Brother-Out-Law

By Eric Baysinger

When Garys wife is found dead of an overdose in her car, he turns to her brother to help him find out who her supplier was and to take care of the infant daughter she left behind. The two men are drawn into a web of corruption and custody battles that test them to their limit and reveal that their own previous relationship might not be as relegated to the past as they believed!

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Feb 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9781546230823

Eric Baysinger

Eric Baysinger is an Iowan transplanted to Pittsburgh. He is the author of five previous novels: “Nine Attempts” (2007), “brother-out-law” (2018), “Beck & Caul” (2019), “Your Middle Finger’s Sense of I” (March 2020), and “Mage in Motion” (October 2020). This is his first novella.

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Brother-Out-Law

Eric Baysinger

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© 2018 Eric Baysinger. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 02/24/2018

ISBN: 978-1-5462-3083-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-3082-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018902428

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and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

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For Kurt

1

G ary didn’t see the cops until they were right beside him. Their shoes were shiny, as black as their pants, and they made deep impressions in the long grass all around them. It had muffled their approach, which, as he glanced behind him, had been along an ambush line from the driveway right up to his back. Their squad car was mostly concealed by Gary’s pick-up, but parked so they could read its license plate and prevent its use in any escape attempt. The two men’s shadows fell over him. He gripped his hammer more tightly and squinted up at them from where he was nailing one 2x4 into a framework beside three other boards. He had one knee and one foot on the ground, a pretty good stance for taking off running.

The younger, fitter cop pointed at him. You Gary Wayne Lowe? His other hand wasn’t on his weapon, but it wasn’t idling around in his pocket either; it was ready, twitchy even. The older, heavier cop held his arms loose, but eyed Gary’s hammer, Gary himself, and the other workers on the crew of this home rehab, who kept a wary distance.

What do you want?

"Well, if you’re Gary Lowe, we’ve got bad news for you. So is that you or not?"

What’s the news?

The older cop, Officer Robinson, according to his name tag, spoke up. Sir, your wife has been found. I’m sorry to tell you she’s deceased.

Gary turned his gaze downward and beat shit out of the boards in front of him for a full minute. The cops took two steps back and waited until Gary fell on his ass and tossed the hammer aside. He stared at the splintered boards, picking up shards of wood and flinging them into the bushes that lined this part of the yard. You sure it’s my wife?

The younger cop, Officer Diehl, consulted a small notebook. Deceased was found in the front seat of a 2007 Chevy Cobalt, black with tinted windows, registered to one Ashlee Jo Sampson residing at 7301 Fleur Drive, trailer #25. Driver license photo matched the victim’s appearance. White female, born 01/09/1992, brown hair, brown eyes, 5' 9 in height, weight approximately 135 lbs." He closed the notebook.

Robinson crouched with a grunt. We’ll need you to confirm this was your wife, when you’re able. He seemed to want to pat Gary on the shoulder, but thought better of it.

Where’d you find her?

Walmart Supercenter on SE 14th. Way out on the edge of the parking lot. Employee noticed the car and became suspicious. Called 911 right away, but it was too late.

Sweat dripped off Gary’s forehead onto the brightly lit grass. It was somewhere in the low nineties, not much wind. What about my daughter?

Robinson nodded. She’s okay. Employee found her in a car seat in the rear of the vehicle. She’s been taken to Broadlawns. Thirsty and a little warm, but the car was found about eleven o’clock and the windows were down. She apparently slept right through it.

One month old. Just one fuckin’ month old and already a close call. Emma. I gotta go see her. Gary noticed that only his boss, Hank, was still in the front yard. The other workers, mostly Latino immigrants, had gone inside the house. He could see a few of them watching from the living room.

Hank walked over. Yeah, you take off, man. Go do what you gotta do. He pulled Gary to his feet and shook hands with both the cops. Thanks for comin’ by. You guys ever heard of Walter Wegman? Uncle of mine. He retired from the force about eight years ago.

Robinson nodded. Fine officer. Worked the west side.

That’s him. Tough motherfucker. Shot twice. Here and here. Hank pointed to one beefy thigh and the opposite shoulder. His long beard caught some of the chew he spat onto the lawn and he wiped it clean within one varnish-stained hand. You good to drive, Gary? Want me to take ya?

Gary shook his head.

Hot day, Diehl said. You been drinking? Beer or two maybe?

No, no, Hank ran interference. We got a good crew. I’m in recovery, so there’s no drinking on the job with me at all. Just, you know, this is bad news. You sure you’re good?

Gary tapped the keys in his pocket. I gotta grab my lunch bucket. He indicated the house and took off at a trot for the front door. It was shut but unlocked and he met Oscar in the living room. Two other Guatemalans and a white guy named Buck had retreated deep into the kitchen. All were keeping an eye on the scene outside, not even pretending to work.

What goin’ on, Gary? Oscar asked. Why the police here?

My wife’s dead.

Two of them crossed themselves and said something he didn’t catch.

You been here all day. We tell them if you want.

Nah, it’s okay. I’m not in trouble. Gary found his lunch bucket and what remained of the jug of iced tea he’d begun drinking right after breakfast. Ashlee had still been in bed when he left the trailer, but he got in a kiss on Emma’s forehead before taking off. He’d eaten two king-size protein bars on the way up SE 14th to I-235, then west to this job site on Kingman Boulevard, a 1930’s house the owners wanted torn up and reconfigured inside and out. Hank’s crew had been tearing out old walls, building new ones, expanding bedrooms and bathrooms or shoring up the floors since late June. They’d probably be here through mid-August at good money. Gary was grateful to Hank for the work. Subcontractors came in and out to do asbestos removal or electrical wiring, but Hank, Gary, and Oscar were constants.

Gotta finish that wall framing tomorrow. Rip out the 2x4 I busted up and replace it. Maybe pay Hank back for it. He shouldn’t have to foot the bill for me losin’ my cool like that. He’s a good guy. Ashlee wasn’t dead this morning. Now she is. Emma’s dead too. No, wait, she’s not dead. It’s hard to-

Gary? You okay? You not movin’.

Gary saw he’d become lost in thought while bending over to pick up his plastic jug. He stood up and went back outside. He almost headed right for his truck, but forgot where he was supposed to be going and then noticed the cop car behind his pick-up again. When he turned around, all three men were looking at him. He threw his stuff into the truck, took off his tool belt and tossed it on the passenger seat as well. You got me blocked in.

Diehl. Fat jerked his thumb at his partner and Fit headed toward the squad car. He stopped when he got even with Gary, sniffed around without even being subtle about it, and glanced inside the truck’s cab.

How come you haven’t asked how your wife died? You know something you should tell us?

Diehl, Robinson caught up. Leave him alone. There’s time for questions later.

How she died? Gary repeated.

Yeah. It’s like you already know somehow. Why is that?

A dozen answers would surprise Gary. Only one wouldn’t. He looked to Robinson.

Preliminary examination indicates an overdose of heroin. Not the first this year, of course. Not even the first of July, to tell you the truth.

Yeah. That’s the answer I was expecting. Ashlee started using again. This morning she was alive. She scored some ‘boy’ and now she’s dead. Gary walked around the front of his truck, got in, and started the engine. The cops sauntered back to their squad car and got out of his way. Somebody gave it to her. That’s the son of a bitch I’m gonna find and, whoever it is, that’s the son of a bitch I’m gonna kill.

2

G ary stuck carefully to the speed limit, stopped fully at every sign or red light, and used his turn signals. He even buckled up, although that meant digging among the fast food bags wedged between his seat and the console. From Kingman Boulevard up to University Avenue, then farther north past Drake’s campus where he and Ashlee had gone with her brother Spaz and his date to Senior Prom in 2010. Hickman Road led east to Broadlawns Medical Center where Emma was born. His and Ashlee’s first kid, Jesse, was also born there, in 2009. He was eight now. Ashlee knew his age like there was a stopwatch running continuously in her brain, but Gary had to think first and calculate. He tried not to think about Jesse and calculating the years of not actually being his son’s dad was painful, so he skipped that the way he’d skipped Old Mr. Simon’s algebra class.

Robinson and Diehl hugged his tail like they were tied to it, like Gary’s tailgate would fall down and bundles of heroin would start rolling out of the truck bed onto the hood of their squad car, each one worth a year in prison. He knew they could search his truck, strip him naked and get a whole fist up his ass without finding a gram of that stuff. He was less certain about the mobile home he and Ashlee shared. That was her domain and just like she had a stopwatch keeping track of Jesse’s exact age, she had a whole crew of mental employees with scanners and number pads strapped to their waists to monitor exactly how many diapers, ponytail holders, cans of Pepsi, and men’s boxer briefs were contained within the walls of their trailer. Each item had a GPS attached to it and inside Ashlee’s brain was a 3D display of each item’s real time location and motion. If she kept boy in their home, only she knew the perfectly-sized and impossible-to-find cranny it fit into.

Outward order was Ashlee’s compensation for the inward chaos of addiction. Gary thought she’d started in middle school. Not heroin, but other stuff, none of which was a ‘gateway drug’ to the others. Her experience of narcotics was more like one of those roach motels: several portals open at the same time and all leading to a sticky pad inside her brain. She monitored dose, frequency, and strength with an expertise that could have let her be a doctor if not for, of course, the drugs themselves.

She went clean a couple months before their wedding, which meant three months, more or less, before she got pregnant. She stayed sober, no alcohol even, all the time she carried Emma, and, apparently, for exactly one month after giving birth. Ashlee had never been a fountain of milk, so Emma had been on formula -all precisely measured and mixed- within her first week of life. Jesse had been too, but of course he was out of their lives long before he turned one week old, handed over -gratefully- to Gary’s older sister, Nicole, and her husband, Randall.

This was a lot of calculation and Gary didn’t like any of it, but it seemed necessary to think very carefully over what must have happened during the last several hours of Ashlee’s life if Gary was going to find and beat her dealer into a pulp even the coroner wouldn’t guess had been a human being until the results of a DNA test came back.

She calculated her dose. She knew how much she’d been taking before she gave it up and she picked up right there, but -Gary strangled his steering wheel- she didn’t think about her tolerance going down. That’s something a real doctor would have learned, but Ashlee hadn’t. She could have gone to college. She could have gone to med school. Things would’ve been tight, maybe impossibly tight, but the potential was there inside her.

Maybe the stopwatch in Ashlee’s brain wasn’t a stopwatch after all. Maybe it had been a countdown clock all along and had finally reached 00:00. It started flashing and Ashlee reached for heroin right on schedule. She was twenty-five, married, and had produced two healthy children. She’d shown she could beat addiction, had created a stable life, and had turned Gary into a responsible adult. Maybe she’d known there was nothing more for her to accomplish: no further education, no meteoric rise to success in business, no creative talents to develop and display. Maybe she’d just thought she was smart enough, hard enough, to juggle narcotics and normal life. The result was the same either way.

Broadlawns came into view. The cops parked where they liked, but Gary went to the trouble of finding and paying for a space in the visitors’ lot. He checked the charge on his cellphone and the impassive look on his face. It was important to be stony, wooden, metallic even; all the materials the world had to offer that gave no clue how much pain lay beneath the surface. Pain had to be squashed and buried so that not even K9 officers could smell it. Ashlee was dead, so she could be buried, and Emma was fine, so no pain there. No scent of pain or weakness. Officers Fit and Fat weren’t going to get the better of him.

He got out of his truck and headed for the Emergency Department entrance. Robinson and Diehl partly followed, partly led the way. They reported on the microphones attached to their shoulders, hung back, got instructions, or just watched Gary. Maybe they were watching for incriminating behavior, a small plastic bag tossed into one of the garbage cans they passed or a syringe palmed off one of the metal trays stacked here and there. Maybe they thought Gary would suddenly cry out, Oh, why did I ever become a drug dealer? My poor young wife had so much to live for! If only I hadn’t stashed all that heroin in my lunch bucket which is now within plain sight on the seat of my white Ford F-150! He could’ve laughed. It wasn’t the circumstances that kept him from laughing; he just didn’t laugh much, even at normal times, except at crazy shit that Spaz did.

He kept himself together, however. He gave his name to the ER receptionist, gave her his daughter’s name as well. He ignored the cops tailing him and wished everyone else would ignore them too, but their squawking walkie-talkies were hard to tune out. Code numbers came over the airwaves and were responded to. Diehl consulted with Robinson. Robinson dispensed advice. Always they were surveying: the room, its inhabitants, its entrances and exits, the view beyond the windows.

The receptionist made a phone call. Gary could see she was moving fast to get a frantic dad within sight of his infant. He made himself cool, relaxed, and grateful. He slid his hands into his jeans pockets or rubbed the stubble on his face. He grinned and said thanks when she assured him he could go in right away and his daughter’s physician would meet him at pediatric intensive care. The cops followed him, not like toilet paper stuck to his shoes, but like dog owners who’ve given their pet an extra length of leash to play around with.

The physician was young and pretty. She gave Gary her hand, which he caught, and her name, which he didn’t. Since he was in the habit of reading name tags today, he read hers, but it was so long and so unfamiliar that he couldn’t make sense of it. It looked like it had about nine syllables and they were all dancing around, not settling into place. Pri was all he caught of her first name. She shook hands with his uniformed owners. All three humans watched him, amused by how he sniffed their shoes or crotches, and charmed by his tongue lolling out of his mouth. They just barely stopped short of petting him on the head or scratching him behind the ears.

My daughter?

Dr. Pri fell back several steps and pointed through a large window to exactly the kind of clear plastic bin Gary had imagined. In it, Emma slept, breathed, jerked her arms and legs, made fists then relaxed them, and snuggled under her blanket. She was wholly alive, pink and pulsing. Gary put his hand on the glass and then rested his forehead there as well. He watched her as long as he could, until her just being alive had turned his stone, wood, and metal mask into soggy papier-mâché.

Gary’s stomach cramped up and he struggled to get himself under control. Bathroom? Dr. Pri pointed behind her and he hustled off into a small space furnished with a toilet, a sink, and a long cord that could be used to summon help. He used foam, water, and paper towels to clean up, then checked himself out in the mirror. Sawdust was scattered here and there over his blond crewcut, but his close-cropped mustache, soul patch, and small goatee were clear of debris. His dark-blue eyes were now ringed in red. Freckles, forehead wrinkles, and a short fan of scars from where windshield glass had lodged in his cheek made up the rest of his face. He didn’t see what Ashlee had seen in him, except that he was so tall he had to bend over to bring his full head into the mirror. His arms and hands were strong too. That was a plus. He could pound nails all day and finger his wife all night, if that’s what she wanted. She didn’t mind the specks of paint, the chewed up fingernails, or the hammer-smashed thumbs. Her second-favorite thing about his hands was to see them cradling their newborn daughter.

He looked at his hands now and wondered what kind of dad he could be without Ashlee. She made the whole machine of parenthood run on time. Calculator, stopwatch, digital calendar. All those apps and others in Ashlee’s brain. Emma slept through the night because Ashlee fed, bathed, dressed, and rocked her on a schedule that did not waver. Why she would’ve chosen to take up ‘boy’ again early on a Monday morning was too weird for Gary to figure out. She at least coulda waited ’til I got home, couldn’t she? Why put Emma in danger?

He guessed he should just be thankful that she’d done what she could to keep Emma from dying like other kids or pets did in hot cars, puking, turning red, cramping up. Crying until they didn’t have any more liquid left for tears. That image almost got the best of him, but he gripped the edges of the sink until his knuckles turned white and made himself focus on the real, living baby just yards away. He pissed, flushed, washed and dried his hands again, then returned to the corridor.

Robinson was gone, but Diehl was still there, conferring with the doctor. He cut their conversation short when he spotted