by Tom Pitts
For our purposes that bright spring morning, such lady guns would hardly suffice. We chose from the sergeant’s absurdly extensive arsenal Glocks affixed with foot-long suppressors, Armalite AR-15 assault rifles manually upgraded to fully automatic, each subjoined to night vision scopes, and massive pump-action shotguns, Ithacas and Remingtons that could, and did, cut men clean in half with single discharges.
Clad in dark overcoats, said Kevlar and knit caps, we could have passed for the poorly aged star attractions of a high school shooter reunion tour. We crossed the city limits, the rural route buttressed by fallow fields of grazing cattle eyeing passing traffic with a collective gaze as lifeless as that of the killer cop steering us to our fate on Dog Hill, Luther’s farm east of town where three trench-coated gunmen with nothing to lose would make Kentucky history. Some ambitious and surprisingly street-wise crime reporter would entitle the bloodbath, in one of the earliest newspaper accounts, “The Dog Hill Dog Food Massacre.” The writer’s absurd christening I found particularly impressive as most drug-culture laymen are justly unaware that “dog food” is a street name for heroin.
Taste the stuff after it’s been broken down with water and before some dope fiend draws it up into a syringe and you’ll understand the reference.
Why did we have to kill Luther?
I’d made the lanky loudmouth Eastern Kentuckian stupidly rich with my connections in the Cincinnati and Chicago heroin trades. Don’t get me wrong. Luther was wealthy before I came along. The man had, for nearly a decade, been considered by both the police and concomitant criminals the most successful marijuana cultivator and distributor in Kentucky. But when we started raking in the kind of money to be made peddling Dog Food, Longmire, almost overnight, succumbed to that paranoia so common among the indecorously powerful, and began blithely murdering anyone that MIGHT someday pose a threat to his freedom and finances.
“Can you start loading?”
I blinked twice and turned to face the woman who’d summoned me from my reverie back to Nashville, to the rear parking lot of the Sweetwater Music Club where I’d escorted this unsuspecting cult icon of alternative country music to perform and where, a few blocks from here, without her knowledge, I planned to unload to the local chapter of the Dixie Mafia several kilos of the Afghanistan heroin so many had already died for me and my crew to successfully distribute. Our mysterious supplier who brought the dope into the country paid less than a grand a kilo. We were re-selling them at eight. Do the math. This single exchange would net one hundred thousand dollars in profit and it was only one of five conducted just this week. My cut: just shy of thirty thousand dollars. Multiply that by twenty; we shipped five days a week (we’d take two off for debriefing), four weeks a month and weren’t planning on slowing down.
“You okay?” Catherine asked from the passenger side where she sat with the door open.
Rock n’ roll anachronisms of all types lined the club’s sun-bleached adobe walls. Hippies, greasers, mods, plastic men and painted women.
“Yeah,” I told her. “I got it. Socialize. Network.”
“’Network’?” Her tongue hung limply atop her bottom lip and she dramatically feigned a few dry heaves. “Don’t ever use that word around me again.”
“Then why do I have to unload your guitars?”
“Because I want some of these people to think I’m more of a rock-star than I am and having a gofer goes a long way to perpetuate the mythology.”
“I think I’m in love.”
“There are just a few people I need to speak with.” She peered past me, through the driver’s window, at two stooges in nudie suits and J.C. Stetsons staring at us like we were the Beatles fresh in from Liverpool.
While Catherine doffed her Stetson and rounded the hood of the van to greet the two suits, I closed my eyes and continued to relive the worst moments of my life, the week that Luther Longmire died.
I began with Irina, the woman I’d loved for years then lost because I couldn’t quit using heroin or instigating bar fights or, in the more expansive stages of my addiction, threatening strangers with castration on Facebook, Irina, who I had tried foolishly to win back with money and pomp and the long lost faculty to pass a drug screen without cheating. I should have predicted that she’d never have been swayed into the arms of the kind of man I’d become.
I knew she’d find out. I never once lied myself into believing that that precocious little devil would fail to uncover or coerce me to confess exactly how I’d gone from food stamps to five star restaurants overnight. She had been my moral barometer in my former life, when the code of ethics by which I lived and had my being constituted something a little deeper than cold utilitarian calculus. She’d find out what I’d done, or suspect facsimiles thereof. And she would also discover that I had been carrying on with another woman, Amara Longmire, Luther’s cousin and, to the chagrin of us Kentuckians weary of hillbilly stereotyping, his lover, who remains, perhaps, the most deranged female with whom I’ve ever had the misfortune to exchange bodily fluids.
I simply convinced myself, after I’d wooed her back, that Irina would forgive, that she’d look beyond Amara and the drug dealing and the hard cases with whom I’d surrounded myself. She had forgiven worse. The woman had nursed her dying father to a comfortable end despite the things he’d done to her when she was a little girl and the lasting damage the molesting and beatings had left.
A few days before we turned Luther’s farm into the OK Corral, I lost her.
I’d always considered myself impervious to easy detection, at least by Irina, since I conducted most of my business during the day while she was at school and busy looking after her misanthropic, alcoholic mother. We were also estranged and, like most men in their flagrant failure to understand their lovers, I equated distance and space with unloving. I vastly underestimated her heart.
One afternoon, Irina skipped class.
She was studying to be an elementary school teacher. When she had gotten sober, she’d moved in with her mother to go back to school. She’d aced all her papers and tests and never missed a lecture, that is, until the day she couldn’t stand the worry any longer, wondering what trouble her degenerate, junkie, on-and-off again paramour might had brought down on himself.
She followed me from the Hihglands to Anchorage where Luther lived.
The day she realized why I had been missing in action so often since our last falling out, why I never called or answered her texts, Irina was shot to death, gunned down to a pulp right in front of me with a massive .357 hand cannon right in the middle of Luther Longmire’s dining hall. Luther’s courtesan cousin held the gun and laughed while Irina bled out.
“Luther and his house cleaning,” said the bent cop who served for years as Luther’s bodyguard and first lieutenant, the same crooked police that helped me take him down. “He does this every few years and I can’t watch anymore. People who didn’t need to die have, all because we serve a mentally deranged master. And this time will be worse. The heroin has him spooked. I knew we should have stuck with weed. You can sell that shit for a hundred years and never have to take a life, if you’re careful.” There were times when I wondered how the detective had kept his day-job since he seemed to work twice as hard at brokering assassinations and coordinating cash drops and heroin re-ups than he did interrogating suspects, serving warrants, or conducting sting operations. “Or I should say, with anyone but Luther…Luther and his goddamn mood swings. One day he just ups and authorizes the executions of anyone he think might rat or try to replace him. I suppose I’m lucky he kept me around. Maybe I should be more grateful than to back-shoot him. But I know, one day, when spring=cleaning time cycles back around, I’ll be on the hit list. I’m the biggest liability he has. I know enough to send that man to federal prison for seven lifetimes.”
So we gathered an arsenal and we drove out to Luther’s farm in Oldham County where he had holed up until he’d gathered the heads of all those he felt might threaten the sustenance o
f his sadism.
We let the Mexican farm hands go free. Those unarmed, that is.
We killed everyone else, all of them except Amara who we tied up and threw in the back of the van. I don’t know why we didn’t shoot her on sight. I suppose, despite her trespasses, executing a woman was something we considered beyond the moral pale.
“We’ll figure out what to do with her after we clear out,” the sergeant had said.
I already knew how I’d cast my vote.
We cracked the safe in Longmire’s office and found nearly one and a half million dollars, which we divided evenly between the three of us. We loaded up as many kilos as we could fit into the van. Then, with a lot of gasoline and what was left of the C-4 our Russian comrades-in-arms had contributed to the siege, we torched the place, hoping that the burnt bodies would stall the police in identifying Longmire and buy us some time to get our stories straight were we ever approached by some crusading narcotics cop or a homicide detective or the DEA.
We didn’t anticipate how quickly the KSP could pressure the lab boys and coroners from Frankfort to rush the process.
We drove to an abandoned rest stop a few miles east where I handed over the keys to my business to Paul Frank, my longtime manager, and told him the place was his.
In the cab, we had briefly discussed the woman’s fate. The vote was unanimous
I pulled Amara from the van, let her cry and lie and beg a little.
Then I shot her in the face.
Now, a season later, here I was in Music City, U.S.A., still free, peddling heroin twice as strong as the batches I used to bring down from Illinois.
And, for the first time since I held Irina’s dead body in my lap, I was close to a beautiful woman, one I had long desired with an earnestness and innocence I thought I had forfeited to the loose, whiskey swilling hussies of the Highlands, to South Louisville juke joints and West End Jones men.
We had passed Printer’s Alley and the Batman building, both of which Catherine had included in the derelict Nashville street tour to which she’d treated her bedraggled chauffeur en route to the crowd that waited reverently outside the Sweetwater.
I’d told Catherine to proceed with her sound check unattended while I found a better parking space. I loaded her two guitars and various sound petals through the back entrance reserved for bar staff and entertainers.
The star attraction asked me if I was all right alone, after all the unfortunate half-truths I’d confessed on the ride down 65 from our bloody Ohio River home. “I’m better now,” I lied and tiredly formed my millionth fake smile of the month.
While I’d never seen the light that Hank Williams Senior sang of as he helped build this Country-Western Athens, I had certainly felt the heat.
The stars’ faded pupils peered through the neon twilight and I stared at Catherine with a poor man’s eyes. I’d probably die long before I could get around to letting her down or turning my back on her as I’d done so many bygone intimates who, in my darkest dreams, their warm faces offering nothing less than unconditional love and another soul to soil, still melted me with their glow.
Catherine removed her Stetson from my head, leaned into the van, and kissed me, a last loving gesture offered to a broken man clearly dying of some undiscovered and wasting disease. “Don’t miss the first song.” She dropped the Bobby Bare Stetson onto her crown and disappeared into the smoky dark of the Sweetwater.
While I turned the van back toward the highway and the irradiant arches of the Parthenon, two men in a rented Honda Civic with Ohio plates watched from the parking lot of the corner drugstore across the Nashville thoroughfare. The cornrowed Californian in the passenger bucket brought his work to a close, fitting 9mm hollow-point rounds into the two banana magazines that fit the submachine pistols hidden beneath the back seats.
“He’s leaving,” said the passenger’s partner from the driver’s seat. The elder snorted, swallowing his spit. He didn’t speak.
The younger said, “We been followin’ him since Louisville. We shoulda taken him there but the client didn’t want it done near the business and the motherfucker has been holed up in that bookstore all day. We coulda ran them off the road and done ’em on the side of the highway. Why the hell did we have to follow him all the way to fuckin’ Nashville?”
The elder scratched pensively at his gray-flecked goatee. “We didn’t get paid for two. We got paid for one. We do the girl too, we’re gonna have us a conflict with our man in West Louisville. He’s a cheap son-of-a-bitch and he won’t want to pay for the unexpected addition to his one-name hit list. We ain’t got him away from the store and by hisself yet. But it looks like we’re about to get our chance”
“I say we pull up on him now. Light him up in the parking lot and then head downtown so I can challenge some of these cracker motherfuckers to a karaoke showdown. Show ’em what real singing sounds like.”
The elder reminded his squire that, as with the shop off Bardstown Road, there were too many possible witnesses were they to take Catlett at the Sweetwater.
The engine turned over.
“Guess little corn fed bitch got lucky.” The younger popped his knuckles and glared at the cornpone white bread nightclub they’d allowed Catlett’s date to enter unmolested. “Lucky she dealing with some cheap-ass niggas.”
“She got lucky for tonight,” said the elder. “She wants to live to grow old, ofay bitch better start making better relationship decisions.”
1
I was back in town at the behest of my old partner and the two police detectives investigating a rash of homicides I’d helped commit. Fortunately, the LMPD homicide division only solves, on average, one out of every four murders. Essentially, you had to be a real stupid asshole to get caught killing someone in Louisville.
I’d rehearsed my story a dozen times on the three hour pilgrimage back from the Appalachian mountains where I’d been laying low with my extended meth-head family since the Dog Hill massacre.
I practiced aloud to the puppy mutt my cousin Dale had given me, one of about a dozen half-Chihuahua, half-Jack Russell Terriers to survive his bitch Dragona’s litter. The dog closely resembled a baby golden retriever, blonde with floppy ears that rose like antennas and betrayed her Chihuahua birthright whenever I spoke to her. Her eyes were outlined in black, as if she’d been provided a lifetime supply of naturally reapplying eyeliner at birth. She lay on her side, curled up in the floorboard of the passenger bucket, her gaze fixed unceasingly on her strange new caretaker. Back in Cumberland, my perpetually crotch-scratching cousins offered only free packs of crystal meth and hard liquor as an alternative to my malaise, offers I repeatedly turned to the great amusement of my hellion hosts: “Johnny’d rather have him one of them foo-foo drinks them fag bars in the city serve.” I’d decided long ago that if I were to commit suicide, this time I’d do it quickly with a gun or a hand grenade, and not prolong the process by diving head first into active addiction again and hoping for an overdose like the selfish scoundrel I’d been most of my life. Without the little dog’s companionship, I would have likely gone the way of the self-inflicted hollow point wound. She was more precious than most of what I’d lost to find her.
“Detective,” I said as we hit the mountain parkway, leaving Jackson, Hazard, and the rest of Eastern Kentucky behind for the city where I’d begun my larcenous learnings. “Detective, I only know what I know, bro.” I spoke in a lilt that I’d drop when going through the motions with the cops, affecting the sprightly lisped tone of a slightly lower registered Truman Capote. I could say anything to that dog and she’d wag her tail as long as I continued this inflection. “Irina…she had so much life left, Detective. She…I loved her so fucking much. I’m a lesser man without her in my life.” Saying her name caused me a hard, bitter swallow, the image of my departed paramour with half a head, crumpled like a drunkard’s suitcoat in the trunk of a muscle car. “Irina, listen, wherever you are.” I stopped talking to the fictional cops and spoke instead to t
he bitterest of my many dead. “I’m sorry.”
“Irina,” I said to the dog.
Then I realized, I had finally provided the puppy with a name.
“Irina. That’s it. The prefect name for a little angel. She would have been your mother, you know, and it stands to reason that you SHOULD have her name, by God. She would have adored you too, you vexing little minx.” I patted the passenger seat and Irina hopped up for me to scratch behind her ears the way she liked.
At least I knew now what to call the precarious little creature. I think even she was tired of hearing my yell, “Little doggy” or “hey, shithead.” I’d have to be sure not to call her by name around the investigators lest they question my soundness of mind. I wasn’t in the mood to fight a mental inquest warrant.
As I left route 15 and hit the Mountain Parkway, phone reception returned and my cell began ringing. After leaving Louisville, I’d tossed every burner but one, the number to which I’d texted a few old Louisville friends, in case someone died or the city sank into the Ohio River.
“Fuck you, Scotty,” I answered.
“Surprised this number still works.” Scott Morgan cackled like a consumptive brothel keeper. He had once considered himself a proud addition to the shiftless procession of dope fiends and inebriants wandering the streets of Louisville seeking truth and misadventure. We together enjoyed the low life of modern boulevardiers until the day Scott’s Marine General daddy ordered him to straighten up or expect a complete and swift severance from the family and the millions papa had accumulated leading poor young men to their violent deaths.
