Author's note: This is the last part of Dewey Lynne's arrest story. If you want to hear a specific story from Dewey Lynne, let me know through the contact at the bottom of the page. Kellie took the picture above on one of our walks last week.
Chapter 8: Me and Trooper Qualls
So, anyway, I’m a sitting here in this restaurant, pushing the crust of a piece of pie around on my plate because I’ve already had too much to eat and I am not a fan of pie crust no matter how it’s made except for graham cracker crumbs heavy with butter—That’s the only way I like a crust, and this one wasn’t it. -- when, out of the corner of my eye, I see this black car come down the off-ramp at a speed way too fast to stop at the stop sign at the bottom. I am paying close attention now, and the car doesn’t even slow down at the stop sign but turns onto the main road sliding sideways across both lanes and causing a westbound pickup truck to swerve off the road into a stand of tall weeds. The car straightens back up and picks up speed before it suddenly darts into the truck stop parking lot, kicking gravel all over the place as it skates sideways and splashes into a big mudhole. When it comes out of the shower created by it bottoming out in the mud puddle, I recognize the car. It’s Enos Taney’s 1977 Smokey and the Bandit Trans Am with the gold eagles, T-top and everything except Burt and Sally. I suppose that Stainy is probably inside the car, given what I know about his driving style, so I slug down the last bit of coffee in the generic white café coffee cup, put the duffle strap over my shoulder, stand, and start walking outside. I reckon that’s about as good a way to catch us up to where we were in the last chapter as any. Don’t you?
I’ve told my readers before that I don’t wear a watch, never did. It just wasn’t something that appealed to me. Therefore, I could not have told when I arrived at Flo’s Diner—or was it Mel’s Diner? Or was it Alice’s Diner—It was some diner based either on a TV show or a song. Whichever? Anyhow, I could not tell you or anybody else what time it was when I called Stainy on the phone and told him that I needed picked up in a very bad way, but I knew that it should have taken him somewhere around three hours to get from Conway, AR to the truck stop off Exit 19 in Hayti, Missouri. Three hours at least. And one thing I know for damned sure, it wasn’t three hours since I called him. That son-of-a-bitch must have driven a hundred mile an hour all the way there. Hell, I’d only barely had time to eat an open-faced roast beef and a couple of pieces of pie, maybe three. I don’t imagine it matters any, but I sure was surprised to find him there so soon.
I walked straight out of the restaurant and got straight into the passenger door of Stainy’s car without saying “hi,” “bye,” or “kiss my foot” to a single soul, and, then, Stainy was giving her hell outta there just like he had arrived. I didn’t much care for his particular method of driving, so I distracted myself getting my long Navy coat out from around the money in the Indiana State Sycamores duffle bag. When the coat was out, I flashed the money inside the bag so that Stainy could see it.
“How much is it?”
“Don’t know. Haven’t been where I could count it. I figured it was yours to count anyway not mine.”
“What about the drugs?”
“Scattered all over the floor back at the house.”
“Pot?”
“Covered in blood?”
“Gawddamned, Bugler, what the hell happened and what have you done?”
I told him the story of what happened just as I have told all of you in the previous chapters. He probably got some details that you folks won’t get because I forgot them, but he also didn’t get some of the particulars about how I felt about things the way you are getting them now. He was a good listener, and he didn’t interrupt until he was sure that I was done.
“You are a stone cold mother pokin’ assassin, Bugler. I’ve never even heard of any shit like that.”
Then, he started asking me about details, and that’s probably the main reason that I remember what I do to this day. He was particularly fascinated about the injecting of heroin into the pregnant girl-child and the way the blood pumped from the holes in Joey Bob’s neck. Yep, I’m pretty sure now why I do recall those moments with such clarity. I probably repeated every gross specific about that entire incident five times apiece in the car to Stainy as we literally flew down the Interstate 55. That is why I can still see each gory detail in my dreams, I reckon.
Well, we crossed the Arkansas state line, and we’re coming up on this overpass where I can plainly see a car sitting on the west side of the ramp pointed at us but in a position to hit the merge ramp in the same direction we’re going--south toward Memphis. This here car’s got the telltale light rack on the top with two blue bubble gum machine spinners. I think that surely Stainy sees what I’m a seeing, but he’s not slowing down any discernible amount. I bend over the center console and look at the speedometer. Now, I’m gonna surprise you a bit here, but it is the gawd’s honest truth. I looked it up on the Internet. You’d think a hot rod like that souped-up death trap would have a speedometer that went to 140, 160, or even 200, wouldn’t you? But, nope, the 1977 Trans Am Firebird speedometer only registers 100 mph. That’s it. But that’s where Stainy has the needle sitting and a holding though its trembling like an oak leaf in the wind.
“He won’t chase us. Heh, heh, heh!” Stainy laughs with his irritating snicker, “Too much trouble, heh, heh, heh!”
Well, Stainy is wrong, and the blue lights start spinning, and the cop car whirls expertly in the grass, smoke flies from the tires when it comes back onto the pavement, and the car heads toward the top of the embankment to go over the top and come after us. We lose sight of it as we go under the overpass at a hundred or however fast we’re really going, and it takes the trooper car ten miles to catch up with us, but, when Stainy finally realizes that the cop is gaining, he lets up on the gas pedal, slows even below the 55 mile per hour speed limit, eventually, pulls onto the off ramp to U. S. Highway 61 and stops on the concrete shoulder. The Arkansas State trooper pulls up behind us at an angle with the back end of his car in the road and just sits there like he is expecting us to make a move. Of course, cool cats that we are, we sit in the car and talk.
“Bugler, I hate to tell you this, but there’s four or five baggies of primo bud laying in the back seat behind you. I don’t know the weight but it’s quite a bit.”
I’ve got better sense than to do a lot of moving around when a cop is in the car behind you watching your every move, probably with his service pistol out and in his hand, so I don’t even turn to look back into the back seat. I can take Stainy’s word about the pot if that is what he wants to say.
“I need you to say it’s yours, Bugler. You don’t have a record, and they’ll let you off easy. I’ve got other issues with the law that—let’s just say—aren’t resolved. That little bit don’t amount to much. It’ll be short time, really short time, maybe no time. Heh, heh, heh. Just say it’s yours.”
“What about the money?”
“Yeah, that too. Heh, heh, heh. And whatever I say, whatever they come at you with, you just go along with. Okay?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll make you a deal. Heh, heh, heh. However much money is in that bag, that amount is yours whenever I see you again. But you keep my name out of this. Can you do that, Bugler? Pretend you don’t know my name?”
I don’t recall understanding whether that last part was a question or a statement, but, yeah, I could, and I did. In the arrest, interrogation, and the court trial, his name was never mentioned by anyone, least of all by me, and he has always appreciated me for that. Says it every time I see him. I might have been a stupid kid then, but I knew where the money came from that kept my bread buttered, and though the screws got laid to me this time, I learned a lot from that day, and I really don’t blame any of it on Stainy. He kept his part of the deal, and I honestly don’t think that he knew what was going to happen. I don’t know how he could have, and if I ever find out that he did know, he’s as dead as M.O. Stanley. Moe Stanley? Give me a minute, and I’ll get there, but first let me tell you briefly what happened in the next few minutes before I ever saw that man’s face.
The state trooper, a corporal Qualls, came to the driver’s door of the Trans Am with his gun drawn, and Stainy surrendered immediately, putting his hands outside a rolled down window. I also surrendered by sticking my empty hands up through the T-top opening. Corporal Qualls came around to my side, gently pulled me out of the car by the forearm, did not cuff me, but walked me to his car and put me in the backseat. Then, he went back to the car, apparently allowed Stainy to step out of the car under his own power, and cuffed him but let him stand by the trunk while he searched the Trans Am. I could see them talking the whole time. I don’t know what either was saying, but Stainy was steadily jacking his jaws. Corporal Qualls confiscated the money bag and the clear bags of pot and put both on the hood of his trooper car. Then, he uncuffed Stainy, who was still leaning against the trunk of the Trans Am, came back to the trooper car, and opened the door where I sat.
“Mr. Taney says he picked you up hitchhiking on the Interstate.”
“Yes, sir.”
“He says he’s never seen you before.”
“No, sir, I have never seen that man till he picked me up.”
“He says the drugs and money are yours.”
“Yes, sir, I was showing it to him, hoping I might interest him in making a deal with me.”
“Did he act like he would?”
“Would what, sir?”
“Make a deal?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I just started talking about it with him when you pulled us over.”
He slammed shut the back door between me and him, opened the front door, picked up his ticket book out of the front seat, leaned down onto the hood, and started writing. When he was done, he marched over to Stainy, ripped a ticket out of his book, and handed it to him. Stainy then got into the black and gold Trans Am and took off with only the shortest bark and smallest puff of smoke from the tires. I wouldn’t see Stainy or hear from him again for the better part of three and a half years. I don’t recollect ever seeing the Trans Am again either, but I do recall the feeling that I got when I saw the back of that car vanish out of sight over the crest of the overpass. It was a feeling of inevitable doom and dread.
You see, Stainy disappears scotch free like the nameless feller in High Plans Drifter, but me and Trooper Qualls stay sitting there with just the two of us for a while until a bunch of other cars pulled up—well, I was sitting, and he was standing outside chain-smoking cigarettes. Are state troopers allowed to smoke anymore? I don’t think they are. Anyway, two cop cars pull parallel in front of the car I’m sitting in, and another one that I never saw pulled up behind us. I couldn’t see it, but I knew it was there. All the cops mill around the front of Quall’s car a looking in the money bag and inspecting the dope. One of them lifts up a bag and tosses it in his hand like he thinks it oughta weigh more than what it does. They don’t seem too pleased about something like they’d been a deer hunting and all they’d killed was a ratty gray squirrel. I’m a watching them trying to figure out what the hell’s going on and why we’re not headed to the local lock up when somebody knocks on the window near my head kinda startling me because I wasn’t expecting it, and I turn to look at the face of Miles Oliver Stanley, a name that would come to haunt the next few years of my life. He nods his head, “yes” to somebody, and it’s all over for me.
You see, Miles Oliver Stanley AKA Moe Stanley was a DEA agent working undercover outta the Memphis office. He was assigned to gather information on a drug trafficking ring that, supposedly, had an important swap spot at the truck stop at Hayti, Missouri. He’d been working for years trying to expose the ring—supposedly connected to Mexican cartels-- and had diddly squat to show for it. Truth is he was a crook and corrupt as a three dollar bill I came to find out later on, but, that was later on after I had figured some things out. On that day and in the particular circumstances I’m describing, his word was gold. He identified me as a major supplier to this drug ring and swore that I had been working the truck stop for years. At the trial, he invented and penciled out such an elaborate story of the goings on with such precise details that I almost came to believe that I might have been involved without even being aware of my participation. He had confidential informants--whose identities had to be protected and so they never appeared in court--who gave him exact dates, times, and other particulars of my whereabouts and my well-documented nefarious activities. Of course, I never was in any of those precise places nor did I participate in any of the alleged exact events, but I could not say when nor where I was as a means of an alibi because…well…because, I’d a had to lie. Telling the truth coulda and probably woulda placed me at the scenes of crimes where I might have truly been guilty of some one thing or the other. Once you pursue a life of crime, nothing in your past can belong to you. At least when you’re standing somewhere that God expects you to tell the truth.
Anyhow, Moe Stanley had found his sucker, his lollipop, his ticket to the big times, and he simply lucked out that I was the kinda guy who couldn’t put all of his cards on the table at that point in the game. What Moe Stanley couldn’t have known was that I would be the feller to watch the last light of life flow out of his eyes a few years later. Yep, about three weeks after I got outta prison, I found and took the life of the man who had taken away three years of mine. I had to do it. I had no choice. While I was locked up, Stainy had made such a reputation of me as a cold-blooded hit man that I had to become one if I was gonna stay in the business, and I can assure you that I was going stay in the drug business the way that money floated around in it just a waiting for an ambitious hand to snatch it up.
But all of that is another story for another time. Now, you know the whole truth about why I went to prison for something I didn’t do, and how I didn’t go to prison for something that most people feel I should have.
So far, I have asked after telling a part of my tale what you, my faithful readers, would like to hear about next. I reckon I can see to give you a bit of time to think about it, but I think that I’m going to start working on a chapter or two about what it was like it was like in prison and all that I learned there. Pretty much, every truly scholarly venture of mine was during the 38 months I spent in a federal penitentiary. I’ll start writing and waiting. You tell me what you wanna hear?