Due South of Nowhere
by Gary Clifton
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
conclusion
A year earlier, Twister had rolled a wino in downtown Dallas. The victim had nothing of value except a shiny Ft. Worth Police badge which Twister had already used a half dozen times to pick up women or rob dope dealers. The badge and a Glock .40-caliber pistol both were stashed in his backpack. Today, they were the key to the front door of the Bristol County Jail.
The old GMC was basically invisible among other shabby vehicles on the East Ft. Worth grocery store parking lot. But, by the edge of town, the old clunker began steaming its last.
It took him less than five minutes to pop the ignition on a fairly new Buick and head toward U.S. 287. Stopping in a rundown apartment complex, using a dime, he removed the tags from another Buick which appeared to have been setting idle for a year. He stuck them on his original Buick and gunned the stolen ride toward Comanche Wells.
Twister sat out of sight behind a Comanche Wells truck stop as the blazing sun yielded to dusk. Pulling the Glock pistol and Ft. Worth Police badge from his backpack, he stuffed his little .38 in his boot, then parked the stolen Buick in the “Police Only” parking space in front of the Justice Center. He swaggered through the front doors. His normal entry would be via the back, book-in area in handcuffs.
The elderly uniformed desk officer eyed the Ft. Worth Police badge closely, noting the undercover cop was particularly seedy. She directed him to slide the Glock at his waistband in the little safe outside the main turnkey and put the key in his pocket. Then she buzzed him inside. The Criminal Justice Center, like all jails, had no metal detectors in the doorway reserved for officers on official duty. She had no way to spot the .38 in the scruffy officer’s boot.
The only other officer on duty, an unarmed jailer, greeted the Ft. Worth visitor. In two heartbeats, Twister had both officers locked in a cell, the desk officer’s Smith and Wesson in his waistband, and was frantically going through the jailer’s keys.
“Which one opens Grifford’s cell, assholes?” He pointed his .38 through the bars in the terrified jailers’ faces. In minutes, amidst eight other prisoners clamoring to be released but ignored, Twister had retrieved brother Brooks from his cell and his Glock from the little box.
He stopped, intending to shoot the two locked-up officers, but concerned with the noise of gunshots and potential witness still locked in the cellblock, thought better of it. With his half-brother in tow, he walked out the front door. Both sneered like they’d just won the lottery. Twister handed Grifford the officer’s Smith and Wesson.
“You had this ride all day, bro?” Grifford inspected the Buick’s interior. “Maybe time to dump it?”
Twister nodded agreement. Total prairie darkness had set in. The old gent in the new Toyota never saw the brothers’ approach as he bent into his trunk in front of his house a block from the jail. Quickly, with the Toyota owner locked in the trunk of the now abandoned Buick, the fugitive brothers were on the road in a new ride.
“You sure you can find that box?” Twister asked as they whizzed through the dark, vacant landscape.
Grifford leered across the seat at his brother. “Like I said, buried a hundred paces straight north, back o’ the house. I even left the shovel.”
“Sixty large will hold us till we square up with them cartel losers, bro.” Twister turned his broken body to face his brother. His laugh was deep, evil, nasty.
Grifford spotted the lights of a convenience store ahead. “Swing in there, Twister. I’ll get a quart of wine.”
* * *
For the second night in a row, the telephone rousted John Bob out of a sound sleep. The Comanche Wells Police Dispatcher said neighbors had reported a man shouting from inside a car trunk on a Comanche Wells Street. Police had brought the man, disoriented, furious, and unaware of how lucky he was to be alive to the Justice Center. There they discovered the pair of night employees locked up and Grifford missing. The brothers had to be the car thieves.
“Gotta be his brother, Twister,” John Bob observed. Twister and Grifford already had an hour’s head start.
“Put out an APB on the Toyota,” John Bob told the dispatcher. “Occupants armed and dangerous.”
“He don’t know the license number, John Bob. We’re takin’ him home now to look at his files... if he has any.”
John Bob hurried through his white shirt and badge ritual. After years of nosing around the dry plains, a man develops certain intuitions. Skipping a trip to confer with other cops at the jail in the Justice Center or the Comanche Wells Police Department, his gut sent him elsewhere. Marilou handed him his customary thermos and sandwich as he hurried out the door. Years of hard experience told him the direction to take. He dug his shotgun from the trunk and headed the Dodge toward the burned meth lab.
As he approached the scene, he spotted lights of a white van screeching out of the crime scene driveway and heading west on the narrow road a mile ahead of him. John Bob considered chasing the lights, but his long-honed sense of priority told him to revisit the burn site.
He cut his headlights short of the driveway and eased the Dodge into the yard. Even in the gusty wind, the smell of burned house and gasoline still hung heavily. Vehicle tracks in the sandy soil led around the house and over a small rise to the rear.
The potential for ambush blared like a brass band in the pitch-blackness, which blanketed everything outside the limited reach of car headlights. He spotted the Toyota, its high beams peering out into the endless darkness. Pulling his .45, he drove with his left hand while he crept closer. The found the answer easily enough.
In the Toyota headlight glare, a large man lay dead, sprawled face up on the ground beside the passenger door, a lengthy stiletto extending six inches from an eye. A Smith and Wesson semi-automatic pistol, the slide back, lay beside him. He had run out of ammunition.
“Welcome to hell, Brooks Grifford,” John Bob muttered softly.
An open hole in the sand and a shovel tossed aside bore mute evidence that somebody had outflanked the Griffords for a buried prize. He flash-lighted the opening. A nearly empty quart wine bottle lay at the bottom. Somebody had returned to claim money or narcotics buried in the adjacent hole.
He figured Twister Arnold’s body would be nearby. After a sweep on the area via car lights, he found no sign of Grifford’s vicious brother. He pondered if Twister had used his brother to find the contents of the buried box, then double-crossed him, or had he been abducted by the occupants of the white van that had just fled?
Realizing he should have pursued the fleeing white van and with limited radio range, he pondered how to send warning that an unknown number of murderers were fleeing west.
His pulse raced as lights of another sedan turned into the driveway. Retrieving his shotgun from the front seat, he picked up his radio microphone. “Daniel, that you, son?”
“Yes, sir, it’s me, John Bob.”
John Bob explained what he knew about Grifford, dead behind the burned meth house and of the van he’d seen fleeing to the west when he’d arrived two minutes before.
“Good grief, John Bob, I passed them back a piece. If I get wound up, this Dodge might close some distance.”
“Daniel, there’s gotta be several men, all heavily armed.” He gestured to the bodies on the ground. “If you catch up, slow trail them till some help clusters up. I’ll follow you till we can reach somebody by radio.”
At that, the young trooper spun his cruiser onto the asphalt highway and was gone. John Bob, attempting to follow, stuck his car in the soft sand. After several infuriating minutes, he freed the vehicle and headed west at speed.
It didn’t take long. Daniel’s cruiser was sideways on the road, a white Chevrolet van lying driver’s side down ahead of him, with a San Rupert County Deputy sheriff’s car diagonally blocking the road a hundred feet beyond the wrecked van. John Bob figured Daniel had reached the San Rupert officer by radio car-to-car and the deputy, seeing the van approaching, had blocked the highway with his cruiser. The van driver had swerved and rolled over. A gunfight had followed.
Daniel, his uniform soaked in blood, lay face up beside his car bleeding profusely from a bullet wound in the left thigh and another at the edge of the left shoulder of his Kevlar vest. He was alive and groaning in pain. “Hold on, Daniel.” John Bob leaned down. “I know you’re hurtin’, but I think you’re gonna be okay.”
John Bob hoisted his shotgun, walked past the capsized van and located the San Rupert deputy, face up on the pavement. By flashlight, it was apparent the deputy had caught a heavy caliber bullet over his chest, but the bullet had not penetrated his Kevlar vest. Although the concussion had knocked him unconscious, the officer would recover in intense but not fatal pain.
He scrambled back to his car. “Shots fired, officer down!” he shouted into the radio. “Need ambulance and EMT’s on State Highway 763 now!”
Before he could add directions, the radio blared, “Three minutes out, John Bob.”
Then he saw emergency lights approaching. Somehow, Daniel or the San Rupert officer had gotten through to a dispatcher. He walked back to Daniel’s car. The young officer was groaning heartily. Then he realized the thigh wound was a through and through, painful but non-fatal. The shoulder wound had been mostly stopped by his vest. Daniel would survive. “Don’t speak so good for dopers’ shootin’ ability,” John Bob muttered aloud.
“Am I gonna die, John Bob?’ Daniel rasped.
He knelt. “No, Daniel, looks painful. Help comin’, two minutes. Hold on. For God’s sake, hold on.”
Peripherally, he saw movement in the upturned passenger door of the van. He walked ahead to the van and peered over the rocker panel.
The van had been carrying multiple occupants. The driver was dead in his seat, impaled on the shattered steering column. A swarthy man in the back seat had been thrown clear. He lay dead on the pavement shoulder, several bullet wounds visible in his upper body. A fully automatic Uzi submachine gun lay beside him. Daniel and the Deputy, outgunned, had managed to cancel the vehicle load of dopers. Great God, what waste was this?
Wedged on the floorboard of the front passenger seat, a third man suddenly groaned and managed to claw his way partially up and out the passenger door. The man struggled for several seconds, a large semi-automatic pistol in his right hand. He fell heavily back inside the overturned vehicle.
Hundred-dollar bills — Ben Franklins in doper parlance — and vinyl packages of white pills, some broken open by the crash, were strewn inside the van, intermingled with splattered blood and gore.
“Hold on, kid!” he shouted to Daniel then started back toward the San Rupert Deputy.
Suddenly, from behind the overturned van, a shrieking man barreled into John Bob’s back, clawing at the Ranger’s pistol. John Bob’s shotgun clattered to the pavement. Both men sprawled on the road a few feet in front of Daniel’s patrol car. Twister Arnold, his face recognizable in the flickering lights, was bloody and hysterical. The pistol went off striking John Bob in the left foot with agonizing pain. Instantly, the weapon fired again. Twister’s corpulent body went limp. The round had caught him in the stomach. He slumped on his back, his eyes fixed in death’s eternal stare. John Bob shook free of his bulk and retrieved his shotgun.
The wounded man trapped inside the van, screaming in painful final agony, clambered over the rocker panel. As he fell heavily to the pavement, he managed to hold on to his weapon. He glared death up at John Bob and raised his pistol haltingly.
John Bob leveled his shotgun and blew off the right side of the doper’s head. He fired another round, then another, scattering blood spew across the asphalt and up the overturned undercarriage of the van. Self-defense? Overkill? Effective rehab? This was not a confused kid in a bank lobby.
He stepped out into plain view of the approaching squad cars, so his white shirt and badge were clearly visible and raised his hands. Several officers approached. “How bad, John Bob?”
“Dunno. Hurts like hell.”
A uniformed DPS trooper knelt. “This guy is dead, John Bob.” He gestured to Twister’s corpse. He flash-lighted blood hemorrhaging from John Bob’s badly damaged boot. “That’s bad, dude.” He produced a knife and began cutting off the boot.
An EMT leaned down, a syringe in hand. “Little stick here, John Bob. Pain gone in seconds. Daniel and the San Rupert kid gonna be fine, too.” ; He gestured to the DPS officer who had nearly finished removing John Bob’s boot. “Give the morphine a chance to work.”
As the boot came away, several officers watching groaned in empathy. The EMT said, “Damned bad, John Bob. Probably save the foot, but I’m bettin’ you’re gonna go out on a full disability pension. Man, sorry about that.”
John Bob stifled a grin through his pain. The evil brothers Grifford and Twister would sell no more dope in an Amarillo schoolyard. At least part of the cartel was eliminated. He’d just killed two men, both useless dregs of society. All officers would survive.
Disability pension? No more three a.m. call-outs? He’d call Marilou as soon as he reached a hospital and DPS right after. After well over half his lifetime, he was through, finished. He wouldn’t quit; he had no choice. He’d exit honorably.
The morphine euphoria began to creep in. “Sorry?” Sorry, hell. He’d never felt better in his life.
Copyright © 2022 by Gary Clifton
