The Other Side of Bad (The Tucker Novels)

by R. O. Barton

  I believed him. They didn’t expect to have to go back tonight. And they probably figured we would go back through the regular border check, since we wouldn’t be carrying any marijuana back, so they thought.

  I hadn’t the time nor the energy to get angry over this new-found knowledge.

  “Let’s go!” I said, and turned to leave.

  “Mister Tucker,” Armando said.

  I turned back around and said, “Yes?”

  “I would like to shake your hand.”

  I put out my hand, and we shook. Then I turned and put out my hand to his quiet brother, Tom’as.

  After all the respectful goodbyes were over, we left.

  As we pulled away, I looked back and saw Chollo and the other Mexican farmer pulling a body out of the building. There was no sign of the Mirandas.

  Phil drove and I sat shotgun. The old term for sitting next to the front seat window was fast taking on new meaning, or should I say, the old meaning. Robby sat behind Phil and Teemo behind me, a little to the center so he could lean over the back of the front seat and give directions.

  We went only a few hundred yards when we came upon the first orange string of corks. They were very bright and easy to see.

  “Wha’s that een the road?” Teemo said.

  “That’s our way home,” Phil said with a delighted chuckle.

  It gave me a feeling of well-being, to know we really weren’t lost. It was only a hundred yards or so when we came on the next string off to the right, our signpost to turn right and off the road. This would take us into the washout, I could see it all in my mind. We didn’t really need Teemo.

  “You see it?” I said to Phil.

  “Got it,” he said, slowing to turn.

  “No, no, keeps going, no turn,” Teemo said quickly. “Eez mucho slow tha way. We have no time.”

  Phil kept slowing, looking over to me.

  “Do as he says,” I said. “Think about it, if we get busted by the Mexican police, so does he.”

  In less than a minute, we had turned right onto a larger road and passed the strings of corks that we had dropped when we turned off the main road onto the desert. We had already made up ten minutes.

  Teemo pointed to the corks and laughed.

  “You some smart gringos,” he said, pounding me on the back. He sounded friendly and relieved.

  We were pitched forward as Phil slammed on the brakes and said, “I’ve got to get out, I’m going to puke.”

  The Bronco was barely stopped when he opened the door, holding on to the steering wheel with his right hand, he leaned over the road and threw up.

  He may have just realized he killed someone tonight. As I thought about this, I wondered why I didn’t feel sick. I had never shot anyone before. Maybe because I had trained to do just that for most of my life. All those hours of practicing, I was practicing to shoot someone. Now that I had done it, it didn’t feel much different than shooting the pictured targets of bad guys pointing picture guns at me, so far.

  When we came to the river crossing, the pile of corks I had dropped were hung on a bush, floating.

  We stopped at the edge of the water and watched the current. There hadn’t been any when we came across earlier.

  “What’a ya think, Teemo?” I said.

  “I don know,” he said, leaning over my shoulder, his head stretched out towards the windshield.

  There was that fluctuating accent again.

  “Robby, look behind you and see if you can find that spot light,” I said, trying to make it sound like a suggestion.

  I heard him rummaging, then he handed it over the seat. I plugged the 20 foot cord into the cigarette lighter hole and pushed the button to see if it worked.

  “God damn,” Phil said, as we were almost blinded by the light that filled the cab. It was a very, very, bright light.

  “Teemo,” I said, “come with me.”

  I got out and went around to the front of the Bronco and stood on the front bumper, getting the light as high as I could by raising it over my head. Teemo stood next to me, and I shined it out towards Texas. We could see the island, it wasn’t completely submerged yet and I could see the string of corks still laying down in the middle, on dry ground.

  “Si . . . Si!” Teemo yelled. “We go, rápido, rápido!” Then he jumped down, and ran around waving for me to hurry. He was a funny little guy. It made what we had just been through even more bizarre.

  It was close. The water was dangerously close to drowning out the engine. We had to keep our forward motion so as not to allow water to go up the tail pipe.

  We all had suggestions for Phil as he forded the first crossing. Robby and I were yelling instructions at him, and he was cussing and telling us all to shut up, the entire time Teemo was yelling in Spanish. At one point, the almost air-tight trailer, full of what the river considered wood, started floating and wanted to jackknife into the rear bumper of the Bronco. It was a comical circus, and we were all laughing by the time we touched Texas. But, touch Texas we did, and Texas was in the United States.

  There was an all around sense of relief, even Teemo was laughing and pounding Robby and me. You wouldn’t know that less than an hour ago, Robby fully intended to blow Teemo’s brains all over an adobe wall.

  Surviving a gun battle and going from feeling betrayed, to the understanding of good business, does strange things to a human being.

  Now, the fact that all we had to worry about was getting three thousand, one hundred and ten pounds of high-grade grass back to Shreveport without getting busted or hijacked, seemed a small matter.

  After passing the gas station where I had seen the horse in the pickup, I looked at Teemo and said, “Where do you want us to drop you off?”

  “Eet no matter, where er’ jew wan, I jus make call an dey come for me.” Then after thinking for a second or two, he said, “Soamplace wit food and cerveza.”

  The perfect answer, it pleased everyone. It looked like Teemo was going to live, at least for tonight.

  While driving through Zapata, Robby had me reach under the driver’s seat and pull out a portable CB unit, and no sooner did he turn it on than we heard Allen’s voice.

  “Come in, Teddy Bear, Come in, Teddy Bear . . . over.” He sounded as if he had been saying that for a long time.

  “Teddy Bear here . . . Good Buddy . . . over,” Robby replied.

  There was a stunned silence, then, “Everything cool, Teddy Bear?”

  Robby looked at me. In the dim light of the cab I could see him grin. “Everything is cool, start back the way we came and I’ll contact you within the hour…over.”

  “Ten-four . . . over.”

  Why doesn’t he just say ‘I’m a cop’.

  Just north of Zapata, we passed an all night truck stop with a beer sign in the window.

  “Phil,” Robby said, tapping him on the shoulder, “turn around and go back to that truck stop.”

  A minute later, we pulled into the truck stop to let Teemo out. As he prepared to leave, he stared almost bashfully at Robby and said, “I jus do wha dey say to do, Rowbee. Dey say no going to keel jew, jus take dinero, dey say eet weel be eesy.” Then Teemo laughed and slapped his leg and pointed to me and said, “He naw so eesy, eh, Rowbee, no?”

  Robby and I locked eyes in the light of the truck stop. I wasn’t sure how he was going to take that, but he smiled and said, “No, you’re right Teemo, there’s nothing easy about Tucker. He just seems that way.”

  I looked at the sign in the window and said, “I don’t know about you guys, but I sure could use a cold one and maybe some Cheetos or something.”

  That turned out to be a popular idea. Robby, Teemo and I went in and bought some beer and a bag of snacks. We were back in the parking lot in a few minutes, the three of us standing by Phil, with his window rolled down.

  Teemo smiled at all three of us and said as hopefully as a child asking for a bicycle for Christmas, “Eez how jew say, no har feelingz?”

  Robby l
ooked at me, I looked at Phil, Phil looked at Robby, and we all started laughing. After all…how ya gonna act?

  Robby had contacted Allen on the CB, and it was easy to rendezvous with him. Three hours later, all four of us were in Freer, Texas eating breakfast in a little restaurant on Highway 59. The sun was just coming up, and I’d have to say it was one of the most beautiful sunrises I had ever seen.

  As usual, we were as far removed from any other patrons as we could get, and we had a window booth so we could see the Bronco and trailer.

  I didn’t feel like talking. I was tired, and I missed Margie. But, Phil and Robby had nothing holding them back. They filled Allen in on the night’s activities, and like most retelling of anything exciting, certain liberties were taken with the facts. By the time they got to the part about the extra load of bricks being made at the end, I had almost forgotten about it.

  It was easy to do, since I had just learned we had taken on about 20 of the ‘baddest motherfuckers in Mexico’ and killed them all, but Teemo and the ‘jefe’.

  Robby looked at me over a cup of caffeine and said, “What was all that gift shit about Tucker?”

  “Before I answer that,” I said, “when do we get paid? We gave all the money to Armando.”

  Allen grinned and said, “I’ve got yours. We took it out of the duffel when you were in the bathroom, back at the motel. It’s in a paper bag, all ten grand of it. When we leave, I’ll give it to you. I’ve got paper bags for all of us. You and Robby take the load in the Bronco. Phil and I will follow you in the Impala, just like on the way down. We’re home-free, man, home-free.”

  I looked at each of them and said, “Well, we’ve come out a little better than you think. I’ve got us an extra 50 kilos to split between us, it’s ours. It has nothing to do with the shipment we came to get.”

  It took a few seconds for that to sink in.

  I could see Phil trying to do the math.

  “That’s twenty-seven and a half pounds apiece.” I said. At 200 a pound, which should be easy to get, that’s . . .”

  “Fifty-five hundred fuckin’ dollars!” yelled Phil, the mathematician.

  Allen looked perplexed.

  “I’m not a drug dealer,” he said. “How am I going to get rid of it?”

  I could see Phil and Robby thinking the same thing.

  “What!” I said. “What did we come down here for. What’s in that trailer out there?”

  I couldn’t believe my ears.

  “We don’t sell it,” Robby said. “We just get paid to come and get it. Our boss takes care of the distribution. It works that way, we don’t know who sells it, and whoever sells it doesn’t know who goes down and gets it.”

  “Kind of like one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing?” I said.

  “Yeah, kind of,” Robby said.

  I thought back on how many times Marijuana Mick had asked me if I could get pounds. He said he had guys all over north Louisiana begging for pounds.

  “Okay,” I said, “I’ll get rid of it for you, at say . . . $125 a pound. It may take me a few weeks, but I’ll move it.”

  Phil was almost counting on his fingers.

  “That’s a little over three grand,” I said.

  Within five seconds, they were all grinning and nodding their heads at me.

  I had just moved up from dealing lids to dealing pounds.

  Robby and I took turns driving and sleeping. The CB was quiet. We decided not to use it unless there was danger of a bust or a hijacking. We were tired and strung as tight as a banjo. The silence was as welcome as a warm breeze in the middle of a hard winter.

  I was driving, still on Highway 59, going through Livingston, Texas, when Robby started to stir and rub the sleep from his eyes.

  “Where are we?” he asked sleepily.

  “About 60 miles north of Houston.”

  “I need some coffee,” he said, as he stretched as much as he could in the restrictions of the Bronco. As small as he was, it was a lot.

  “It’s time for a pit stop anyway,” I said, eyeing the gas gauge and squirming to relieve bladder pressure.

  After gassing up and getting some Hostess Cupcakes to go with our coffee, Robby pulled to the edge of the parking lot where we waited for Phil and Allen to finish their end of the now much practiced routine, and, like routines go, it was beginning to get boring.

  To compound the boredom I was tired. Maybe that was one reason I couldn’t stop thinking about Margie. I had fallen in love with the girl across the street, literally.

  There was a bond between us, a bond that had been forged out of surviving hardships together. There was the hardship of being in love at an age when all the adults in our life were telling us ‘we didn’t know what love was’. We had lost our first child, not to death, but to the authorities, who had taken her away from us. Our parents, thinking they knew what was best for us, made Margie go to an unwed mothers’ home, where the nuns made her take care of her newborn baby girl for a week, then took her away. They said it would be a good lesson for her. She was only 15 at the time. It broke her heart.

  After the first couple of months in the home, one of the nicer nuns took pity on Margie and allowed her to contact a friend of ours, who contacted me. Until then, I didn’t know where she was. I was sick with worry and anger. A strong anger. I still remember the joy when I found out where she was, my first love, my sweetheart, my baby. After getting the phone number, we found ways to talk to each other throughout her pregnancy and our daughters birth. When she called and told me the baby was gone, we cried, together. But when she told me what the nuns had done and how they treated her, like some sort of slut, well, that was when I started hating nuns, and I wasn’t even Catholic.

  A little over a year after she returned, my father informed me we were moving to Florida. He had talked to the coach at Florida and finagled a scholarship for me. We wouldn’t let them separate us again, so we got pregnant again, knowing there was no way they could not let us get married. We did get married, in August, the summer before our senior year in high school. We were very much in love, and that love had always kept us together through the hell our parents put us through. They were very creative in the hell they dealt under the guise of wisdom and love. We dreamed of getting married and then finding our daughter, Patricia Elaine, that’s what we’d named her, and surely they would give her back to us.

  When that dreamed was shattered, our love for each other and our second daughter, Shannon, kept us together. I lived with her family for a year, then we got our first apartment. So, when I say we had a bond, it was made of steel. We had never lied to each other. We had no secrets. I was having a hard time thinking this may be a time to hold something back. It may not be wise to tell her everything that had transpired.

  “George Darvoyce.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Our boss is George Darvoyce, the Commissioner of Public Safety. He’s the one who pays us.”

  It was like hearing the Pope was the devil, it just didn’t compute at first. I had seen him on TV, speaking out against drugs and how he was personally going to stamp it out. I had seen him setting fire to piles of marijuana. He would do it at an abandoned airport and always with a lot of publicity. Television crews from all the local stations would be there along with the major newspapers. He was quite the public figure.

  I knew Robby was serious. It all made sense now. Why he wasn’t worried about getting busted by the cops, and how he got the time off.

  “Does he know about me?” I asked. I had never met him.

  “Yeah, he knows about you. I had to clear it with him. He knows I’ve been grooming you. I told him what you could do with a pistol, and he’s heard about you from other cops.”

  I was confused. There was a protected warmth flowing through my body, and a cold drowning sensation in my head.

  While I was deciphering my emotions, he continued.

  “I’ve known him most of my life. He was a friend of my father’s, when
my father was coming up in the force. Darvoyce was an assistant D.A. at the time. Anyway, he caught me smoking a joint behind my father’s carport at a Bar-B-Q a few years ago. I thought my ass was grass,” we both laughed. “But, he told me not to worry about it, it would be our little secret. A few months later he took me to dinner, and we talked about the futility of the marijuana war and how it would probably be legalized soon. One thing led to another, and we started taking the pot we seized on busts and putting it back on the streets.”

  “You mean, those burnings on TV were faked?”

  He continued to drive for a minute before answering. “Not exactly. That was one of my first jobs for him. I would replace the bales and bricks, with hay and alfalfa, wrapped up to look like marijuana, leaving only about 10 percent of what we actually burned marijuana. I just made sure it was left on top.”

  “What happens to the rest of it?”

  “It goes back on the street. I don’t know who’s involved with that part of the operation, just like they don’t know about us. I assume there are more cops involved, but I don’t know. That’s where the money for this run came from. Darvoyce really put the pressure on to make more busts the past few months.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I’ve noticed more publicity about it lately.”

  He laughed, and said, “It’s really weird to see it on T V and knowing all the while, he’s just scrambling to raise more money so we can make another run.”

  The more I thought about it, the more sense it made, that is, me doing this. It was a tight operation and only a few people knew about me and they all had more to lose than me.

  “And, Tucker, thanks to you, from now on our runs will be a breeze. If you don’t think what happened down there will get around to the other dealers and possible hijackers, you’re crazy, and I’m going to make sure Darvoyce knows about it.”

  I didn’t remember thinking anything like that, but Robby often talked that way, transferring his thoughts to others.

  “I suppose so,” I nodded, looking out the window as east Texas rolled by, a little too fast. This conversation was lulling me into believing even the Texas cops were in on it, so just to make sure it didn’t do the same to Robby, I said, “Better watch your speed, wouldn’t want to get stopped this close to home.”