Crystal Meth Cowboys

by John Knoerle

  CRYSTAL METH COWBOYS

  by

  John Knoerle

  Copyright © 2003 by John R. Knoerle.

  All rights reserved.

  Cover designed by John Nguyen.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Published by Blue Steel Press.

  Chicago, IL

  bluesteelpress@att.net

  johnknoerle.com

  ISBN 978-0-9820903-2-9

  This is a work of fiction.

  Other books by John Knoerle

  The Violin Player

  The American Spy Trilogy:

  Book One, A Pure Double Cross

  Book Two, A Despicable Profession

  Book Three, The Proxy Assassin

  The author would like to express his gratitude to Deputy Mark A. Ward for his generous help in the writing of this book.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Epilogue

  Chapter 1

  "This has got to be the only housing development in America where the color scheme is based entirely on human waste," said Bell.

  "12 Frank - Control."

  Wes Lyedecker squinted to hear the dispatcher on the police band while the car radio played Junior Walker and the All Stars, the wind whipped white dust across the windshield as Bell hiked his voice into a hillbilly twang. "You got yer piss yella." Wes dutifully turned to observe the bright mustard tract house in the stark new housing development. He thought he'd heard '12 Frank'. His mind raced as he tried to remember their designation. One was their unit number, two was their beat, Frank stood for felony.

  Bell wheeled past a stucco house painted a ripe avocado. "This here's yer snot green."

  "12 Frank - Control."

  Bell's small head periscoped back and forth atop his seventy-six inch frame, scanning the geometric jigsaw of one-story homes. Wes turned to look at him. "I think the dispatcher is trying to call us, sir."

  Bell continued to cruise down the hall of mirrors, passing the same tract house, in different colors, on both sides of the street. They rounded a corner. The view was just the same. Bell rolled to a stop in front of a house with a just-seeded lawn and a tarp-covered speedboat in the driveway. The house shone a bright burnt umber.

  "Sir, I think I heard our unit number."

  Bell turned to Wes with a smile. With his watery blue eyes and mottled pink Scotch-Irish skin, he looked like a graying oversized elf. "Aaaand yer shit brown."

  Bell's smile vanished as he X-rayed his rookie with a look. "Don't ever step on your partner's punch lines. That's the first rule of police work."

  Wes, unable to gauge the ratio of jest to threat in this remark, managed only an "Oh."

  Bell plucked the mike off the police band with long, thick untapered fingers. He keyed on. "Control - 12 Frank."

  "12 Frank, barking dog. 3100 block of D-David."

  "Control, this is 12 Frank."

  "Sorry, 12. We're fresh out of felonies right now."

  Bell keyed his mike - the squelch of static was his sullen acknowledgement to the dispatcher - and hung a U-turn.

  Lyedecker peered out at the parade of stucco houses. They were good size, set back from the street, most had well-tended lawns and flower beds. But Wes thought they looked temporary somehow.

  The LTD Crown Victoria turned right on Playa Road, a commercial artery that formed the southern border of Wislow. They passed a Burger King and a Circle J Mini-Mart advertising gas for $1.12 a gallon. "You must be pretty shit hot to get accepted from an Academy that's out of state."

  Wes suppressed a prideful grin. "I guess my degree helped a bit."

  Bell waggled his eyebrows lasciviously. "You're a college boy."

  Wes nodded. "I majored in police science."

  "Oh my stars and garters," said Bell, taking his foot off the accelerator and fixing his watery stare on Lyedecker for a full five seconds. They were still moving forward and Wes wanted to watch the road, but he didn't turn away from Bell's stare. Just before they reached the intersection, Bell turned back to the road, braked and said, "I am sincerely fucked."

  -----

  The squad car nosed past the cottonwood trees that lined D Street. The wind whipsawed their branches, flashing the shiny undersides of their leaves. Bell and Lyedecker pulled to the curb in the 3100 block. This neighborhood was older, modest wood frame houses with detached one-car garages. Both officers cranked down their windows and listened to the sounds of late afternoon.

  "I don't hear any dogs barking," said Bell. "You?"

  Wes listened intently but heard only the eager rattle of the wind and Martha and the Vandellas. "No. I guess not."

  Bell flung a long arm out into the wind, his palm splayed outward. "This heah's whut you call a sundowner," he said in a deep Georgia drawl. "It comes away offa the desert 'bout five o'clock and makes the locals vera twitchy, vera twitchy." A brown leaf scuttled across the hood of the car. The wind pinned it under the arm of the windshield wiper where it struggled to break free. Wes blinked dust from his eyes. "The river acts like a carbuerator in this situation, sucking hot air through the mountains. It's called the…something effect, I forget. Anytime you squeeze air through a narrow aperture it accelerates." Bell let the warm dry air bathe his palm. "Venturi. It's called the Venturi effect." He grabbed a white card from the metal clipboard mounted on the dash and held it out for Lyedecker. "Your first MS card. Kind of a special moment."

  Wes took the Miscellaneous Service card and studied it. In the line marked 'Complaint', he carefully printed 'barking dog' in the boxy style drilled into him at the Academy, recalling how it made him feel like a first grader to endlessly draw square letters inside the plastic stencil. He recorded the location, the beat number, the sector number, his name and ID number. When he reached the line marked 'Disposition' he turned to Bell. "What was our response?"

  Bell pondered a moment, then cranked his cheeks into an idiotic grin. "I'd say it was jackshit!"

  Wes printed in big block letters.

  "Hey," said Bell, snaking out a rawboned arm. He read the card and chortled. "Very funny. The Emperor will be tres amused."

  Wes, his cuff case digging into his lumbar, shifted his gunbelt with a creak of leather. He wanted to write another MS card now, fill it in properly in neat block letters. But he didn't guess he could.

  "Say 'Park my car in the Harvard yard.'"

  "Pahk my cah in the Hahvard yahd."

  Bell thrust his tongue under his upper lip. His gray-brown mustache bulged as he ran his tongue up and back. "Boston, thought so."

  "Braintree actually," said Wes.

  "How in the hell'd you pick Wislow?"

  "Well, it's California, it's near the beach, it's about as far away from home as I could get…"

  "And you didn't want to get your ass shot off in some urban hellhole."

  Wes shook his head. "I just wanted to start small. Someplace where I could make a difference."

  Bell shifted in his seat and looked across the street. A young girl with impossibly skinny legs chased her little brother around the lawn of a small white house. The little boy took refuge under the sparse dome of a dwarf lemon.

  Bell clicked on the oldies station in time
to catch the closing bars of Under the Boardwalk. He chuckled to himself, shaking his shaggy locks. "Braintree."

  They motored back toward Playa Road. White alders and live oaks towered from back yards. Cottonwoods flanked the sidewalks. Wes thought there was something spiky about the trees here. Bell rolled through a stop sign and turned right. An olive tree shaded the corner. Wes examined it as they passed. The leaves looked thick and greasy.

  "So these cops at a Southern California beach community…"

  "Which one?" demanded Wes. He had decided Bell's odd behaviour must be some kind of hazing ritual and he wanted to show he could stand up to it.

  "I can't tell you."

  "Why not?"

  "Because you're low scrotum on the totem!" said Bell, turning west on Playa Road. "So these cops are assigned day shift after working graves. They go out the night before their new shift for a little choir practice. What the fuck else you gonna do? You can't sleep. So they go to the beach, get seriously shitfaced, one thing leads to another and about zero dark thirty they decide to take target practice on the lifeguard station." Bell took his hands off the wheel and held them up. "I'm not sayin' it was a good idea!" Bell flashed an apologetic grin as he returned his hands to the wheel at the ten and two positions. "But they pumped about sixty rounds into that lifeguard station."

  Bell slowed for a signal at J street. A pigeon sat nestled in the red light cylinder. Bell stopped a full car length behind the '72 Chevy Caprice in front. "Never pull up close. Always leave yourself room to swing around." Bell resumed his story. "So they show up at briefing the next morning, screwed, blued and tatooed, and the duty officer says there was an 11-44 on the beach last night. Dead Hispanic Male." Bell scoped left and right and ran the red light.

  "Wellll now. Everybody looked at everybody else, several o'ccers soiled themselves, and they were about to confess to involuntary manslaughter when one of the cops runs in waving a teletype back and forth like a checkered flag and says…". Bell leaned over and whispered hoarsely, "’It's OK, it's OK. He was stabbed!’"

  The SWACK of of Bell's huge hand on the dashboard caused Wes to leap forward, locking his shoulder belt and bouncing him back onto the seat. The LTD Crown Victoria passed a paint store, a massive Municipal Pool building and Miss Muffet's Cafe. A sign in the window read 'Air Cooled'. "That's a safe house there," said Bell.

  Wes nodded like he knew what safe house meant. They rolled on toward the ocean, past the city government complex, two stories of sand-colored, windowless stucco that housed the police department. The roof was fringed with red tile in a low-budget attempt at Spanish Colonial.

  Bell decelerated, peering ahead. "It's amazing, isn't it?"

  Wes followed Bell's look but saw nothing of note. "What is?"

  "You pave some streets in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, throw up a couple of strip malls, and he appears."

  Wes again scanned the street. "Who?"

  Bell slowed to a crawl and pointed a long white index finger. "Esteban No Middle Name Rodriguez."

  Lyedecker looked up the block a good fifty yards and saw two Hispanic males standing on the sidewalk. "I don't know who the one with the hair is…" Bell referred to a Latino with a mop of black hair so thick it looked like a fright wig. "But the other one's Estebang."

  The unit crept closer. The two men made a great show of ignoring them.

  "He beat the livin' dogsnot out of his mother," said Bell. "But che was maddoggin' heem, mang. Che was gibing heem the evil eye, the ojo malo! And of course Mama would never testify against her little nino. So we ran him out of town."

  "How'd you do that? Threaten him?"

  "No," said Bell. "We didn't threaten him. We threw him in the back of a squad car, drove down to the Greyhound, handcuffed him to a bus seat and gave the driver the cuff key and a one-way ticket to Tijuana." Bell eased the squad car to the curb. "It's taken him six months to weasel his way back."

  Close-up, standing outside the car window that Bell told Wes to lower, Esteban Rodriguez vibrated with kinetic energy, black eyebrows flaring, cheek muscles clenching. He wore dirty chinos and an open yellow shirt. The T-shirt underneath stopped halfway down his narrow belly. His scalp was buzz cut except for a fringe of hair that fell forward on his brow. When he bent down to the car window, Wes sensed he had to struggle to keep from springing erect. Rodriguez looked past Lyedecker to Bell. "Officer, officer, officer, officer," he said.

  "Back in town, I see," said Bell, leaning over for some serious eye contact.

  Esteban stepped back, glanced left, glanced right, and shrugged. "Looks like it, mang."

  The guy with the hair squelched a laugh. Esteban bugged his eyes out and grinned. Though he kept his torso still, Wes noted that his feet were pivoting.

  Bell cocked his hand like a gun and pointed the barrel at Rodriguez. "Watch yourself," he said and punched the accelerator. The LTD gurgled, then lurched forward, bouncing their heads off the head rests. Rodriguez and his buddy fell about themselves laughing. "Fucking Ford," said Bell.

  They cut a fat hog down Playa Road. The roadside development thinned, giving way to five acre plots of strawberries on both sides of the road. A sheen of orange mist announced the approach of the Pacific Ocean.

  "Rodriguez looked like he was high," said Wes. "Should we have rousted him?"

  Bell worked his teeth over his lower lip. "Naw. We'll wait till he really fucks up." A woman in a Dodge Polara slowed when she saw them bearing down. Bell whipped around her in the number two lane. "That's the great thing about being a small town cop."

  Wes inhaled the familiar putrescence of marine air. "What is?"

  Bell dropped his voice a notch as he searched the skies. "You always get another at bat."

  -----

  The massive, dark green C-141B transport plane thundered a thousand feet overhead, the heat of its great engines bonding air into nitric acid in its wake, so close that Wes could make out rivets in the undercarriage. It seemed to pass by forever.

  Bell cocked his neck back and drank in the spectacle with shuddering glee. "Ohhh tu tu tu tu tu!" he said.

  The LTD sat parked on a dirt ag road alongside a kale field, a mile from the beach and the tip of the frayed elbow of central California that jutted out into the sea, creating a wind break for the tranquil beaches of Santa Barbara. Wes leaned up against the squad car. He raised the volume level of the talking brick on his gun belt in hopes of a call, though the jetwash smothered all sound. The giant plane banked west, heading back to McClintock Air Base and Missile Test Center for another touch and go.

  Lyedecker's pulse was slowly returning to normal after the adrenaline rush of his first code 3 response. Not sure who or what they were pursuing, Wes had snicked off the leather strap that locked the Smith and Wesson nine millimeter semi-automatic in his holster as they raced down Playa Road, the siren screaming. Then Bell brodied to a stop on an empty ag road to watch a plane pass overhead.

  Wes took in the spring green hills dashed with the lambent yellow of flowering bristle brush. A scarp of limestone cut across the final seaward hill like a sash. The ocean air eddied behind his ears, cooling him. The C-141 banked across the setting sun for a instant. Bell said, "Ewwwwww-hoo!" Wes shaded his eyes. The plane was too big to be graceful but, hanging just above the misty blue line of the horizon, the sun burning through the cockpit, it had a stolid majesty.

  "The amazing thing isn't that people rape, rob and kill each other. That homies shoot it out in hospitals, fathers fuck their own children," said Bell, locked on the plane like radar. "That shit's been goin' on since day one. The amazing thing is…" Bell gazed upon the C-141 with the blissful assurance of the saved. "…that something that big and complicated ever gets airborne."

  Wes shivered slightly in his short-sleeved shirt and watched the plane sink slowly behind the darkening mountains to the south.

  -------

  "Shouldn't we be out patrolling?" asked Lyedecker, peering into the plum-colored twilight. Forty-five minute
s had passed, the sun had set and Bell was adjusting the treble on Little Red Riding Hood as they sat by the kale field.

  "We are patrolling," said Bell. Sam the Sham sang, "Who's dat I see walkin' in dese woods?"

  "But we're just sitting here."

  "I'm patrolling my eyeballs up and down Playa Road," said Bell. "We're laying for Farmer John. He's due any minute." Bell continued before Wes could ask. "He's a test pilot at McClintock. Drives a black Corvette. Fur in excess of the posted limit."

  "Well, if you know who he is…"

  "Of course I know who he is!" said Bell, squinting his cheeks into polyps. "I got close enough to make his plates once."

  "Well, if you know his identity and you have observed him violating the speed limit, why don't you just mail him a ticket?"

  Bell eyed the rookie as if he had just lowered his pants and said he was lonesome. "Where's the sport in that?"

  Wes Lyedecker did not reply.

  Bell searched the glimmering outline of the distant road. "I just know we're gonna get a call." He clicked on the bawl-out speaker atop the unit, grabbed the mike and lowered his voice to a window-rattling basso profundo. "Here kitty, kitty, kitty," rumbled out over the kale field. Bell turned to Lyedecker. "That's what a six hundred pound canary says."

  Wes forced a grin. He scratched an ear that didn't itch. "Why do they call him Farmer John?"

  "12 Frank - Control"

  Bell seemed perversely pleased. "What did I just tell you?" He cranked the ignition and spun moist soil off the back tires. "Control - this is 12 Frank."

  Wes found that he really wanted an answer to his question, but felt the moment had passed. Bell pointed the unit east on Playa Road.

  Chapter 2

  "These are the low-income housing projects LBJ stuck us with during The Great Society," said Bell, using a Boston broken-jaw accent as he and Lyedecker strode down the ground floor walkway of a two-story apartment building. They passed a flower-patterned bedsheet hung from a curtain rod. Wes wiped spider silk from his forehead. A middle-aged black woman smoked a cigarette as she watched them from the end of the walkway.