The Other Side of Bad (The Tucker Novels)

by R. O. Barton

  His head jerked around, and I could see the lights come on behind his eyes. He looked quickly down at the speedometer and let off a little on the accelerator.

  “Yeah,” he whispered, more to himself than me.

  We stopped at a storage place, where I rented a unit, and we unloaded the 50 kilos. We did it just like we knew what we were doing, hiding in plain sight. Robby said he would take care of the rest. We pulled into my apartment complex at five in the afternoon.

  So, when Margie opened the door after we honked, I looked like I was returning from a hunting trip. She was wearing a black halter top, white short shorts and was barefoot. My mouth mistook her for an ice cream cone and salivated accordingly. She jumped on me, wrapped her legs around me, and showered me with kisses.

  “I love you . . . I love you . . . I love you,” she repeated over and over. The worry she had been experiencing since my departure, was running down her exquisite cheeks.

  Robby was standing beside the Bronco smiling, I heard the door slam, and as he drove off, he yelled, “Miranda was right, you’re a lucky bastard!”

  After throwing my duffels on the floor and unloading my shotgun and putting it away, she stood in the bedroom with her hands on her hips. Her dancer’s body looking totally feline, her face covered with the realization that I had not unloaded my weapons until that moment. If I had come home from hunting, they would have been empty before entering the house. I would have to watch that next time.

  “Tuck,” she said huskily to me. Her voice dripped sex, like a pheromone from an insect.

  But, I knew there was something besides making love on her mind.

  “What is it, Baby?” I said, turning around from the closet with the brown grocery bag full of money.

  “I don’t know if I could take another one of those trips.”

  I walked over to the bed and poured $10,000 onto it. It was mostly in 20’s with a few 100’s and 50’s mixed in. It was a lot of money, and it looked like more than it was.

  She stood at the side of the bed and looked down at it for a full minute. She slowly turned her blue eyes to me, moving her shoulder length hair out of her face so she was framed in a thick auburn mane with gold highlights. She said, “What are we going to do with it?”

  “Well, I’ve been thinking about that all the way home. I was thinking that I would quit my job.”

  “Quit your job?” she said apprehensively.

  With the storage unit in my mind, I said, “Yeah, you see, I have more, just about that much again, and it’s all ours. And, in a few months I’ll go down to Texas again, and, well, it looks like I don’t need that job anymore, and I thought I would go back to school.”

  As she absorbed that information, her face transformed from nervous fear to the joy of possibilities.

  “Me too? Can I quit my job and go back to school, too?” she said, barely whispering as if afraid, if the words were too loud, they would shatter and fall, before making the journey to my ears.

  Now, Margie made a lot more money than I did. She was an insurance underwriter, and had her own office with the company she worked for. She had seniority and benefits. But, the look on her face was like a little girl asking for the best birthday present imaginable.

  “You bet,” I said, the tears forming as I was able to grant her wish. “We’ll both quit and go back to school. But, before we use the money to do that, what you say, after I take a shower . . .”

  As she pulled me down on top of her and the money, she said, “The shower can wait.”

  I eventually took that shower, then we nourished ourselves, with food. After making love through the night, lying in the comfort of her arms, a place of total honesty, I told her everything. Leaving nothing out and with no embellishments. When I was through, she proceeded to beat the stuffing out of me. She had a pair of strong dancer’s legs, and she could spin around on her round bottom and crash down on me with her heels. She learned long ago that was the only effective way of exerting her smaller stature over me.

  Chapter 34

  Nashville-Carr’s Mansion-5:00 PM

  “What are you smiling about?” LeCompte said. “From what Gray told me, there wasn’t much to smile about on that trip you made into Mexico.”

  Smiled. I wasn’t aware I’d smiled.

  I wasn’t smiling about the trip.

  I looked at Carr and a sadness swept over me. I said, “I was thinking about when I got back.”

  Carr tore his eyes from mine and looked down at his cigar and knowingly nodded.

  Evidently my smile had interrupted Carr’s reading of Robby’s account. I was aware of his voice droning behind my thoughts, but hadn’t been listening. I decided to shorten this interview.

  I said, “Just what did Robby say about that first trip?”

  “Frank taped the interview with Gray,” Carr said, as he was again sorting through the files and folders on his desk.

  “I’ll bet he didn’t know about that,” I said.

  “Of course not,” LeCompte said.

  Carr held up a stack with at least a hundred pages in it and said, “I instructed Frank to have all interviews taped, and then I had them transcribed. This is Robby Gray’s interview. If even half of what he says happened is accurate, it’s fascinating reading.”

  “Just the condensed version, if you don’t mind,” I said, wondering who had done the transcribing.

  Carr’s eyes shifted over to Frank LeCompte’s and with almost an imperceptible nod, turned the telling over to him.

  “For one, he said if it hadn’t been for you, they would have lost the money and the connection. Said when the shooting started, you shot three Mexicans before he could get a shot off. And shot each one of them twice.”

  “Seemed like the thing to do at the time. I knew he was going to shoot somebody.”

  LeCompte smiled at me through a blue cloud of smoke and said, “He said the same thing about you.”

  “What?” This didn’t sound like the same gunfight to me.

  “Yeah, he said when he heard you say, ‘Margie, I love you,’ he knew you were going to draw. Said it sounded like you were saying goodbye to her.”

  Now, this was a surprise.

  “I didn’t know I said it aloud.”

  “Was that what you were doing?” Carr asked. “Saying goodbye to her?”

  I took a drink and said, “More or less.”

  LeCompte said, “He said you didn’t shoot to kill, you just wounded them, but in the right places.”

  “I had never killed a man. I’ve always been lucky concerning violence and I was naive enough to think I was good enough to just wound someone, to incapacitate them. And, I think maybe I just had difficulty with killing a man.”

  “You don’t seem to have that problem anymore,” Carr said, unsmiling, from the other side of his desk.

  “Like I said. I was naïve.” Then added, “And things change.”

  After a moment of silence, and to no one in particular, I said, “I’ve done a lot of that since then.”

  LeCompte said, “How’d you feel after killing those two hit men?”

  His question wasn’t out of idle curiosity. This was a man who wanted to compare notes.

  After the shooting I’d have ample opportunity to examine my feelings, or lack of them, concerning the death of those men.

  I’ve felt more grief over killing a deer. A beautiful, majestic, gentle animal, truly one of God’s innocent creatures. One moment they would be eating acorns off the ground, and the next moment they’d be dead. The deer never did anything to me or to anyone else, and they sure didn’t have a gun, but, I still killed them. I tried to honor them, by killing them quick and as painless as possible, and by not wasting any part of them. I still have the hides of every deer I’ve killed. I don’t deer hunt anymore.

  I said, “I can live with it.”

  LeCompte and I looked at each other.

  I said, “There are human animals running around that like to kill human beings,
not have to, like to. There needs to be someone between the animals and the human beings.”

  “Which are you, Tucker?” LeCompte asked. “One of the animals or one of the human beings?”

  Again, LeCompte and I looked at each other.

  “Would you like another drink, Tucker?” Carr asked, taking LeCompte’s eyes from mine.

  “I better not. I have some business to attend to later.” I said, thinking about my impending chat with Eddie Tuma.

  “I’ve got some Haake Beck,” he said.

  “That would be fine,” I said, wondering if he always had it on hand or if he had done that much research on me.

  Instead of pushing an intercom button or using some hi-tech method of communicating with Rachael, he got up and walked over to the bar. After fixing himself another drink, he opened what looked like a lower cabinet and pulled a Haake Beck out of a small built-in refrigerator.

  After opening it, he reached back into the refrigerator and brought out a tall heavy pilsner glass. He poured it without leaning the glass over, making the perfect head and letting off the ideal amount of carbonation to best experience the taste.

  I felt LeCompte observing me as I watched Carr prepare my Beck’s exactly as I like it.

  After Carr brought the glass over to me, I looked up at him and said affably, “If you would have told me where it was, I would have gotten it myself.”

  His smile was only in his eyes as he looked down and said, “Well, now you know.”

  Yeah, I also knew where I was. In the middle of something I didn’t understand.

  He walked back around to his chair, set his fresh drink down on the desk and stood behind the chair, resting his hands on the back of it.

  I said, “Mr. Carr, just what is it you would like me to do?”

  He looked a little hurt that I had used ‘Mr., just a little.

  “You have obviously gone to a great deal of trouble and expense to check into my past, a past that I am neither proud of, nor wish to remember. A past that wouldn’t enhance my current profession if it were to become public knowledge.

  George Carr held up both his hands as if to ward off impending blows, and said, “Tucker, let me assure you, you have my word, this information goes no further than this room and the people in it. Believe me when I say that the record we have compiled about you is, to me, an asset for what I would like you to do.”

  Before I could say what was on my mind, he read it, and said, “Don’t worry, it has nothing to do with dealing drugs or anything against the law.”

  I still didn’t get it. I didn’t know if I was just dense or he was being obtuse.

  “From what we have learned about you through a compilation of written and verbal interviews, you have a reputation of being tough, honest, and honorable. You are well liked and respected. You also seem to be lucky. Put all this together, and you are a person I would want on my side.”

  “On your side to do what?” I said, trying again.

  He was on a roll, it was as if he’d rehearsed his words, and wasn’t going to be quelled at this point.

  “Who taught you about honor? We were told by more than one person that ‘if Tucker says he is going to do something, it’s as good as done.’ Even as an outlaw, you had a good reputation, and you were a young man. Where did you learn about honesty and honor? In the business you were in, those traits aren’t common occurrences.”

  He was genuinely interested. I didn’t think he was going to like my answer.

  “Louis L’Amour,” I said.

  I was right, his eyes darkened and his frown grew into a silent snarl. This was a man that was in the habit of being taken seriously at all times.

  With as much sincerity I could muster, I said, “I’m serious. I started reading Louis L’Amour books when I was about ten or eleven and read everything he wrote. I didn’t stop until he died.”

  As my words soaked in, his face relaxed, once again revealing the man I liked.

  “You didn’t learn it from your father?”

  The ‘it’ he was referring to was really more than one thing. After a moment’s thought, I said, “I didn’t have a very good relationship with my father. We didn’t get along. But, from him I did learn one of the things you spoke of. He taught me that if I said I was going to do something, I better do it.”

  I’m sure my tone said this wasn’t one of the lessons I enjoyed. But, learn it I did. It was a good thing to learn, even if the learning of it was painful.

  His smile was slow in coming, and it was mixed with knowing compassion. He said, “It may have been an epidemic of our generation, not getting along with our fathers.”

  I nodded to him and said, “I learned a lot from my uncles, about what it meant to be a ‘Tucker.’ They all liked me. But, for the most part, I learned what kind of man I would like to be by reading L’Amour’s books.”

  “Like what?” he said.

  I said, knowing that L’Amour may never have said the exact words, “Like ‘there are times you have to be tough, but you never have to be mean,’ and taught you the difference through his characters. The difference between a bad man and a mean man, a bad man wasn’t necessarily mean, but a mean man was always bad.”

  Carr and LeCompte exchanged looks.

  “Well, you asked,” I said, as I recalled the basic outline of the relationship with my father, after hours of therapy.

  It started when my parents got divorced. I was maybe five or six at the time. My father didn’t think I was old enough to understand what was going on, and he turned all his attention to my older brother, Ben. He explained to him how it wasn’t his fault, Ben‘s, that is, that they were getting divorced. He told Ben how much he loved him, how he would always love him and would always be there for him, he pretty much ignored me and my little sister, Kathi, I guess he thought we were too young to know what was going on.

  Because my alcoholic mother and equally alcoholic and physically abusive stepfather were such unfit parents ,my maternal grandmother was going to testify against her own daughter. Four years after the divorce and without a court battle, my father regained custody of my brother and me. It was years later that I found out my father wanted only my brother, but Ben said he wouldn’t go without me. I also learned that my brother’s sometimes malice towards me was his way of dealing with his own set of problems. The time we spent with my mother and stepfather we were so neglected that my brother literally raised us. He would make sure we ate and stayed clean. I can still see him at the kitchen counter making us peanut butter sandwiches or heating up Campbells tomato soup. He protected us the as well as he could. It was a big responsibility for such a young boy. I literally did everything he said…like he was my dad. It must have been very hard for him to let go of that responsibility after my father gained custody of us. It caused quite a bit of conflict between my father and me as well as my brother and me. But, we did the best we could. I trusted my brother more than my father. Ben was the only constant in my life. My father would give me chores to do and then my brother would want me to do something else. I usually did what Ben wanted…it gave a whole new meaning to “the middle child.”

  It wasn’t until I was in my mid-forties that I found that the reason my father didn’t want Kathi was because she wasn’t his daughter. Kathi was conceived while my father was out of the country, on TDY. My half-sister, to this day, doesn’t know. When my brother told me and found out I didn’t know, he was amazed. I remember being angry and thinking, ‘how would I know, no one ever tells me anything’.

  Needless to say, I wasn’t my father’s favorite son. He used to introduce me to his friends at the American Legion bar as his number two son, his number one shitass.

  My uncles once told me they’d told my father I was the best son he had, and the reason he didn’t get along with me was because I was just like him.

  Being so much like my father was an enigma, at least for him. My father had a hard time dealing with himself, I don’t think he liked himself very much.
He was well thought of and respected by his peers, by everyone…by me. He had a reputation of never taking any shit from anyone. I was the same way.

  My father didn’t want to take a close look at himself. He was a womanizer and an adulterer. He drank too much and was a mean drunk, mostly to me. I’m sure a lot of it was due to the war. But, in those days, Post Traumatic Stress had not yet been coined.

  Since I was so much like him and he didn’t like himself, well, you see how that goes. He didn’t like me because I was so much like him and just couldn’t see it. And I liked him because of the same reason. He was so much like me, I recognized that and it felt right. The more I loved him, the more he rejected my love.

  I was told (by a professional) that was one of the reasons I used to do so many dangerous things. Death was nothing compared to the rejection of my father’s love. I loved him, I “saw” him. I knew him. He and I were the same. But, if we were the same, why didn’t he love me, why didn’t he see me? Louis L’Amour saw me.

  Can you say, ‘baggage’?

  Carr thankfully interrupted my reverie, “I’ve never read any Louis L’Amour, but I’ve seen a couple of movies made from his books,” Carr said.

  LeCompte was grinning at me when he said, “I’ve read a lot of his books. I can see it.” He looked at Carr and said, “Yeah, I can see it. Tucker’s just an old cowboy, a real rootin’ tootin,’ damsel saving, gunfighter.” His statement held no sarcasm.

  Now, that appealed to me. I felt my eyes crinkle and held up my boot to show it off.

  “My damsel’s beyond saving,” Carr said, erasing LeCompte’s grin and bringing us back to why I was there.

  Chapter 35

  “If you would tell me what you would like me to do. I will tell you if I will do it.”