A fool gives full vent to his anger, but a wise man keeps himself under control.
—Proverbs 29:11
There had been six felony property thefts down the parkway over the past three weeks. Most of the stolen items were unsecured marine equipment, taken off boats and docks, big-ticket items like depth finders, radars and radios, a few trolling motors and outboard motors. Even a canoe, two kayaks, and a small wooden rowboat had gone missing. In addition, three misdemeanor thefts of the same kind of stuff, only of lesser value—tackle boxes, life vests, water skis, fishing rods, batteries, oil and gas cans, coolers, even tow ropes and mooring lines—had been taken from piers, boathouses, and gazebos along the same stretch of Dog River. And an alert citizen had reported seeing Wesley Colt driving what turned out to be a stolen John Deere lawn tractor down Riverside Drive yesterday morning.
All had occurred on the east side of the river and along that side’s bayous and slues, all within a half mile of where Riverside Drive and Gill Road converge before dead-ending at the water’s edge.
That alone—the location—was all I needed to know. Just past the Riverside/Gill convergence is the home of Little Ricky Stedman, seventeen, and his mama with the lazy eye who’s not all there. She hasn’t been right in the head, it’s said, since her husband, Little Ricky’s daddy Big Rick Stedman, had died in a fiery motorcycle wreck several years ago.
Big Rick had been a legendary wildman on the parkway. Though well liked and gifted with a wrench (he could build, fix, and race anything with two wheels, four wheels, or an outboard), Big Rick didn’t leave his wife or Little Ricky much when he was cut down in his prime, so they took in boarders to make ends meet.
There was an ever-changing cast of drifters, grifters, dope addicts and slingers, thieves, tramps, and layabouts taking up temporary residence at the Stedman place, 3656 Riverside. They would hang around until the heat was on, we busted them, or they were run off by their own kind, only to be replaced by newcomers, or returnees who had done their time in Metro and had been released to wreak more havoc down the parkway.
Little Ricky’s mama’s house is, as you’d expect, a wreck, but the acreage it occupies is prime, graced with towering old live oaks in the front and a hundred feet of waterfront in the back. Many of the neighbors’ homes, on both sides of the Stedman place as well as across the bayou behind it, still command high six figures and are equipped with all the pricey toys that go along with that lifestyle, despite the gradual but unremitting decline of the parkway.
A few short decades ago, the parkway had been one of the more prosperous, thriving commercial and residential areas of Mobile. The first blow was LBJ’s closure of Brookley Field (home of twenty thousand good-paying aircraft fabrication jobs) shortly after Barry Goldwater carried Mobile in the ’64 election. The final blow was the hurricane that took out the bridge at the bottom of the parkway, from Hollinger’s Island to Belle Fontaine. This disaster had rendered the arterial’s very name a misnomer, as you could no longer get to Dauphin Island by taking Dauphin Island Parkway. The lifeblood of the area was pinched off to a trickle, and blight, neglect, decay, and crime set in.
So now the parkway is a mix of vacant, abandoned, overgrown houses collapsing in on themselves as daily they are pillaged by copper thieves and squatters; modest, formerly tidy working-class neighborhoods that have become rundown pockets of federally subsidized housing favored by dope slingers and small-time gangsters; boarded-up businesses and empty strip malls sprinkled with second-tier chains and franchises like Burke’s Outlet, Citi Trends Clothing, Checkers hamburgers, Shop ’n Save groceries, and pawnshops; and opulent waterfront homes nestled among the live oaks with $50,000 sailboats, trawlers, and yachts moored at their piers out back. A thief’s paradise.
The most frequent boarders at the Stedman place are the Colt boys: Travis, twenty-one, and his brother Wesley, eighteen. Both are driven by fierce addictions and criminal inclinations, limited only by their modest intellects. The Colt boys stay at the Stedman place when banned (at regular intervals) by Grandma from the Colt family homestead on Gill Road, about a mile east of the Stedman place. Grandma Colt’s daughter Brandy, in her late thirties, and Brandy’s daughter Candy, nineteen, also reside there. Brandy and Candy are mother and sister, respectively, to the Colt boys. There’s also another guy, Andy Colt, who is maybe a little older than Brandy and also appears to live at Grandma Colt’s place. Andy keeps to himself, and the rest of the family doesn’t seem to have much to do with him, either, but I always see him sitting on Grandma Colt’s front porch or puttering around the yard when I drive by, and I see him walking around by himself a lot. Rumor has it he’s a half-wit, but he doesn’t look mongoloid or anything, and he’ll say a sentence or two if you address him directly. Various accounts of the half-wit Andy have him as cousin or brother or nephew of somebody in the Colt clan. Whatever he is, Andy Colt’s not a criminal, but he’s not all there, either.
The mother-daughter team of Brandy and Candy Colt, though conniving and clever enough to stay out of Metro (for the most part), is nevertheless driven by the same demons as Travis and Wesley. Brandy and Candy usually manage to escape arrest by ratting out Travis and Wesley (and anyone else with the bad luck or bad sense to pass through their orbit), though as often as not, all four are equal participants in criminal enterprises that are usually hatched by Brandy and Candy in the first place.
A case in point was the theft of the $23,000 cash life savings of a sad old terminally ill alcoholic in the last month of his wretched life who had the additional misfortune to reside directly across Gill Road from the Colt clan. Brandy and Candy insinuated themselves into homebound Fletcher Gibbs’s life by walking Gibbs’s crippled old bulldog, Sarge, providing light housework and meal prep, running to the ABC state store and the Rite Aid to replenish his stocks of Crown Royal and Lortabs, and occasionally performing fellatio.
The girls introduced Travis and Wesley and Candy’s then-husband, Troy, into the mix by convincing ol’ Fletch that the boys’ collective expertise in auto repair, home maintenance, and landscaping was critical to his well-being and to the value of the estate he’d be leaving his grown and distant heirs upon his imminent passing due to liver disease. Fletcher Gibbs’s physician had estimated he had no more than six months to live and told him to get his things in order. Fletch’s idea of getting things in order was to close his checking and savings accounts so as to keep a close eye on the $23,000 that he kept in fat wads of fifties and hundreds within arm’s reach, under the cushion of his Lazy Boy recliner where he spent his days and nights drinking blended whiskey, chain-smoking Pall Malls, and watching old cowboy movies on the Turner Classic cable channel.
When Fletch came to one morning and discovered the cash gone, he still had enough sense to suspect the Colts but couldn’t be sure which one and had no proof. The clerks at the state store and the Rite Aid confirmed to me that Brandy and Candy had been buying way more than their usual lately and paying for it all with crisp fifties and hundreds. The old parkway dope slinger Roosevelt Jenks, a favorite supplier of Travis and Wesley, confided to me that the brothers had recently been coming to him flashing rolls of Benjamins and acquiring his entire inventory every few days. And Candy’s husband, Troy, had been seen wheeling around the parkway in a new (to him) ’06 midnight blue Dodge Charger with dark tinted windows, fancy rims, and a paper dealer tag on the back. The owner of the car lot where Troy bought his muscle car recalled that Troy paid $5,200 cash for it, in hundred-dollar bills.
Poor Troy never should have married into the Colt family. He’s the only one I was able to convict for the theft of the Fletcher fortune, because the Colts eventually put it all on him in written, signed, and sworn statements and convinced him to submit his own written confession to me. Troy told me he was doing so solely for the sake of his and Candy’s infant son.
“Troy Junior’s gonna need a family,” he said tearfully. “He won’t make it if we all go to jail for this,” he declared with a sniff of noble self-sacrifice. Shortly after Troy went off to prison, DHS found Candy to be unfit and placed Troy Junior in foster care.
I was unable to recover much for Fletch. Troy wrapped the Charger around a concrete pillar on his way back from the casinos in Biloxi, totaling the car just six days after he bought it. It netted $150 at U Pull It auto salvage, after the towing and impound fees. And Candy turned over seventeen hundred-dollar bills to me that she said she found in one of Troy’s hidey-holes.
When Fletch signed for the recovered cash, he was in a bad way. He told me his beloved Sarge had been missing for three days, and he was certain the Colts had kidnapped the crippled old hound. Fletch died a few weeks later, as much, I think, from sadness and despair as from cirrhosis and renal failure.
I had arrested Travis and Wesley several times in the past, and this latest rash of waterfront larceny had their names all over it. The Colt boys had been staying at Little Ricky’s place since Grandma Colt and Brandy and Candy had kicked them out after the Fletcher fiasco. (I had tossed Grandma’s place twice looking for Fletcher’s cash, and Granny’d had it with the boys.)
I head down the parkway and radio for backup to meet me at the intersection of Gill and Riverside. I have no plan other than to look around the Stedman property for a stolen John Deere or boating and fishing equipment, and to arrest anyone on the premises for it—preferably the Colt brothers.
Veteran patrolman Frank Black meets me at the spot, near the Stedman place but not visible from it. Frank has patrolled the Parkway for more than a decade, has busted the Colt boys and Little Ricky at least as many times as I have, and has written a couple of the recent theft reports himself; he knows what we’re there for.
“I walked up the driveway this morning when it was still dark, right after roll call,” Frank says. “Didn’t see any drivable cars around, so might not be anybody home. But that John Deere’s parked up there right by the front door, sorta behind some bushes, so you can’t see it from the street. Didn’t go around back ’cause the dogs started barking. If anybody was in the house, I didn’t wanna give ’em the opportunity to shoot me for a prowler. But I’m guessin’ we’ll find the boats and tackle back there along the bayou.”
“Right. Well, let’s just leave our cars here and walk on up there and knock on the door. If any of the boys answer, we hook ’em up. If Mama Stedman answers, we ask if we can come in to look for the Colt boys or Little Ricky. If nobody answers, we walk around back to see what we can see.”
“Sounds like a plan, boss,” Frank says.
There is no response to our knock on the door, other than the loud yaps, growls, and barks of the mutts inside. The John Deere is parked right where Frank had seen it; a busted left headlight and scratches in the paint on the mowing deck match the description from the report. We peer around the corner of the house and observe a yellow kayak, an aluminum canoe, and a wooden rowboat lying in the tall weeds along the bank of the bayou. A couple of blue tarps are also stretched over piles of unknown objects.
“Bingo,” Frank says. “Shall I start the Impound truck to come pick this stuff up?”
“Not just yet,” I reply. “C’mon, let’s just walk back down the driveway like we think nobody’s home. I wanna see if they come out after they think we’re gone.”
At the end of the driveway, no longer visible from the house, I tell Frank to wait for me there while I walk down the neighbor’s driveway and peek through the slats of the fence to see if there’s any movement from the house. I’ve done this before; the neighbors keep no dogs and they both work, so I can creep along their fence line undetected. I see no movement in the Stedman front yard. I continue around the neighbor’s house to the backyard to get a look through the fence at the rear of the Stedman place. As I round the rear of the neighbor’s house, I catch a glimpse of movement out of the corner of my eye and see a palmetto leaf waving among thick flora. I draw my weapon, approach the palmetto, and spy a blue-jeaned leg sticking out of the hedge row.
“Let me see your hands and come on out slowly. Is it Wesley or Travis?”
“Don’t shoot, Detective Johnson, I’m comin’ out. It’s Wesley. Don’t shoot, sir. I’m not gonna run or anything.”
I cuff Wesley and pat him down, and we walk down the neighbor’s driveway toward Frank.
“Why are you hiding under a bush in your neighbor’s backyard, Wesley?”
“I was just scared, Detective Johnson.”
“No need to be scared of the police unless you’ve done something wrong. What have you done wrong, lately, Wesley?”
“Nothin’, Detective Johnson. I just ran outta habit, I guess.”
“Wouldn’t have anything to do with that John Deere in your front yard, or the boats in the back?”
“What? Whaddaya mean, Detective? I don’t know anything about any of that. It must be Little Ricky’s stuff, or his mama’s. It’s their place, Detective. I don’t even live here, really. We just came over to chill, and maybe smoke a blunt, I’m bein’ honest. I admit I smoke a little weed, Detective Johnson, I won’t lie to ya.”
“Who’s ‘we’? You said ‘We just came over to chill.’ Is Travis in the house?”
“Huh? Did I say we? I don’t know who’s in the house. I just got here before you showed up, and when I saw you I ran. I don’t even know who’s inside.”
We meet up with Frank out by the road and put Wesley in the cage.
“Stay here with him, I’m gonna take one more look through the neighbor’s fence.”
I return to my first spot with a pretty good view of the Stedman front yard just in time to see Brandy Colt emerge from the house with Travis. She’s telling him to hide in the rafters of the detached garage. I run back down the neighbor’s driveway, tell Frank what I’ve just seen. We jump in his car with Wesley in the cage and roar up the Stedman driveway. Frank pounds on the front door while I check the garage for Travis.
To my surprise, he’s not in there. Brandy comes to the door acting like she’s just woken up and doesn’t know what’s going on.
“Don’t gimme that shit, Brandy. I was on the other side of that fence just five minutes ago and I saw you telling Travis to hide in the garage. So where is he?”
“Okay. I’m sorry, Detective Johnson. But if he’s not in the garage, I really don’t know where he is.”
“Mind if we check the house, Brandy? If he’s not in the garage, he’s in the house.”
“Go right ahead, Detective. He’s not in the house. I just came out of there. But feel free to search inside all you want. Just let me go inside and get the dogs out first.”
“Right. How stupid do you think I am, Brandy? I’ll come in with you for the dogs. Frank, go around and cover the back—I don’t think Wesley’s gonna try to kick out your rear window and escape.”
“Let’s just make sure,” Frank says, and walks over to his squad car, puts a pair of shackles around Wesley’s ankles, and straps him in with the seat belt. He mutters something to Wesley that Brandy and I can’t quite hear, but Wesley’s assurances that he “ain’t about to try anything stupid, Officer Black, sir” are clearly audible.
Frank disappears around the corner of the house to cover the back. As Brandy and I enter the house I tell her, “You better control your animals, Brandy, or I’ll shoot ’em, I swear.” (A lie. I think I’d hate to shoot a dog, even an aggressive one, more than a person.)
The dogs who’d sounded so fierce and berserk earlier seem to consider me no threat when Brandy accompanies me inside. I toss the place pretty thoroughly, checking under every bed, inside every closet, even looking in the attic, the kitchen cabinets, the clothes dryer, and kicking my way through a waste-high mountain of smelly dirty clothes. No Travis. I did, however, make a mental note of the bong, some seeds and stems, and a glass crack pipe in plain view on the kitchen table.
We exit through the backdoor, and Frank and I check under the kayak, the canoe, and the rowboat in the tall weeds down by the water. Mired in the muck next to the bulkhead is a small, half-sunk sailing sloop that’s been there since before Big Rick died. I step on board and shine my flashlight into its water-filled cabin. No Travis. Under the tarps, as expected, are outboard and trolling motors, marine electronics, life vests, tackle boxes, coolers, batteries, rods and reels and coils of rope, but no Travis.
I’m losing my patience. We check around all the overgrown clumps of shrubbery along both property lines and finally return to the front of the house. Wesley’s still in the cage, and when I ask him about their hiding places, he only suggests places we’ve already checked. Brandy, of course, has no idea where Travis could have gone, nor how all that stuff in the backyard got there or who it belongs to; she feigns exasperation with her mischievous boys, remarking, “It looks like they’ve been up to no good again.” She’s become a chatterbox as, one by one, all the obvious hiding places turned out empty. She’s not very effectively concealing her relief (or pride?) that her eldest has eluded capture.
“I guess he musta just ran off, Detective Johnson,” she offers brightly. “I don’t know how he dipped out so quick, but I promise you, when I see him I’ll make him turn himself in to you.”
“You will, Brandy? You’d do that for me?” I say.
“I swear I will, Detective.”
“But I don’t think you’ll be seeing Travis anytime soon, Brandy.” I grab her forearm and slap a cuff on her wrist. “Turn around for me, please. You’re under arrest for Hindering Prosecution.” I put the cuff on her other wrist as she wriggles and twists, sputtering, “What? What the fuck? Wait just a goddamn minute here! ‘Hindering’? This is fuckin’ bullshit!”
“Stop buckin’ on the detective,” Frank warns, “or he’ll add the Holy Trinity: Resisting Arrest, Disorderly, and Failure to Obey.”
“Not to mention the paraphernalia, weed, and rock on the kitchen table,” I add. “Go ahead and put her in the cage with Wesley, Frank.”
“Hell, no you ain’t, motherfucker! You got nothing on me! That shit in the kitchen ain’t mine! I don’t even live here! This is Little Ricky’s place! You ain’t got shit on me! This is fuckin’ bullshit!”
Frank pushes and pulls her to the squad car and opens the rear door. Even Wesley, cuffed, shackled, and strapped up in the cage, is yelling, “Mom! Stop it, Mom! You’re makin’ it worse! Just tell ’em where Travis is!”
“Hold up a minute, Frank,” I say. Then, to Brandy: “I’ll give you one more chance. Produce Travis in five minutes, or you’re going to Metro with Wesley.”
She starts yelling, “Travis! Traaa-visss!” It’s ear piercing, her wail. “Travis, get your thieving ass here, now! Or they’re takin me to jail! Traaa-visss, you motherfucker don’t you dare put me in jail, you little bastard! Traaa-visss! I’m gonna beat your punk ass with a shovel if you don’t come here right nowww!”
Even Wesley joins in, from the cage: “Travis, I’monna kick your chickenshit ass if you let Mama go to jail! Traaa-vis!”
They keep it up for the full five minutes. I time it with my watch. I didn’t really think it would work, but Frank and I got a kick out of the pathetic display.
I tell Frank to go ahead on to the precinct with them. He drives off with a load of Colts in his cage, and I walk down the long driveway to fetch my car on Riverside Drive, pissed at myself for letting Travis get away.
Just as I turn the ignition and start to roll, I picture one place I failed to check, where Travis might be hiding. It’s a long shot, but I radio Frank to tell him to circle back to the driveway and wait for me while I look in one more place out back. Then I retrace my steps down the driveway, around the house, and to the waterline.
I hop onto the top of the sunken sloop’s cabin and step to the far edge, on the bayou side. Peering over the side, I look down into the murky water. To my shock—and his—I’m looking directly down into his face. Just his face, that’s all that’s visible. He sitting or squatting in the mucky bottom of the bayou, all but his face concealed in the brown water, his head cocked back so he can breathe, the water forming a ring around his chin, cheeks and forehead, so that his face looks like a floating Mardi Gras mask.
For a moment we just stare at each other, motionless, speechless. Then I draw my Glock and point it directly between his eyes as he slowly rises from the muck, both hands up. He had been crouching in water that barely reaches his waist when standing.
“Don’t shoot, Detective Johnson. I surrender. Please, put the gun down.”
“Step around the boat and come on out of the water,” I say. “Don’t do anything stupid.” I feel the old adrenalin kick in. The thrill of victory. The rush of apprehension. Only, it’s heightened, literally and figuratively, by my elevated position several feet above him on the dry white cabin roof of the sloop, in my charcoal gray suit and tie, my badge on my belt, in my polished black boots, poised in the ready-fire position, weapon trained on his center mass, as he unsteadily, haltingly emerges beneath me from the black primordial ooze.
The moment’s all the sweeter precisely because it has taken so long to get here. We’ve been at this for more than two hours now since I first nabbed Wesley under the neighbor’s palmetto. Then my sneaky spying on Brandy and Travis through the fence, all the searching, all the stolen loot recovered, the bonus bust of Brandy, with all its high-volume drama, and then, finally, when lesser men might have called it good, called it a day—and a good day it had been with two felony arrests and thousands of dollars in recovered stolen property—I go the extra mile, acting on instinct, on a wily hunch, switching from the mind of the predator to the prey to visualize the unlikeliest concealment, divining the ultimate hideaway, and make the collar!
I feel like Dirty Harry Callahan. I square my jaw and affect the Clint Squint.
“Please, Detective Johnson,” Travis whines as he struggles to free himself from the sucking muck. “Just put the gun down, I surrender. Look, I’m trying to get to the shore.”
“I’ll put my gun away when I put the cuffs on you,” I growl, Clint-like.
But then Travis pauses. I can see the wheels turning in his scheming criminal mind. He takes a step back, away from the shore, away from the sunken sloop.
“Don’t shoot, Detective Johnson. I’ve got my hands up.”
I can hear the synapses popping in the limbic system of his reptilian brain. Slowly he steps backward, away from the shore, away from me. Into the depths of the channel he retreats, the water slowly rising, now above his waist, all the while intoning, almost chant-like, “Don’t shoot, Detective. I surrender. Don’t shoot.” He keeps creeping away from me into the bayou, his hands still up in the air.
“Don’t be stupid, Travis!” I bark. “Come back this way, now!” My mind is racing. The conniving little shit knows I can’t shoot him, not under these circumstances. For me to take a legal shot, he’s gotta be a threat to me or somebody else. He’s clearly no threat, he’s just a petty thief, and he’s getting away. And he’s betting I won’t come after him. Is that the little curl of a smirk I see forming on his lips?
“Don’t shoot, Detective Johnson,” he says, in the soothing, almost singsong voice one might use with a snarling dog behind a fence. The little fucker’s not worth ruining my suit and boots over, that’s for damn sure. I’ve left my damn radio in the car, so I grope for my cell to call Frank and tell him to drive around to the other side of the bayou, where Travis is headed. The adrenalin is at full throb now, and I fumble with my gun-free left hand for the pesky little device.
Splash.
My cell disappears into the watery murk. I look back to Travis, now midstream and grinning broadly as he starts to backstroke away. He still calls out to me, “Don’t shoot, Detective.” In a fury, I decide to make a dash for my car in order to race around to the other side of the bayou myself. I slam the Glock into my holster.
Blam! A gunshot!
Instinctively, I crouch and scan my perimeter 360 degrees, then look back at Travis, who has stopped mid-stroke, equally stunned by the shot, trying to make sense of it. He raises both hands in the air. Where did the shot come from? It was fucking close! Loud as hell!
Then I smell the gunpowder and look down. There’s a hole in the roof of the sloop’s cabin, barely an inch from my right foot. Then I see my tattered pant leg. From the bottom of my holster, there’s a ragged tear about six inches long, aligning directly with the hole by my foot.
My Clint Squint turns into a bug-eyed look of horror and shame. I have become Barney Fife.