knew.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and told myself to leave. Except I knew Clement and his boys were there for the money the Flatts were supposed to have hidden in the hardware shop. They lived in the second floor of the hardware store. They owned a house, had raised their son and grandson in it, but they rented it out after Ralph got himself killed and Mr. Flatt added that second floor. It was one more way of making money.

  And all that money they made was supposed to be in a safe in that store.

  In the past, people had broken into the hardware store and tried to find it. No one ever did. Personally, I thought it was stupid to trust that kind of cash in a safe instead of in a bank, but Mr. Flatt didn’t trust banks all that much. There were also rumors that the Flatts took money under the table and off the books, and that they had to hide it so the IRS wouldn’t know about it.

  I didn’t know and wouldn’t have guessed, but I was certain both of them were about to get dead this morning.

  I glanced out at the street that ran in front of the store, hoping someone else would come by. No one did.

  Still, I wasn’t going in there. No good deed ever went unpunished. I’d learned that first hand seven years ago when Bounce had called me in the middle of the night. Bounce had been my best friend all through high school. His daddy was almost as bad as mine, so Bounce and me commiserated together, got drunk on cheap beer the first time together, and even lost our virginity to the same girl. I didn’t know that till later.

  At the time, she was supposed to be my girl, but she didn’t feel that way, I guess. Bounce slipped right in, and I didn’t know till she left me for some guy she met on the internet. He told me she hadn’t been faithful to me because he’d slept with her too before she’d dumped me. He just hadn’t wanted to say anything while we were dating.

  Even that hadn’t come between us. Like he’d said, she’d been the one to cheat on me, not him. It made sense in a way. That’s the kind of friends you make when you’re a kid and don’t think you’ll ever have any better.

  When Bounce was little, his daddy had nicknamed him Bounce on account of he couldn’t sit still. He was always dreaming up stuff, thinking about things, questioning everybody about anything. The teachers said he was ADHD, hyper, but I’d always known him as my friend, the guy who was always there when I needed him to help me bandage my hands after a night at the cockfights. And when Daddy
worked me over on a losing night, which was often.

  That was why, the night Bounce was with Ralph and Tinker and the other guys at the meth lab had called, I’d gone to get him. Bounce had gotten the heebie-jeebies that night. He said somebody had been stealing from Tinker and Tinker was pissed, and there was a big deal coming up with some out of town guys from Tulsa. Nobody except Tinker knew them. Bounce had been working on the fringes of the group, never taking drugs himself, not like Ralph did, just picking up some pocket money now and again.

  That night, Bounce had ridden with Tinker, but he’d wanted to get out of there. He’d called me, and I’d gone to get him. I’d had to park the Nova and walk a mile through the brush to get to the meet site, which was out in the boonies. I’d been surprised Bounce had gotten a cell signal.

  I got there and let Bounce know I was around, and we slipped off from the others and started back for my car. Only, as it turned out, Tinker wasn’t meeting with dealers from Tulsa. He’d tripped over a group of undercover cops. They arrested Tinker and Ralph and the others.

  Bounce and I ran for the car, but I wrenched my ankle on a tree root and went down. I told Bounce to go on, not thinking he’d do it, but he ran without hesitation. I still almost made it, and I would have escaped if Bounce hadn’t driven off as soon as he climbed in the car. I watched the Nova’s red taillights vanish in the darkness just as one of those cops tackled me.

  During the trial, I didn’t squeal on Bounce. Neither did Tinker or Ralph or the others. None of them told anybody I was innocent, either. On the advice of their attorneys, they said nothing. My attorney told me he couldn’t do much for me, what with me there and no good reason to give for it.

  While I was in prison, Bounce had come to see me when he could, and he’d put some money on the books for me when he had it. He was always hurting for money too because the job he got didn’t pay enough. We both agreed that if he tried to tell anyone what actually happened, they’d just lock him up too.