'tween a Rock and a Hard Place

By Wm. E. Bobb

Jake Leggs didn't know when he walked into his favorite watering hole that his life was going to change on a dime, and not for the better. A drug courier—a young woman—abandons a suitcase of drugs in Jake's truck behind the bar. He only finds out about it after he rescues her from her minders. Normally he'd turn it over to the cops, but a certain judge has a hard-on for him, and he's not sure he trusts anyone in law enforcement. He's forced by events to negotiate a trade for the girl's life with a drug lord while evading the cops. Throw in high-level corruption, a breakaway polygynous cult's involvement, the mob, and you have a recipe for disaster.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781646288649

Book preview

Chapter One

If I had made the call, my life would still be normal. Then again, I probably wouldn’t have run into Brenda, and she’d be dead.

I needed to order a new computer over the phone for my girlfriend and send them a money order. I don’t do credit cards—too many crooks out there. I should know. I’m acquainted with a good many of them.

The toll-free number meant a phone tree and an aggravating half-hour wait to talk to a machine or somebody in India who doesn’t speak English well enough to understand the two words money order.

Opting to procrastinate, I hopped into my twenty-year-old Chevy pickup and headed to my favorite watering hole that doubled as my office. It was early, but as Jimmy Buffet says, it’s five o’clock somewhere.

Not many people can boast of an office with simulcast horse racing, a betting booth, and your own personal bartender. A great place to do some serious thinking. And drinking. And gambling. And sometimes lost women wandered in there. All in all, it is the perfect office, but the rent varies from day to day.

The place is a huge log cabin, almost a hundred years old, which is old for Flagstaff. I love historic places, especially bars. It’s given name is the Taxidermy Club, but we call it the Zoo.

June, the fiftyish blond bartender, greeted me with her million-watt smile as I came through the old double doors. I’m pretty sure she’s an old Hari Krishna burnout, but I’m an old hippie burnout, so who am I to judge, right?

Jake! she beamed. How ya’ doing’? Beer thirty?

Same as yesterday, June. Give me a Coors. Most people as exuberant as June irritate the hell out of me, but not June. She is a genuinely nice person, albeit a little ditzy, but she is what she appears to be, which, in my professional experience, is rare.

Me being Jake Leggs, pushing fifty, erstwhile contractor, sometimes finder, most times fixer. My job description is a little vague. I’m not a PI, and I don’t carry a gun. When I was young, I made an unfortunate career choice with which the government rewarded me with an extended unpaid vacation at one of their institutes of lower education. They also permanently cancelled my membership in the NRA. I do what I do. I don’t have a résumé, and I don’t have a business card. People that need my services know where to find me.

I grabbed my beer from June and headed over to the pool table. This one in the daytime had a plywood and Naugahyde covering over it and was surrounded on three sides by chairs. On the fourth side was an array of four TVs showing four different racetracks.

Sitting in seven of those eight chairs were some serious gamblers. Old farts, mostly. They ignored me as I took the only available chair.

Most of them were screaming obscenities at one or another of the screens. I tried to tune them out as I scanned the various displays. Mostly local-yokel tracks. Hollywood, my favorite, wasn’t running.

Vinnie, the wrinkled prune sitting next to me, stopped yelling and sat back down throwing his trifecta tickets to the floor in disgust.

Swear to God, I’m gonna quit this shit one of these days. Just one more big tri and that’s it, swear to God, he growled. We both knew that wasn’t going to happen.

Bad day, Vinnie? I asked, not looking at him.

Fuck you, Jake, he answered without rancor. Want to go halves on the last race at Calder? Gonna be big.

I tried not to laugh. That would have hurt his feelings.

I don’t know. I said tentatively, You got a tip?

Naw, he replied. But I got this theory.

God help us both, I thought, but I had to ask. And what’s that?

Well, he said as he leaned in close. He looked around as if anybody really gave a shit and whispered, You see, I’ve noticed that the last race at every track the long shots come in more often than not. Big payoffs. You know why?

No, I whispered back, deadpan and barely able to contain myself.

He started chuckling. To keep the suckers around! You know, betting. They don’t want everybody leaving before it’s all over, so they rig the last race to payoff big-time! His cackle progressed into a full-blown hack. I was afraid I was going to have to call an ambulance if it ended in a seizure.

Finally, he spit out a huge gob of phlegm onto the floor and caught his breath, thank God. I didn’t envy the cleaning lady tomorrow morning.

You’re pretty sure about this, huh? I asked, knowing where this was going.

You can take it to the bank, my young friend, he replied, wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve.

Yeah, right. I suspected the only one going to the bank today would be the track owner.

How much? I asked. Maybe I could get off cheap.

Twelve bucks. Six each.

I forked over a five and a one. Ah, what the hell. It was only six bucks, so I didn’t obsess over it. I liked Vinnie, even if he is a bit crazy. I was shaking my head at my own stupidity as I watched him totter over to the betting window.

That was when I saw her come in. All six-foot of her. A miniskirt showed her tight ass, and an equally tiny halter top barely covered her thirty-eight Cs. All that stacked on four-inch fuck-me heels. We’re talking bombshell here. She was half my age, but I’m so old it’s relative. She was carrying a small gym bag, and she looked like she’d been crying. That’s like blood in the water to me. I looked at my companions to see if they’d noticed.

I should have known better.

There’s one thing about hard-core pony players—you could parade a naked woman in front of them and they’d be oblivious. Their eyes would go from the racing form to the video monitor and back again. What naked woman? Even if they did notice, they’d probably tell her to get the hell out of the way.

As if I needed proof, Albert yelled, How many minutes to post time? to no one in particular. Nobody paid any more attention to him than they did to Blondie.

She took a seat at the bar. A couple of minutes later, June put a margarita in front of her. She took it daintily in her long-fingered hand, sucked it straight down, slid it back across the bar to an astonished June, and said with a gasp, Let’s try that again.

I’m deaf in one ear and can’t hear out of the other—one of the occupational hazards of being a contractor. Guns going off close to my ears probably didn’t help either, but my eyesight is 15/20 in both eyes, and I’m good at reading lips. Her bee-stung lips were a piece of cake to follow. I was getting aroused imagining their potential.

I think that was when I fell in lust with her. June caught me looking at Sweet Lips and must have read my mind. She raised her eyebrow. I knew what she was thinking—that I was a whore-dog—and she was half right. True, I am a dog sometimes, but I ain’t no whore.

I was jostled out of my fantasies and my growing woody by Vinnie, slapping me on the back, jumping up and down. Hot damn, hot damn, son of a bitch won! We did it, Jake! We’re rich! he screamed, hitting me hard enough to spill my beer.

Dammit, Vinnie, stop it! I yelled at him. He quit hitting me as his laughter turned into another coughing fit, but his shit-eating grin never left his face.

Jake, he finally wheezed, I told you the long shots always come in on the last race. We won. We hit it big.

How much? I asked, figuring his idea of rich was a grand.

He squinted at the Tote payoff board on the screen. Forty thousand and change. Twenty apiece on a twelve-dollar trifecta bet. Unbelievable, he said in a whisper, as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing.

I was stunned. Holy shit, I said and meant it, beaming at him. Sometimes even a blind pig can find an acorn. Go get it, my friend.

Vinnie looked uncomfortable. I had a feeling I knew why.

What? I asked.

Well, it’s like this, Jake. I don’t have my social security card with me.

Anything over six hundred bucks gets the IRS vultures involved. So big deal. I’m sure you know your number. I looked at him and waited.

He gave me his best hang-dog look. Well, uh, it’s a little more complicated than that.

No shit, I thought.

You see, I’m retired—you know that—and I can’t make over a certain amount of money. And if I do, the bastards cut my monthly check down. Might even cut me off entirely, he said with a sigh. He missed his calling. He should have been an actor.

Great. That meant I had to redeem the ticket using my own social security number and pay the tax for both of us. I should have known.

Okay, I’ll do it, I said. But you’ll have to buy my beer for the rest of your life.

He thought about it for a moment before realizing that might not be too long, actually. You got it, pal, he beamed back.

What a sucker I am.

I figured Julia, the teller, was going to shit a brick when she ran the ticket, so I took a minute to enjoy the moment. I knew Sweet Lips had heard the conversation and was watching me. That didn’t hurt my feelings. The stool next to her was empty, and as soon as I cashed out, my bony ass was going to be planted in it. This was looking like a win-win situation.

I waited for all the small-time winners to get out of the way and was headed for the teller window when a mean looking son of a bitch came through the door.

When I was young, I did a two-year stretch in a federal maximum security penitentiary—hard time—so I know the difference between the wannabes and the real McCoy. This guy clanged an eleven on a ten scale.

He looked around, trying to adjust his eyes to the dim interior. I had a feeling I’d seen his face before, but I couldn’t quite place him. In any event, I didn’t like his looks—reminded me of a weasel. I tend to be a quick judge of people. Some of the shit I do, that’s a good thing. It comes in handy, and I’m not often wrong.

Weasel zeroed in on Sweet Lips and headed her way just about the time she saw him. She jumped off her stool like her ass was on fire and took off to the lady’s room.

Like that was going to stop him.

Weasel wasted no time going after her but was blocked by two elderly tourist couples trying to make their way out of the place. I could tell it was frustrating the hell out of him because he finally just tossed the last couple sideways despite their indignant protests. As he lifted his arm to push them out of the way, his shirt rode up, revealing the gun in his waistband.

I forgot about cashing in the ticket and took off to intercept what looked to be an execution of my next ex-wife.

The Zoo is a huge log cabin built around, what were at the time, living trees. Five of them still support the roof. I used one of these two-foot wide trunks to hide my interception of Weasel. He was so focused on Blondie that he never saw me coming. He was pulling out his Glock 17 when I clocked him upside his head with my mostly full long-neck Coors.

He went down like the floor had dropped out from beneath him. I picked up the gun immediately, hoping nobody noticed anything.

Fat chance.

A wall of booths shielded me from most of the patrons, but not the bar. The three guys sitting there—all regulars—were glued to the video monitors and didn’t even turn around at the sound of breaking glass, but June saw the whole thing.

Her eyes were wide, and her mouth was shaped like an O as she poured some lucky bastard a triple shot instead of a single, but she quickly recovered and went about her business.

Hey! Anybody seen Jake? Vinnie was yelling at the top of his lungs from the pool table.

RJ, the owner, stepped out of his office to see what all the commotion was about. He took one look at the guy lying on the floor, me standing over him holding a gun, rolled his eyes, and went back into his office. Neither one of them wanted to know what was going on.

I’d stumbled into the ladies’ room by accident on more than one occasion, so walking in there was second nature. I yanked all the stall doors open until I found her huddled in the last one. Her eyes were bugged out, and she was clutching the gym bag to her chest. I guess she thought it would stop a slug.

Don’t be afraid, I told her. I’m here to help you, but we’ve got to move fast. I held out my hand, and after a moment’s hesitation, she took it.

I yanked her up and hustled her out the bathroom door. Dickwad was on all fours, trying unsuccessfully to get up. I still had a little time, but not much. I went over and kicked him in the head. He went down for the count.

I went back and pushed her to the back door—a pair of double doors to the bathroom’s left. I had just replaced them for RJ after his bouncers had ejected a rowdy patron without opening them. Fortunately, I had replaced the chains with panic bars and had her through them without too much noise or anybody but Jane noticing, I thought.

Wrong.

Vinnie had seen me drop kick the shooter and hustle Blondie out the door. He started yelling, Jake! Where the hell are you going, Jake? Jake!

I didn’t have time to explain.

Chapter Two

I jammed a couple of full trash cans against the door then got her over the rickety cedar fence that abutted the parking lot. The side door to the only bowling alley in town was twenty yards away and was the best cover to be found.

We went through it, fast walked past all the lanes, past the few bowlers in there, and right out the other side, emerging into yet another parking lot that faced a fast-food joint.

I dragged her in there and shoved her into a booth. Stay put and don’t say a damned word to anyone, I hissed at her. She just nodded in a dazed kind of way. Good, I thought.

I went to the counter and ordered a number two, two number four combos, and a cheeseburger to go. With the exception of the cheeseburger, which I wanted, I had no idea what I was ordering, and I didn’t care. It cost me almost thirty bucks and no beer, dammit. Right now, I could use one.

I reluctantly forked it over while keeping a surreptitious eye on the side door of the bowling alley. No goons came crashing through it while I waited for our gourmet delights. Good thing for them. I was fully prepared to cave in their heads with the toothpick dispenser next to the cash register. True, I still had the gun tucked in my waistband, but I had no intention of using it unless I absolutely had to.

When I was young and stupid, I got busted on a felony. It has haunted my life ever since. Being a felon has one upside, though. You don’t have to do jury duty. The downside is that I can’t carry a gun, which sucks in my line of work, so I’ve learned to use everything else as a weapon instead. A sugar shaker can be mean machine in the right hands. But you have to get in close. The trick is to not be still holding onto the glass when you crack it against the bad guy’s skull. It’ll cut the shit out of you as well as him.

Once, when I was kid working the graveyard shift at the local mini-mart in El Paso, some jerk in a raincoat over his arm came in and announced he was robbing me. As he came around the corner and backed me into a corner, my hand clamped onto one of those old-time glass beef jerky jars, and I just naturally cold conked him with it. Knocked him clean over the counter. The gun skittered down the aisle, out of reach. I’d cut him pretty bad—a crescent-shaped gash to the bone ran from his chin to his widow’s peak. Blood was everywhere. I’m sure he would have shot me if he’d still had his gun.

He ran out the door and jumped into a new car. That surprised me until I saw him reach under the dash for the hot wire. Stolen car. He was gone in a flash.

I called the cops, and they showed up just about the time I was sitting on the curb using both shaking hands to down a twenty-four-ounce can of malt liquor.

One of the cops walked up to me. He looked at the beer can. What happened, kid?

Guy tried to rob me. I hit him with a glass jar. Cut him real bad. He took off that way in a new red Mustang. I pointed down the street. If you hurry, maybe you can still catch him.

You let us worry about that. Did he get any money?

No. I looked down at my hand. It was bleeding because I didn’t let go of the jar when I hit him. I was getting over being scared. Now I was pissed.

The other cop came out of the store with the gun in his hand.

Aren’t you even gonna go after him? I asked.

Put a cork in it, kid. We know our job. The Rio Grande and the border is only a mile away. He’s probably wading across it now. We’ll put in a call to the Mexican police. They’ll pick him up on the other side.

Don’t worry. We’ll get him, his partner chimed in, sticking the gun in his back pocket.

My response was to put mouth in action before engaging brain.

Right, and pigs can fly, I said without thinking about the pig part.

The cops looked at each other. The one with the gun looked at the beer can in my hand and said, How old are you, boy?

Just turned eighteen, I replied. Old enough to sell but not to drink.

They didn’t even take a report; just walked back to the patrol car and drove off.

Bright and early the next morning, I got a call from my boss telling me not to bother coming back into work. I was fired. Apparently, I hadn’t read the Employee’s Handbook, which I didn’t even know existed. It was against company policy to resist an armed robbery. It raised their insurance rates, he informed me. So was drinking on the job, both of which were grounds for termination.

The cops had snitched me off. Go figure. I guess I should have been glad they hadn’t arrested me for underage drinking.

I learned three lessons that night. One: let go of the glass before contact. Two: no good deed goes unpunished. Three: don’t fuck with the cops.

Chapter Three

Waiting for the food, I looked down at my hand. It was bleeding. So much for lesson one. I grabbed a napkin and pressed it to my palm as they handed me the bag of mystery meat.

I took the food over to Sweet Lips. She must have been hungry despite her condition because she fished out the number two combo and dug into it like there was no tomorrow.

I got my fingers out of the way so they wouldn’t end up as collateral damage and went over to the pay phone to call a cab. No way was I going back for my truck.

All the cab company numbers were busy. Shit.

She was still stuffing her mouth when I sat down across from her, one eye on her and the other on the door.

Brenda, she said between huge bites of my cheeseburger.

What? I replied, distracted by the thought of how vulnerable we were until a cab got here.

My name. It’s Brenda. You never asked me my name.

Great. This just keeps getting better. Brenda is my first ex-wife’s name—the biggest bitch on the planet. Wonderful.

I shook my head, got up, and walked back over to the pay phone again. Time to call that cab and get the hell out of here.

I got through this time but was told it might take a half hour or more. I wasn’t happy about being exposed for that long but told them to come anyways.

I needed a backup.

Two more quarters and I went to call my friend, Arliss. He answered on the first ring like he was expecting the call.

Yeah, what the hell you want? He enjoyed being rude, especially when he thought he could get away with it.

A ride, you rude fuck, I replied, which I knew would please him immensely.

What a surprise, he came back with, happy to hear from me. He liked living on the edge. Every time he hooked up with me, he was definitely there.

"Got a big problem, and I need a ride now. Like ten minutes ago, amigo."

Yeah, I know. June just called me. She said you might be calling. Something about guns, gangsters, and a blond. She wasn’t making a lot of sense, but it figures. Just another day at the office, sounds like. Where are you now?

I told him.

I’m gone, he said and hung up.

Arliss is weird but dependable. He helps me out on jobs sometimes. My being his only friend helps too. He’s forty-two, a computer geek, lives with his mom, and drives an old VW minivan. How weird is that? I knew he’d be here long before any cab.

I walked back to the table. Brenda was chomping her way through some tacos, which I surmised was the number four combo. I’d be lucky to get a tortilla chip at this rate.

Want to tell me what this is all about? I asked when she finally came up for air.

They want to kill me, she replied with a bit of lettuce hanging from her gorgeous lips.

No shit, I thought. Who’s they?

The drug guys, she said with her mouth full.

Great. Just what I needed—drug guys. Dealers. Killers. Right up my alley.

Not.

I rubbed my eyes for a minute because the stars I saw momentarily distracted me from the seriousness of my problem, and it felt good. One minute was all the reprieve I got. When I looked back up, she was still digging into the tacos like it was the most important thing in the world. I think the shrinks call it disassociation, something like that.

What kind of drugs are we talking about here, Brenda? I managed to ask without screaming.

Meth, she said. A bit of cheese sat on the tip of her nose.

Wonderful. Speed freaks. On the scale of drug dealer killers, they were at the top. Crazy to begin with, pump them full of their own product, put a gun in their hand, and they’re off the scale. Not your run-of-the-mill killers. We’re talking psycho mass murderers here. Just fucking wonderful.

Lesson two—no good deed goes unpunished—came unbidden to mind.

Before I could take a hike, Arliss squealed into the parking lot.

Chapter Four

Atliss loves drama, lives for it. Unfortunately, when he’s in town, I happen to provide the only drama in his life. Lucky me.

He pulled up right next to the door—in the drive-through lane facing the wrong way, naturally—and slammed the old bus into a garbage can barely on the curb. Taco wrappers and Styrofoam cups went flying as he jumped out of the van.

This caught the pimply faced manager’s attention. Arliss hit him chest to chest—or in this case, face to chest—at the door. Arliss won. He’s really dark skinned, almost black, six foot four, half as wide and gentle as a lamb, unless you get in his way.

His brushed the entry-level manager aside like brushing away a bothersome fly and lumbered up to me.

You requested my presence? he asked in an Oxford accent, talking to me but looking at Brenda.

She was startled. Some ground beef rolled out of her open mouth and into her lap. He was intimidating enough without hovering over her while her mouth’s full of tacos.

I grabbed her and said, We got to go. Now!

She didn’t object but did manage to snag the bag with the remaining tacos as I pulled her away. Priorities.

Arliss brought up the rear with the manager snapping at his heels like a Chihuahua as I hustled her out the door and into the side door of the van. Actually, I think I just threw her on the carpeted floor, slid the door shut, and got into the front passenger seat before