“Oh, there’s a problem,” Sutter confirmed. “Turn around, hands flat out on the roof, and spread ’em. No sudden movements. Don’t fuck with me.”
“The fuck?” the white guy complained.
“Pipe down, Kid Rock,” Trey said, “or I’ll pipe ya down.”
The black guy glared. “I haven’t done anything wrong! You’re just shaking me down ‘cos I’m black!”
“Don’t give me that racist jive,” Sutter said back. “I don’t give a shit what color a man’s face is. The only kind of black man I call a nigger is a black man trying to sell crystal meth to kids.”
That was all the black guy needed to hear—“crystal meth”—before he realized he could either run his ass off or do three-to-five for possession and distro of Class II narcotics with another five tacked on for attempted distro to a minor. He chose to run his ass off.
Shit!
He bolted off the car. Sutter, since he was not exactly dextrous nor physically fit, being obese and close to sixty, managed to get a handful of T-shirt, which sufficed only to slow the guy down around the comer of the car, whereupon the T-shirt tore away.
As for Trey, he didn’t appear to even break a single bead of sweat when in some impressive synchrony he—
Whap!
—landed a solid fist right smack-dab into Kid Rock’s forehead, then—
“Holy Jesus, man, that hurts like a motherfucking motherfucker!”
—emptied half a can of GOEC-brand chemical spray into his eyes and bleeding, split-open face.
“Got ya covered, Chief,” Trey said next, sidestepping forward. He moved fast enough to cut off the black guy before he could get clear. Then—
Thud.
—palm-heeled him once in the solar plexus.
Which sufficed to circumvent the attempt to flee.
“Getcha a case of beer for that one, Trey,” Sutter said approvingly, then lumbered over. “You simmer down the long-hair while I read this suspect his rights.” The black guy was sprawled out belly-down on the pavement, bug-eyed, barely able to move. He was sucking wind. Sutter promptly stepped on the back of his head, treating his face to a little dermabrasion the hard way. The guy flip-flopped on the pavement, shrieking like a little girl who’d just been scared out of a carny house of horrors.
Kid Rock had managed to stop screaming long enough to make the very unwise decision to attempt to drive off. Hair hanging in blood-drenched strings, he jerked his hand forward, touched the keys in the ignition, was about to start the car, when—
“Holy Jesus, mother of God, you gotta be fuckin’ shitting me!”
—Trey emptied the rest of the GOEC into his eyes.
Sutter dragged a dozenish bags of crystal methamphetamine, aka “ice,” out of the black guy’s pockets, not to mention a pipe, and—of all things—a 1964 Topps Mickey Mantle baseball card. Sutter pocketed the card, then allowed the point of his steel-toed black oxford to come into direct proximity with the area of space that was occupied by the black guy’s scrotum. That took the rest of the zing out of him.
Finally got me another Mantle card for my collection . . .
The cowbell on the door clanged. Pappy Halm, a well-known Agan’s Point local and the store’s proprietor, hobbled out front, aghast. He clacked toward the scene on his cane and objected in his typical loud rail, “What the hell ya doin’ Chief? I seen ya in the winder! All that fella done is make a blamed phone call! What right ya got to beat him down like that?”
Sutter showed him a handful of ice. “This walkin’ piece a’ shit here and his hippie buddy are selling these hard drugs to kids. Just tried to sell some to a fifteen-year-old not five minutes ago.”
“Oh, yeah?” Halm replied, then cracked the end of his cane hard up into the black guy’s crotch. Now the guy was gasping, screaming, and blubbering all at the same time.
“Want me to cuff Kid Rock, Chief?” Trey asked.
“Naw.” Sutter dragged the black guy up. “If we write this one up and take ‘em to county detent, I’ll miss dinner. And you know how fierce the wife bitches at me when I miss dinner. Fuckers’d be out on bail in the time it takes me to fart.”
“Roger that.”
“But we better look the vehicle over. Check that guy’s pockets and under the seat.” Sutter opened the Humvee’s back door for a quick search. Jesus . . . He found a tackle box full of more ice. “Bet there’s a thousand bucks’ worth of dope in here,” he said.
Trey peeked between the front seats. “More’n that, by the looks of it. Just think of all the kids they’d be selling it to. And look at what the hippie was carryin’.” He held up a small pistol.
“Jesus. These guys.”
Sutter shoved the dizzy black guy back into the front seat, but before he closed the door—
Crack!
—he raised his fiberglass nightstick high over his head and whacked it down across the guy’s thigh. The thighbone snapped like a stout bough.
Trey whipped out his own billy. “A limp to remember us by. The same for this one?”
“Naw. He’s gotta drive. But I think a Southern-style haircut might do him justice. Fucker must think he’s in Lynyrd Skynyrd.”
Trey twirled a finger around a lock of Kid Rock’s hair, pressed his other hand against his head, and yanked as though starting a lawn mower. The kid barked a righteous yelp when a clump of hair popped out of his head along with a square inch of scalp.
Sutter’s temples pounded in sudden disgust as he looked at the shining vehicle and the gold chains on the wheezing black man. “It ain’t fuckin’ fair, ya know? I ain’t an ungrateful man, and I ain’t greedy either. But I got my problems just like any hardworkin’ man. Them two mortgages I was telling you about are bleedin’ me dry, car insurance just gone up again and so did county property taxes, not to mention the damned Ay-rabs keep jacking the price a’ gas. Got a wife that eats more than the Redskins defensive line, God love her, and who runs my credit cards up like she’s Bill fuckin’ Gates’s wife insteada the wife of a small-town police chief, and now the blasted AC up ’n’ broke, so that’s gonna cost me out the ass . . . so I am pinched to the max. I’m so broke I can barely pay fuckin’ attention, and then look what we got here.” He glared intensely at the shuddering black guy and his accomplice. “We got two piles of walkin,’ talkin’ garbage wearing gold jewelry and drivin’ a brand-new Hummer, and how’d they get the kind of bread for all that?” He looked at the bags of crystal meth. “By sellin’ this shit. Yes, sir, these pieces a’ shit live large and got enough cash to choke a fuckin’ horse, and what do I got? Enough debt to choke a fuckin’ horse.” He slammed the Humvee door, made a fist of his right sand mitt, and said directly to the black guy, “We don’t take kindly to people sellin’ drugs in our town, so listen up.”
He pinched the guy’s cheeks together. “You ‘n’ your buddy are gonna turn this jalopy around and drive outta here, and you ain’t gonna stop till you’re plumb out of this county, and you’re never, and I mean never, gonna come back here again, and if we ever, and I mean ever, see you anywhere near Agan’s Point in the future—”
Whap!
He rammed his sand mitt right into the guy’s mouth.
“—we might have to rough ya up a little.”
The black guy was spitting out teeth. Kid Rock convulsed behind the wheel, backing the Hummer up and spinning wheels out of the lot.
Trey rubbed his hands together. “All in a day’s work, huh, Chief?”