Rugged Roots

Highway 99 Press
August 2012
324 pages
Print, Kindle

978-1-4536450-7-9
978-3-9822665-1-0

CALIFORNIA RETRO

Cash-n-Carry

Bakersfield, California, 1978. At a drive-thru dairy store off Highway 99, three lives have a rendezvous with fate. For local trailer trash, Hanson’s Cash-n-Carry is a dream job. For the confirmation class at St. Paul’s, it’s an entitlement. For a big-city cop with a drinking problem, it’s a last chance.

When he’s offered a job on the steps of church, young Frank Lehmann thinks he’s moving up in the world. Nobody told him that Cash-n-Carry is a breeding ground for cops, criminals, and world-class lowlife. But don’t let Mike McBride hear you say that. He’s following in the footsteps of his estranged father, an alcoholic vigilante with a badge.

Just over the Ridge, LAPD Detective Tom McBride is looking for answers in a bottle. In a shootout ten years ago, he won his gold badge but lost his family. Today, he returns to the scene of the crime and rips open old wounds that send him over the top. When bright futures meet dark pasts, fate steps in and shows its hand. Getting there will make you laugh, cry, and cheer.

Contents

Prologue

1975 - CROSSROADS

1. Born to be Wild

2. Knock Knock

3. Skunk Works

4. The Clipping

1976 - SPILLED MILK

5. Thunderbird

6. Broken Arrow

7. Teething Steel

8. Veterans Day

9. Hanson's Finest

10. April Fools

11. The Tanker

1977 - TO PROTECT AND SERVE

12. Eager Beavers

13. Bent Nightstick

14. Bicycle Babes

15. Christmas Bonus

16. Silent Night

17. Stocking Stuffers

18. Miranda This

1978 - SUN FUN STAY PLAY

19. April Weekends

20. Gettysburg

21. Tithing Beer

22. Redi-Whip

23. Voters Assembly

24. Calling All Cars

25. One-Percenters

26. Outpost Vega

27. Countdown at Nellis

28. Today's Special

Epilogue

Sample

Prologue

When Darlene kissed Tom goodbye with her usual “Knock ’em dead, hon’!” she didn’t mean for him to shotgun a man in half. It just turned out that way.

Standing in the alley five hours later, Tom could still taste the Tang and Tareyton on her coral lipstick. It was full-bodied, with a great bouquet and a slightly bitter finish. Us Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch! Darlene was a riot, his very own Goldwater Girl.

Tom didn’t hear the hysteria in his own laugh. In fact, he didn’t hear much of anything except the loud ringing in his ears. And that annoying ticking noise just out of reach. It almost sounded like one of those cuckoo clocks, the ones where the little birdie comes out of its little wooden housie and says, “Cuckoo, cuckoo!” Darlene liked the one with the red-shuttered chalet at Alpine Village. “Made in Switzerland,” it said. Tom did a pretty good imitation himself. If only Darlene could hear him now.

The dry clicking stopped. Tom looked down at his white knuckles. They were clutching a smoking shotgun. That was strange. It didn’t have a proper sight, just a tactical rail. He turned the gun sideways and squinted at the bayonet lug. The parkerized finish had a greenish-gray patina, like it had been stored in an armory too long. This wasn’t his Ithaca Deerslayer at all! It must be one of those Mossberg 590s from Pendleton.

Something stuck under Tom’s right boot. It felt like Vavoline. On his second try, he got the boot loose and almost stepped on the smoking torso. He frowned again. The olive coverall was way too short, ending at the waist in a soggy pulpy mess, and the legs were sideways. They reminded him of that puppet theater at the Kern County Fair where the legs danced around at crazy angles to the bouncing bodies. Darlene liked the pink cotton candy. Tom preferred the buttered popcorn.

The little birdie was getting louder now, like a siren in heat. Tom cocked his head. Make that a dozen sirens.

“Here comes the calvary,” someone said. “Right on time.”

Tom looked over at Danny. Or what was left of Danny, lying there on the cracked cement like it was the most natural thing in the world. He had that funny bag of bones look that always meant the same thing. At first, Tom had told himself the old horndog just got the air knocked out of him. Then he saw the thick pool of blackness growing rhythmically around the still-crisp blue uniform. And heard it stop. The sucking chest wound was the size of his fist.

Tom felt a numb itchy rage rising in the back of his skull. In measured doses, the adrenal rush was not entirely unpleasant. But now it was flooding his synapses like jet fuel. Just when he thought his head would explode, something grainy cracked behind his eyes. Time stopped. It was replaced by a deafening blur of white noise.

With unnatural calm, Tom watched his backup revolver fly out of his hand as another slow-motion blast obliterated the side mirror next to his head. Glass shards lacerated his left arm and shoulder as he dove across the bench seat and somehow unmounted the Ithaca on his way past the steering column and out Danny’s missing door. Rolling across the sun-baked pavement, he racked the chamber and let loose the first round of double-aught buckshot, taking out a booted ankle under the van, and then another. Each recoil was accompanied by a satisfying, if muffled, scream of agony. As the taste of rusty iron and cauterized flesh filled his lungs, he rushed the gray van.

Around the corner from the miraculously intact round taillight, he saw a silver tooth grinning at him from under a dirty black watch cap. It belonged to the most severe piece of trailer trash he had seen since Oildale. He’d caught the dumb cracker pumping his Mossberg one-handed. Why the hell would somebody get a silver crown on a front tooth? Tom had the strange feeling the fool wasn’t wearing shoes. Silver Tooth was annoyingly cheerful as the Deerslayer wiped the face off his grin and splattered it all over the taillight. This time, the kick to Tom’s shoulder was more like a sore ache that belonged to somebody else. Round three, two to go. He ratcheted again.

Half a second later, someone yanked his strings hard. He pivoted and blew the tattooed green snake off the shotgun pointing out the open van door. He didn’t feel the Deerslayer kick this time. He was busy watching the small flame dance around the edges of the gaping hole. But not too busy to see the limping shadow cross the flat windshield. The Deerslayer barked in his hands again. A spiderweb pattern spread across the laminated safety glass. Before the tiny chunks of glass sprayed the ground, the shadow slammed against a dumpster with a silent thud that slid from view. Another olive coverall. Who the hell were these guys, anyway?

That was when he heard the sickening Ka-tchhh! from his blind spot. Shit, he’d forgotten the fourth man. In a desperate hopeless search for a fresh weapon, Tom tripped over something soft and gooey. Flame spewed out the doorframe overhead, singeing his crewcut. He rolled over one of Silver Tooth’s filthy feet and came back up with the prepumped Mossberg. The boom was deafening. The guy in the doorframe hit the far wall of the van with a hollow crack, then bounced back just in time to catch the left door full in the face. Ignoring the aviator glasses smashed grotesquely across his bloody nose and mouth, he looked down in disbelief at his smoking appendectomy and then back up at Tom.

In a single motion, Tom grabbed his rip-stop collar and threw him down onto the oozing cement, right next to where Silver Tooth’s head should have been, kicked him onto his back, and slammed a bloody boot onto his neck. As the blackened arm clawed frantically at Tom’s pant leg, the ugly wide barrel moved methodically down to the left side of the gaping wound. Tom took careful aim. A gurgling animal sound came from underneath his boot.

“This one’s for Danny,” Tom said, and calmly squeezed the trigger. He didn’t feel any kick this time, just a growing numbness in his right arm. Pressing his boot down harder on the slippery squirming mess underneath, he moved the barrel to the wide peninsula of raw meat on the right. “And this one,” he said, pulverizing more bone and cement. “And this.”

Damn, his finger was starting to cramp up. He turned the Mossberg sideways for a better look. Nada. They just didn’t make fingers like they used to. Then he took aim again.

As the sirens got louder and more insistent, Tom shook his head in amazement. The body had gone quiet, but the legs were still kicking, like when the old man cut the head off that Great Basin rattler with his Bowie knife. No wonder they called it Snake Valley.

Tom heard the first car do a screeching brodie behind him. Carefully, he bent his knees and set the red-hot Mossberg down on the steaming mass of muck. Then he touched the sky. A silver shield appeared in his right hand, face out. Geometrically perfect embossed sunlight radiated from city hall under the smears of blood.

“HANDS ON TOP OF YOUR HEADLIGHTS!” a young voice yelled behind him. It was shaking with adrenaline. “NOW!”

Another siren screeched to a halt. Then another. And another.

Headlights? Tom laughed and licked his cracked lips. Then he laughed again. The drink of astronauts. That Darlene.

Tires screeched at eleven o’clock, just beyond the dumpster at the other end of the alley.

“HE’S ON THE JOB!” a second voice objected behind him. This one sounded just as scared, if a bit older and more level-headed.

Dozens of flashing red lights were bouncing off and through the van like a small circus. Despite the bullet holes, shattered windows, and splatter marks, the back doors sparkled in the midday sun, like they had just been waxed by hand.

Tom’s laugh went sideways. “Cuckoo, cuckoo!” he said.