The Other Side of Bad (The Tucker Novels) (6 page)

As I looked down the shooting lane at Spark putting something on the floor, I heard Spain in the next booth, doing the same to his mags.

“Spark, what’s that?” I asked, as he fiddled with a contraption I couldn’t see, because he was in the way.

“It’s a new countdown light system I bought for just this type of activity,” he said, moving out of the way, showing me a set of four lights stacked up on top of each other, about six inches apart. The whole thing was about four feet high and six inches wide. The lights were from top to bottom, two reds, one amber, and the bottom one was green.

“Reminds me of drag racing down in Opelousas,” I said.

“Where?” about a half a dozen voices asked.

“Same principle,” Spark said, as he lumbered back toward the booths. Spark moved like Spain talked.

Spark said, “I’ve got this set at one-second intervals, it starts at the top and goes down red-red-amber-green. You shoot on green.”

“Duh,” said a comedian from somewhere in the dark. It did get some laughs, but not from Spark, who was looking hard for the performer.

It looked like we were ready to commence. The cop who was going to time me was behind to my left, so he wouldn’t be bombarded by my flying brass. I knew Spain’s timer would be in the same position next door.

Spain peeked around the corner, and was now wearing a pink tennis visor, ear protection that looked like muffs, and shooting glasses with yellow lenses. He’d gotten rid of his suit coat, and his bright, tie-died suspenders were blinding.

“I’m going to order the full rack of ribs and drink two imported beers, cause you’re buying,” he said, grinning like a Cheshire cat.

“Spain, if you could see yourself right now, you wouldn’t be smiling.” I added, “Are you sure you like girls? What
does
Betsy do for sex?”

His grin was replaced by a baffled frown.

There was a lot of coughing going on in the dimmer parts of the cellar and a few small bursts of muffled laughter. As far as I knew, Spain was the highest ranking officer here. It definitely wasn’t kosher to laugh at him.

“Okay, you two get ready!” Spark yelled, as he fingered his glasses back up on his nose.

“I’ll count to three and turn on the lights. You two with the stop watches hit the buttons when the green light comes on.”

“Duh,” again followed by laughter.

Spain disappeared around the partition. I stepped forward, slipped the ear protection over my hat and put on the shooting glasses. They were so smudged with what I was sure were Spain prints, I had to take them off.

“Put your pieces on the bench and step back one step!” Spark yelled, sounding like a drill sergeant.

I drew my gun, set it on the table and stepped back. It was cocked and locked.

Someone, quietly cleared their throat, caused me to look his way. It was Patrolman Richard Walker, and he was shifting his eyes over towards Spain’s booth.

I stepped back and looked into Spain’s booth to find him in a two-handed shooting stance with his gun pointed at the target.

Ever since Spain and I’ve been shooting against each other, spanning over a decade, we’d been playing this game. I took all his shenanigans as a compliment.

“Spain, why don’t you come over here and keep me honest,” I said quietly.

His shoulders hunched, like a small boy caught in the cookie jar.

As he turned to look at me, I ducked back into my booth. When he came around, I could tell he didn’t know if I had seen him or not.

“I trust you, Tucker,” he said, with big innocent eyes.

“I’m sure you do, but I think we’d both have better scores if we could see each other. You know, make it a more interesting competition.”

I looked around and said, “What about you guys? Wouldn’t ya’ll like to see us go at it, side by side?”

Almost everyone had crammed into the booths in order to see the targets, so they hadn’t been privy to Spain’s point shaving tactic.

There were nods and murmurings of agreement. There wasn’t much Spain could do, but come over with me.

I scooted over, which put him to my left. I wasn’t worried about his ejected brass hitting me. On all the guns I worked on, I made sure the brass went almost directly over the shooters right shoulder. That kept them out of the way of their partners in a firefight, and I had definitely worked on the gun Spain was going to shoot.

“Let’s do this!” Spark yelled irritably. “I want to go home!”

I said, “Hold on, Spark, I’ve got to clean these glasses. There’s something all over them.”

I reached over, take hold of Spain’s cream-colored silk tie and started cleaning the glasses.

“Thanks, buddy,” I said. “This won’t scratch the lenses.”

He didn’t say a word, just looked straight ahead like a guilty defendant receiving his sentence.

Spain set his extra magazine on the bench with the .45 next to it, and I did the same.

“You ready?” I asked.

“Yep.”

I looked over at Spark and nodded, then looked at Patrolman Walker and caught his eye, took off my leather jacket and handed it to him. He gave me a sheepish smile and blushed. Walker was just a kid, couldn’t be more than 22 or 23.

“One . . . two . . . three!” Spark yelled, and hit the button.

The lights started, red . . . red . . . . amber . . . . green.

By then I had tunnel vision, my heart rate had slowed, and
The Calm
had settled over me.

When the green light glowed, I stepped, picked up my gun, with slightly bent knees and a two-handed grip, both eyes open, I looked at the target and shot five times. BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG.

After each shot, as soon as the muzzle dropped back into the target, I fired again. The way I have my gun tuned, this happens about every three-tenths of a second.

After the fifth and last round, the slide locked back. With my thumb, I pressed the magazine release button and the empty mag fell on the bench. I shoved the extra magazine, that I don’t remember picking up, into the gun, thumbed down the extended slide release as I aimed, pulled the trigger, starting the next five-round sequence, BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG.

The shots were so close together, it was hard to distinguish one from the other, it almost a continuous roar. Again, as the last round was spent, the slide locked back.

I yelled, “Red!”

I released the slide, thumbed up the safety, slipped the gun in my holster and stepped back.

“God damn, motherfucker, son-of-a-bitch,” were just some of the less colorful expletives bouncing around the room. Cops have such broad vocabularies. I heard one say, “Fuck-me-running! Even a… “Shit the bed!”

I knew I’d shot faster than Spain; that was obvious. He was still shooting when I holstered my gun, and he didn’t bother to say ‘red’. But, had I outshot him? I don’t see where my bullets strike when I’m shooting. I just shoot.

“Six point three seconds!” yelled the patrolman timing Spain.

I looked behind me, and the cop standing there looked like he was going to faint.

“I forgot to stop it,” he said, looking at the stopwatch. He was in his late twenties with bright red hair and now, a face to match.

“Don’t worry about it,” Spain said with disgust, gesturing with his gun to the targets.

The black parts of the targets were about five inches in diameter. His had florescent chartreuse spots all over it and one black hole in the brown border.
   

My target just had one large bright area in the center about three inches in diameter, and in the center of that was a hole you could see through, indicating multiple hits in the same area.

Everyone but Spain and I started talking.

“Sumbitch, Tucker must have shot his in five seconds or less . . . naw, more like four seconds . . . no way six seconds . . . shit.”
 

Spain looked at me, smiled with a shrug and said, “Looks like I buy again.”

“I beat you with that comment about Betsy, didn’t I?”

“No, you just beat me,
 again. I’ve been practicing with this thing (he looks at the gun in his hand) and this setup for a month. I bet I’ve got 20 hours, what with all the driving back and forth, and a thousand rounds invested in this shit.”

“When I was a kid, I used to shoot a thousand rounds a weekend.”

He looked at me like I had just grown a unicorn horn.

“You never told me that before,” he said quietly, looking down to the targets.

“Thousand rounds a weekend,” he mumbled.

Men were starting to mill around, and I felt someone pat me on the back. I’m not much on being touched from behind; I’m not much on being touched period. I spun around to find Richard Walker. He was stepping back, holding out my jacket with an alarmed look on his face.

“Ah . . . your jacket, Mr. Tucker.”

I’d forgotten about my jacket.

“Thanks Richard, and drop the mister,” I said.

From his face, you’d think I just told him he didn’t have cancer. He did put himself out there by alerting me to Spain’s game. He seemed like a good kid, not much older than my son.

“Why don’t you come to dinner with us?” I asked.

“Why don’t you
not
come to dinner with us,” Spain said, looking firmly at Walker.

Maybe Spain
did
know it was Walker who alerted me.

“
Mr.
Tucker and I have some business to discuss, remember?” he said, raising his eyebrows at me.

“Maybe some other time, Walker,” I said.

“Sure, Tucker . . . I mean Mr. Tucker,” he said after getting another ‘I’ll scalp your ass’ look from Spain.

After Walker left, I said to Spain, “A little tough on the kid, weren’t you, or do you just want me to feel old?”

“Yeah, well, he may be a little too nice. It could get him killed someday. If he lives for the next couple of years, he’ll make a good cop. He’s a pretty good shot and getting better. He’s been playing that game ‘knuckles’ you showed those recruits at the range last year. He’s very fast. I think he’s working up to challenge you. Then we’ll see how old you really are.”

I yawned. “Let’s go eat. I’m driving out to the house after.”

“You go on over. I’ve got a little business to attend to. It shouldn’t take me more than five or ten minutes. We’ll eat and talk about the interview and that other thing,” he said, putting on his suit coat.

I nodded and turned to see the basement was almost empty, just a few men hanging around, probably the business Spain was referring to.

When I got back upstairs, Spark was behind the counter, waiting for the stragglers to leave. He also had my target. He held it up in front of his face and looked at me through the hole and said, “Well, I don’t know, Tucker.”   

As I walked up to him he pushed the box of Winchester .45’s I’d loaded my mags from and my pile of hollow points at me.

“Hand me a rag, will you?” I asked.

He reached behind him and pulled one off the shelves.

My gun was hard-chromed, making it the color of dull steel. This stopped it from rusting easily, but after shooting, you could see a powder blast smudge an inch or so behind the muzzle. I took the rag, wiped the gun clean, then started reloading my mags with the hollow points. I’d clean it properly when I got home. I handed the rag back.

“Spark, how did you get that name?” I asked, as I replaced a mag with eight hollow points, chambered a round, then dropped the magazine into the palm of my left hand, to top it off with a round before ramming it home, and holstering my gun.

“I played hockey in high school,” he said. “The coach called me the ‘Spark Plug’ of the team because I had so much spirit and hustle, and it just stuck.”

Spark
just grew a unicorn horn.

Chapter 10

Upon entering the restaurant, I was reminded why Spain and I liked it, other than the good food. There were booths along the back wall, allowing us both to sit next to the wall with a view of the front door.

There were seven four top tables with red and white checkered plastic tablecloths, or would that be tableplastics? It wasn’t crowded this Wednesday night, a few couples and a couple of singles having dinner, plus a guy who needed to go on Weight Watchers, hanging around the takeout counter.

Obeying the ‘Please Seat Yourself’ sign, I went straight back to a booth and took the left side. This would leave my right side toward the door.

A young lady came to take my order. I told her I was waiting for someone and just bring me a water with lemon. Thinking once I was home, I might pour myself a Makers Mark on the rocks. I seldom drank the hard stuff anymore, but when I did, I liked it strong. The Major liked it strong too, so did his four brothers, all alcoholics. That was another reason I seldom indulged.

What with the shooting tonight and thinking about the Major, I couldn’t help but remember how I got started down this road. The Major taught my brother and me how to shoot his 1911 Colt just as soon as we were strong enough to hold it up. At one point he actually had two.

His P-51 Mustang took on a lot of lead during one of his missions. He was within a mile or so of the airfield and having trouble keeping
My Baby
(he named all his planes My Baby) in the air. He finally had to try to land, which turned into a small walk-away crash landing. He was still in Indian country and had to play hide and seek all the way back.

During his retreat, he found, much to his chagrin, he’d lost his .45. So upon his safe return, he put in a request for another one. In the meantime he borrowed an old Colt revolver from a buddy in the squadron. Days later he received his requisitioned pistol, but didn’t open the box because he was getting used to the old revolver, said it was more accurate.

There was a lull in the fighting and some of the mechanics got together and went out to where his plane went down to salvage parts, and lo and behold, his pistol was found in the cockpit.

A couple of weeks later, his buddy wanted the revolver back, so the Major opened the box to clean and assemble the newly acquired .45. They came disassembled in a waxed box, all covered with cosmoline, which is a substance like Vaseline mixed with oil.
 You weren’t supposed to have two pistols, but since the mechanics didn’t report it, as far as the Army Air Corps was concerned, he only had one. The wild thing is they had consecutive serial numbers. The odds of that happening was like being delt a Royal Flush.

He managed to hang on to both of them and after the war had them ornately engraved in Italy. One he had nickel-plated and the other, black-blued. He carved out the inside of two Bibles, and sent them back to the states from different locations. He was an atheist, so for him this wasn’t a problem. Only the black-blued one made it. That’s the one he taught us with. It’s such a beautiful piece, with the engraving magnificently done. During a recidivistic period, I carried it, and it saw me through more than one scrape. Now my brother has it.

These were the kind of stories I could finagle out of the Major in the years following the box of medals incident. Stories like this and him pissing himself because he was so scared while flying to a mission. Or how they’d have to pull him from his cockpit, lay him across a wing, then pull his pants down. He told me he would sometimes lay there for fifteen minutes before he could relax enough to urinate. Then he would go for five minutes. Never stories of why or how he had so many medals.

Those stories came from other sources.