Chapter 6: I Didn’t See Anything, Mister
Anyhow, much to my chagrin, the decision was made that Eddie the Snake and Joey Bob would go into the house with the three duffle bags of Stainy’s product and pursue a business transaction with Errol Flynn, AKA Cuss. I was unsure about where Mullet Man and Overall-guy would be stationed during this dealing, but the Kentucky group seemed to have arrived at some sort of plan that involved all of them going inside. That is where Chapter 5 ended and where we will pick up right now. So, without further ado, off we go.
After Errol Flynn’s proclamation of “no guns in the house,” Joey Bob made a big act of pulling his revolver from the back of his pants and handing it to me. I don’t think anyone was impressed with his performance, but his show put all visible weapons on the premises in my hands or on my person. Then, he slung two of the three duffle bags from the truck onto his shoulders, one over each, and handed the third to Eddie the Snake. Errol Flynn offered for them to proceed to the house with a cavalier wave of his hand, they accepted, and all five men went like ducks in a row across the yard, onto the porch, and in the house through a patched-up screen door. The spring on the door whined as the door opened fully, and it pulled the door shut with a smack as the last man let it free. As they disappeared into the house, I checked to make sure that Joey Bob’s revolver was loaded, stuck it in the belt on the back of my pants, and waited by the truck.
I was too nervous to stand by the vehicles long. I had this feeling something wasn’t right. I’ve never been easily spooked, but I was sensing ghosts, and they were puffed up and ready to say, “Boo!” A couple seconds after the screen door slammed shut, I started creeping over to the edge of the porch on the right side of the house, keeping one eye on the back corner of the house and the lean-to in case we had hiders or spies. I knelt by the porch and looked through a four-paned window into a living room area. I could see what looked like a kid, a girl kid, staring away from me like maybe she was watching TV. I could only see her white-blonde hair, the right side of her chubby face, and her bare pink shoulder. I could hear music of a familiar TV commercial, but I couldn’t see the TV in the line of view I had. I tip-toed down the slope ten feet and stopped before I came to another four-paned window with a paint-peeling wooden frame. Because of the slope, the window was chest high on me, and I could only barely see in because the bottom panes were so dirty. I could scarcely make out the outline of Joey Bob who was near the window sitting at a rectangular dining table with his back to me though he could of seen me if he turned his head. Errol Flynn was at the table on the side opposite of Joey Bob. I could tell him by the color of the pants he was wearing, but I wasn’t in his line-of-sight because of the angle and the table being in the way. Eddie the Snake was the third at the table. I could fuzzily see his back and legs through the grime on the glass. He was just to the right of Errol Flynn. Mullet Man and Overall-guy were not in my line of vision where I stood, and I didn’t want them to see me peeking in, so I ducked down under the window, crouched up under the house, and crept to the back corner to look around. The entire back of the house was windowless, but it had a battered wooden door in the center, more than likely in a straight line through the house with the front door. There was no porch going to the door, and the floor was about level with my chin. I didn’t have to worry about anybody sneaking in that way, and somebody coming out the door would have an ankle-breaking leap from the floor to the ground if he was moving fast. This made me feel a little bit more secure about letting my guys go inside unarmed. Well, let me tell you, it shouldn’t have.
As I was easing back up the slope to the front of the house, staying up under the house to stay hidden, I heard, “pop, pop, pop, pop” from inside like somebody started shooting target practice. People went to bawling and yelling briefly, and I heard footsteps above me, moving quickly but in one spot like someone was running in a circle. A chair falls over, and the thump of something heavy and solid hits the floor right above my head. I crouch-crawl up to the window and peek in from a low angle. Mullet Man is standing on the far side of the table, swinging an automatic handgun in his right hand in a circle around the room. He appears to be looking for something to shoot at, but he doesn’t know what it is that he wants to find. He sees me, my reflection, or a shadow on the window and shoots two or three rounds at it, providing me a better view by shattering and knocking out some of the filthy panes of glass. I duck out of his sight up under the house, check the safety on the gun that has reflexively appeared in my right hand, and immediately start thinking about what my entrance plan will be.
Nothing happens for a few seconds. I’m a listening to my own heavy breathing and a little bit of scratching on the floor above me when I realize nobody is shooting. Only one gun ever fired. Was it three shots or four shots before the window shots? There’s no sound from inside, no footsteps, no voices, no nothing. Errol Flynn and Over-all guy are not speaking to Mullet Man. He could’ve shot all four of them or just Eddie and Joey Bob. I also come to realize that I have anyone in the house trapped. They cannot get out either door without me getting them in my sights and dead-to-rights from the relative safety of the underside of the house, and they can stay in there forever if I don’t make a move. But, I’ve got partners in there who might be dying, and I can’t wait out a long Mexican stand-off if my buddies up there are a bleeding. So, I crouch under the house straight below the window, take a deep breath, turn and fall onto my back on the ground so that I’ve got my gun pointed at the window, ready to fire if I can see anybody. If not, I’ll roll quickly to my feet and slip up to the front door. Well, I’ll be damned if Mullet Man isn’t standing there framed in the window, a scratching his neck behind his ear with the barrel of the automatic like he’s thinking about what he might want for breakfast. I fire off three shots in less than a second, and I know, without seeing, that I put a triangle in his chest right about where his heart is. He falls backwards, clutching at and a knocking something down with him in a clatter and a commotion. I hear his body hit the floor. He’s dead. I know it already, the first person I ever shot and killed.
I’m still a lying on my back with my gun pointed up toward the window when I hear the back door open with a loud rip of wood scratching and screeching across linoleum. Overall-guy’s legs drop down below the house frame where I can see them, and, from a sitting position, he vaults out of the door and down into the grass where he lands in a rather nimble forward roll for a guy in overalls, and he comes up running towards whatever’s out behind the lean-to. I can’t see that he’s got a gun or other weapon, but he’s running like he has a reason to, so I quickly pop a round at him while still lying on my side, which is not a good position from which to shoot with any accuracy. The shot was as accurate as I needed it to be though, and the bullet hits him in the left shoulder in the scapula area. The force of the bullet striking the flat bone flings him forward, and he lands face and chest first in the soft, green grass, but before he is even flat down on the ground, he’s struggling to get back up. Dude was a scrapper and wanted to live very badly, it seemed. Sadly, his desire didn’t do him any good because I’ve rolled up onto my knee by this time, and from this steady shooter’s position, I find the red oval on his backwards baseball cap, aim carefully, and fire. Over-all guy drops like a sack of doorknobs straight to the ground. His body didn’t even bother to continue running like they sometimes do, so I know he is dead and there’s no need for me to check him right away because I’ve got to find out what has happened to my buddies. That is the second person in my life that I shot and killed, five seconds after the first one.
I take a chance that nobody would expect me to come to the back door to peek in, and I stride quickly down there, point my gun in, and look around. On my tippy-toes, I can look in and see through the center of the whole house. Mullet Man has fallen against a metal kitchen cabinet with his head crooked at a weird angle. I cannot see his gun, but the dude is fish-eyed and obviously dead. I can now see Errol Flynn’s head. He’s lying on the white and gold linoleum floor with his face in a pool of blood and brain matter. He’s dead too, but I didn’t kill him. I won’t take nor be given any credit for that one.
Well, that gives me time to pause and think because I know that Over-all man is dead too, and that was all of the Kentucky contingent. I put my gun into its holster, reach into one of my coat pockets, find some latex gloves I know are there, and start putting them on as I walk toward the dead body. Sure enough, I’d put a bullet hole right between the “r” and “m” in the “Farmall” patch on his hat. I didn’t roll him over to see if he was armed because I didn’t want to know if I had killed an unarmed man or not. I still don’t know, I don’t ever wanna know, and I don’t care. I’m sure some state investigator could tell you, but if you ever try to tell me, I’m liable to kill you.
Anyway, with my gloves on and the gun back out of my holster and in my hand, I go to the front door and slip in without opening the tattered screen all the way or letting it slam shut. The girl child is still lying on the couch. When I get close enough to see, I see a strap of rubber-tube around her upper left arm and a syringe hanging from the inside elbow joint just below. She’s shot up with heroine or something and is out unconscious. Three more syringes already filled and ready to use are sitting on a leather pouch on the coffee table by the couch. The pouch is clearly marked “Insulin.” I walk by without studying her too close because she is clearly harmless and helpless. In the next room, denoted by a switch from hardwood to linoleum flooring, and around the corner from the back door I’d looked in a moment ago, Joey Bob has pulled himself into a sitting position against the wall. He’s got one bullet wound in his right shoulder that is bleeding through his shirt and jacket, but it looks survivable though painful, probably busted up his shoulder joint. The other bullet hole is in his neck. It’s actually two holes because it went through-and-through. Poor Joey Bob, the bullet must have nicked a carotid artery because the little holes spurt with every heartbeat. He’s gonna die, and he’s looking at me like I can help him, but I can’t. He can still help me though.
“Joey Bob,” I manage to say, trying to keep my voice from breaking into sobs and fighting back the tears from coming to my eyes, “I’m afraid you’re gonna die. I can’t help you. You know I can’t call the cops or ambulance or nothing. I can’t get you no help, and I can’t stop the bleedin’ in your neck. It’s bad, too bad. No doubt, you’re done for, but I need you to do somethin’ for me. I need you take my gun and hold it like you were shootin’ it. I killed Mullet Man over there, and the other feller…well, he’s dead out in the yard, and they’re both dead from my gun, so I need you to take it and hold it so that it’ll look like you’re the one who shot’em, and nobody’ll ever look for another shooter.”
Yeah, I know. It seems cold and calculating of me to be thinking such a way. I guess that is why I have been so good at what I do. I can separate emotions and business, and I know what I can fix or solve and what I can’t. Joey Bob was solid as always, and he weakly took my gun from my hand and put it in his. Oh, boy! If I’m honest, writing this is killing me, and I’m ready to be to the end of this part of the telling--but I’ve got one worse thing yet. Think about this, readers, I’m nineteen years old. I’ve just killed two people, one of them maybe without a weapon on him to defend himself. I’ve never even shot anybody before. An acquaintance with whom I only recently broke bread at his grandma’s table is lying dead with the front of his face missing. He was shot in the back of the head from close behind. Errol Flynn, I don’t care about. He got into the drug business on his own decisions. I don’t lose any sleep over him. Joey Bob! Man! We were never best friends. That’s a fact. He ran with his crowd, and I ran with mine, but we had been playing ball as teammates since Little League ball in the summer of 1972, and I am watching his life seep out of him one little spurt at a time, his eyes pleading with me like a puppy. He’s trying to talk, but he gurgles instead of saying words. Do something! Hold me! Help me! I can’t do it gawddamn it. I can’t do it.
Oh, hell! So…I am not interested in saving any of the drugs or marijuana. Mullet Man must’ve turned the table up when he fell backwards from my shooting him, and pills are over the floor from open zipper sandwich bags. The marijuana duffle bags are covered in blood and brain spray from Eddie the Snake’s and Errol Flynn’s heads. I’m not touching them, the bags nor the deceased. Up against the wall beneath the upturned table is an Indiana State Sycamores duffle bag. I unzip it and look in. It’s packed full of money. Ones, fives, tens, and twenties wrapped in regular rubber bands is all I see, but I figure that I can take this and recoup some of the losses. Just so you know, Stainy told me there was $167,000 in that bag, and that is exactly the amount he gave me when I saw him after I got out of prison. There was probably more in the bag, but I always think he didn’t have to give me nothing, so I was happy to get what he gave me.
I grab the bag, and I’m on my way out. I cannot say if people in other houses heard the shots. I hadn’t seen another house, but I didn’t wanna waste any more time. I’m about three steps through the living room when the girl child calls out.
“I didn’t see anything, mister.”
Which means she had.
I walked over to the couch and stood over her. She was probably about sixteen years old. She was wearing a yellow Hulkamania tank top and no bra. One breast is half flopped out the right side of her shirt as she was turned into the back of the couch away from me with her face buried in a crack between cushions. She has on red satiny pants that made her pale legs seem even whiter than they were. When I grab her by the arm and turn her toward me so that I could see her face, I immediately notice her swollen belly. She is maybe six months pregnant. I didn’t know that then, but I’ve reflected a lot on that pregnant girl child, and experience tells me that six months is pretty close to how far she was. She has on a lot of mascara and eyeliner, and it’s running down her face with her tears, making her look like Gene Simmons of KISS. You know, the demon.
“You’re shooting up, and you’re pregnant,” I said more as a statement than a question and with the very harshest of judgement, “What the hell are you thinking?”
She moaned something, sobbed, put her head back deep into the divide of the couch cushions. I pick up the leather syringe satchel with the three full syringes in it from the coffee table, grab her by the hair, and turn her face so she was looking right at the case.
“What’s this?”
“We were all gonna trip together after the deal,” she said in a husky voice so low that I had to put my ear down by her face to hear it. Her breath smelled sour, sort of vinegary, from the heroin use I’ve been told.
“You’re pregnant.”
“Don’t you think I know that,” she mumbled.
I took one of the syringes from the case and grabbed her foot.
“What are you doin’?” she gasped.
“Making sure you didn’t see anything.”
I popped the plastic cap off the needle with my right hand thumb and holding her foot tightly in my left hand, I stuck the needle between her big toe and the next toe until it was all the way in and squeezed the dingy liquid into her. I immediately felt her leg gain weight in my hands as she went limp and melted into the couch. I took the other two syringes and injected what was in them into her body between different toes on her other foot. I can’t imagine that the three doses I injected so shortly after the first one she’d given herself didn’t kill her immediately, but I wasn’t gonna stick around long enough to find out. If she ever regained consciousness, I never heard about it. In fact, I never heard anything about anything that when on at this place, and that was fine with me. You, readers, are the first people to ever know what actually happened that day, and now you do. I hope you’re happy.
Anyway, I put the three syringes that I’d emptied into the pregnant girl’s body back into the leather case, closed it up, and took it with me as I half-trotted out the door with the duffle bag full of money over my left shoulder. This time, I did let the whiny, rusty spring pull the screen door back into its frame with a slap. I was done with this place, and the loud smack the screen door made was a fitting finale. I was quickly standing at the door of the brown S10 where I threw the duffle bag and leather syringe case into the front seat through the window. I sat in the truck, started it, and never even looked back to the house as I spun the truck around in the wet grass of the yard. I took off back down that long muddy driveway like I was being shot at, but I wasn’t. Thinking about that day has made me feel awfully bad. I’m through writing now. I don’t know when I’ll do it again. I never figured I’d feel this way reliving I’d done. I warned you I was a bad man. Whatcha gonna do?
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