He thumped ash from his cigar on the ground. “Let me tell you why I’m here.”
“Let me guess. I stuck my dick in your territory.”
“Something like that. You can wise off all you want, but I’m here to do you a favor.”
“I could use some yard work done.”
He leaned forward. “Listen, asshole. Listen good, and tell your partner what I’m going to tell you.”
“Should I take notes?”
“You can take notes, or you can just let it whistle through your ears. This way, I came to you and told you and I’m giving you a chance. Those guys you fucked over, shot one in the leg, took that girl from, flushed their dope down the shitter, they didn’t like it.”
“Well, I hope not.”
“They’re mad at you, and the more connected guys who work the dope through them, guess what? They’re pissed too.”
“Get in line. Me and Leonard piss a lot of people off.”
“I can believe that. I can believe you two are not going to listen and you’re going to wind up with your body parts in separate trash bags in different parts of the county.”
“This isn’t the first time we’ve been threatened.”
“I don’t doubt that, peckerwood. But this has put a little pressure on me. The organization that runs those turds you slapped around, they got folks that run them, and they are bad folks. The Dixie Mafia.”
“Do they have Dixie flags and still whine over the South being unionized into the rest of the country? Do they talk about cotton a lot? Get weepy about the Old South? I don’t know about you, but nothing—absolutely nothing—touches me less or bores me more than those assholes. I was you, a black man, I’d throw my rag in with someone else.”
“It’s bigger than any of that. Some of them, they come out of the Aryan Nations, out of the prisons. But they aren’t so down on the brothers anymore. They just don’t want them to fuck their sisters. They feel they can do business with them, anyone else for that matter. These guys, they don’t care about any war but their own little money war. They’re all about commerce and respect, ass-wipe.”
“Watch your language. I’m sensitive, and I just might go sensitive all over you.”
He leaned back in the chair and grinned. “I’m twice your size.”
“And I’m twice your mean.”
“So you say. Do you want to hear me out or not?”
I looked at my watch. “Might as well. It’s still a couple hours till dinner.”
“They aren’t getting their dope back, so maybe they’ll think to make some kind of example out of you. That would be their way. The low guys on the turd totem pole can’t take care of you, then they’ll bring in the middle guys. That don’t work, then the middle guys will bring in the top guys, and those guys will hire someone that’ll be meaner than a bucket of rattlesnakes. They won’t dirty their hands. They’ll bring in real talent. But they probably won’t have to go that far. Enough guys with no real talent is still a lot of fuckin’ guys.”
“So how do they know it’s us done all this? Could be two other guys of equal handsomeness and anger management issues.”
“You’ve already admitted it was you.”
“I was just playing.”
“Sure. Tanedrue figured you were friends of Marvin Hanson, the grandfather, and all he had to do was ask around. You weren’t that hard to figure. You could maybe pay back the money they lost.”
“Oh yeah, that’s gonna happen. If it cost a dollar to fart I’d have to sweat instead. Don’t be an idiot. We aren’t paying anybody anything, and mostly because we don’t want to. And, by the way, how do you, a fine law-abiding police officer, know all this? Could it be because you’re in cahoots with them? My God, say it ain’t so. Aren’t policemen here to protect us? If that isn’t true, my world has been turned upside down.”
“You know what I make in salary?”
“I could care less.”
“Not a lot. Drugs are all over. You think I stop some drug traffic I stop drugs? That I stop people from wanting to use them?”
“No. But it is your job.”
“Look, I’m gonna tell you something, ’cause it’s just you and me in your crappy yard. Drugs go on. Money is being made. It’s like pussy. Someone is always gonna sell it and someone is always gonna buy it, and sometimes, that pussy, it’s got a disease and it kills people. You takes your chances. No one makes you buy it, use it. So what if me and my partner, who is a nice fat white guy named Reggie who is like a brother to me and will hate your guts if I hate your guts… what if we get a little piece of the action? They’re gonna buy from someone. So who the hell does it hurt if they’re getting what they want?”
“The people who are paying you not to take a piece of the action. And you might toss in the ones it kills or the ones get addicted. Until it’s legalized and they got that stuff in a vending machine, your job is to not make money off of it.”
Conners took a big suck on his cigar, blew the smoke toward me. I was so manly I didn’t wave it away, just squinted my eyes, trying to look like Clint Eastwood. I probably looked like a guy with smoke in his eyes.
“I’ve heard some things about you and your boy,” Conners said, “and you sound a little self-righteous, considering what I’ve heard you’ve done.”
“Don’t believe everything you’ve heard, lawman. And let me give you another line, right out of Billy Jack. Ever see that movie?”
“No.”
“There’s a line where he says: ‘When policemen break the law there is no law.’ After that he beats the crap out of some guys, but that’s not the point. It’s corny and it’s movie crap, but it’s right. I don’t owe you a fucking thing. You come to warn me and you think I’m supposed to thank you for it, but mostly you want me to stay out of your business, because you are the scum at the bottom of this big old pond and what you’re afraid of is that me and Leonard are going to ripple the surface so much that the big frog on the big lily pad is going to hop on your head. You aren’t doing me any kind of favor. Now get out of my yard before I take that cigar out of your mouth and shove it up your ass.”
He stood up so fast he knocked over the lawn chair. “I ought to kick you into next week.”
I stood up carefully. “Start kicking. You’re out of your jurisdiction.”
He stood there with his fists clenched. A vein vibrated in his neck like the string on a stand-up bass. Provided the string was really big.
I didn’t want any part of him, but I didn’t want him to know it. I managed not to piss myself, tried to look like I was thinking about something pleasant, like a politician waiting for a free blow job.
He took a deep breath. “All right. I tried. You warn that fart, Hanson, warn him that he’s in this too. I was him, I’d take that split-tail you two rescued, pack all of you in a bus and head for the high country, or just some goddamn rabbit hole. Change your names. Change your sex. ’Cause they’re comin’, smart-mouth. And when they do, you ain’t gonna like it. It might be the little fucks first, but they ain’t nothin’. You might take care of them. But then it’s the others, and I tell you again, you ain’t gonna like it.”
“Neither are they,” I said.
Conners tossed his cigar on the lawn, gave me a last look that told me there was nothing he’d like better than to reach up my asshole and jerk me inside out. “When it comes down,” he said, “remember your old Uncle Conners tried to tell you how it was going to go.”
“That’ll certainly cheer me,” I said. “But I wouldn’t count me and Leonard out just yet, Uncle Tom … Oh, sorry, that was Conners, wasn’t it?”
“You don’t know a thing. Ain’t no Uncle Toms no more, just a fella trying to do business.”
“One way of looking at it, I suppose.”
“It’ll be a clean sweep,” he said. “Not just you and Leonard, but those around you. You have a woman, don’t you? That’s what I’ve heard. And Hanson, his family. I don’t want to see that, something happening. Truly, I don’t.”