Chapter 4: Skinny Mike

Friday, September 1, 2017

“Gentlemen, I have had it. I hereby resign my position as a member of the human race. There is no possible way I share any genetic material with what I had to put up with today.” So saying, I settled myself onto a barstool in the center of the bar at the Cherokee Grill.

Around me my fellow police officers laughed. Mack Waterhouse, the owner of the bar and a former MPD lieutenant, came over and smiled. “Feel free to tell your friendly bartender what your problem is, Grim. Just make sure you buy a beer while doing so.”

I snorted a laugh and pointed at a tap. To my right, Creighton Matthews was working on a beer and grinning at me. “What are you doing here? You haven’t been in for a bit. Kelly let you off the leash?”

I shrugged and smiled. “Basically. She’s taking the kids over to her parents for the weekend. She texted me that she was having pizza with them, and I was on my own for a few hours. When I get home, she plans on giving me a long list of chores to do without the kids underfoot.”

“Or are you planning to spend the holiday weekend playing hide the salami with your wife?”

“Creighton, please! I’m married! I don’t have sex anymore.”

He laughed. “What about those two kids of yours?”

“They don’t have sex, either.”

He laughed at that. Mack put a glass of beer in front of me and slapped down a menu, but before I could look at it, Roy Winston sat down on my left. He was a patrol sergeant and asked, “Were you in that mess over at Wally World today?”

“That would be the primary reason I no longer consider myself a part of the human race. I cannot be a member of a species that is dumb enough to create people like I had to deal with today!”

“Walmart, home of the trashiest of white trash. You may consider me a racist, but I’m with Grim on this one,” said Creighton. Creighton was one of my oldest friends on the MPD and was decidedly of the African-American persuasion. “Say what you want about the D-Street Treys, but at least they don’t hang out at Walmart!”

It was widely acknowledged by every member of the Matucket Police Department that the national headquarters of White Trash, Incorporated was the Matucket Walmart. There wasn’t a one of us who didn’t have a horrendous story about some nonsense over there. Mine was from back when I was just a Patrolman. I was working the graveyard shift and got called over at two in the morning; two young men were in the process of destroying the store and otherwise disturbing the peace and tranquility of Matucket, Georgia. I rolled in and went inside, where I was directed to the sports section. The criminals were a pair of high-school age twins who’d had a couple of beers too many at a party and were playing hoops, in the process knocking over a pyramid of basketballs. Dozens of basketballs were rolling all over the place.

Fortunately, they were happy drunks, so they didn’t give me any grief when I walked up to them and said it was time to leave. That was when my nightmare of white trash came in. They just looked over my shoulder and started staring. I turned my head to see what was happening, and I had to stare also! Coming up the aisle was the ugliest human I had ever seen. She was seventy if she was a day, at least four hundred pounds, had even less hair than I did, and was wearing a see-through spangled top, a thong, and red flip-flops. She stopped in front of us and asked, “Where’s the beer and condoms?” The boys and I just stared and shook our heads, and she kept moving.

I said, “Guys, let’s get out of here before it gets weirder.”

Only it did get weirder! As I walked the kids towards the door, another seventy-year-old came in, this one a man as skinny as the woman was fat, wearing nothing but a Speedo and flip-flops. He yelled out, “Margie, hurry up! I’ll get the KY. We’re going to be late for the party!” and hustled past us.

One of the boys said he needed eye bleach, while the other said he needed more beer, a lot more beer! I agreed with them both. I checked their IDs and when they came back with no outstanding wants or warrants, I decided not to haul them in and had them call home for a lift. When their father showed up ten minutes later, not looking happy about being woken up to retrieve his offspring from the police in the middle of the night from the front of the Walmart, I just said, “Don’t be too hard on them. They’ve been traumatized enough for the night.” I left as the boys started telling their father what they had seen, all the while swearing oaths they were never going back again!

Enough reminiscing. Mack and Roy laughed loudly. Roy asked, “So what happened over there today? I heard we had half the force out there.”

“Just about.” To Mack I said, “How about a cheese steak, no onions or peppers.”

“Mushrooms?”

“Sure.”

Mack jotted something on a slip and handed it to waitress. “You were saying?” he said to me.

“I think I spent the entire shift there. I got over there about ten this morning on a shoplifting beef, me and Corey Weston. He’s got a transport van. So, the store manager tells us that he thinks there is a group layering clothes in the dressing rooms and Corey and I wait for them to leave and nab them as they are leaving.” Layering involved taking a bunch of clothes into a dressing room and putting them all on, ‘layering’ multiple t-shirts and jackets and coats, and then running out. “So, we are loading them into the van to transport them to the station, and we’re at the north entrance. I’m just standing there, and a Jeep pulls up to the south entrance. She just parks it there and runs in. Suddenly, the Jeep pulls away, all on its own! Nobody’s at the wheel! It’s driving crazy, too, left, right, speeding up and braking. It’s weaving all over the place! People are jumping out of the way and this thing starts playing bumper cars! It’s hitting cars and minivans left and right and even sideswipes the transport van! It does a complete circle and then drives into the outside lawn and garden section. Corey and I are just watching this whole thing and diving out of the way ourselves. Then, just as this is over, the woman comes out of the Walmart and starts screaming in Spanish that her car has been stolen!”

The others were all laughing at this. “It gets better. I leave Corey at the van, because he needs to watch the prisoners and call in for a new van, since his was fucked. I run down to the Jeep, and it’s buried in the fencing around the flower section. The engine is still racing, but it’s stuck, and I can’t see a driver. I yank the door open and there’s a kid sitting there on the seat! He goes, ‘Hola! Buenos dias!’ I’ve got a six-year-old kid playing bumper cars in the Walmart parking lot! He can’t even see over the dashboard!” I mimed moving a steering wheel above my head. “He’s got one foot on the gas pedal and one on the brakes.” As the others kept laughing, I added foot movements to my imitation.

“What, he get out of the car seat?” asked Roy.

“Bingo! I reach in and grab the keys and shut it down, and in the back seat are a couple of baby girls in car seats. They’ve slept through the whole thing. There was an empty car seat in the front passenger seat. Mom left her sunglasses in the store and parked and ran back inside after parking at the entrance. Dale Earnhardt figured out how to climb out of his car seat and managed to put the Jeep in gear.”

“Mom comes racing up and yanks him out of the Jeep and starts chewing his ass in Spanish, he starts crying, and that wakes up the girls in the back seat. Meanwhile all the drivers of the cars he hit come running up demanding that I have to do something! I had to call a bunch of guys over to do accident reports. Then, since it’s Walmart, half the people don’t have insurance, and at least two are driving around on suspended licenses, so they end up being taken to jail, too. Of course, I’m the only cop there who speaks Spanish, which is all the kid’s mother speaks. I swear, I spent half the day in the Walmart parking lot!”

Creighton laughed and said, “You’ve got me beat. The worst I ever had was a six-car pileup on 389 in a snowstorm.”

I looked over at Roy. He said, “Okay, I have a good one, but I was just a witness. This happened a few years ago. My nephew is in the Scouts, and my brother-in-law is one of the Scout leaders. My son, Roy Junior, was also in the Scouts and I had to go with them on a camping trip. So, he’s driving his wife’s minivan with me in the passenger seat and a bunch of boys in the back, and we’re following a couple of pickups with their gear in them.”

I nodded in understanding, and Roy continued. “Anyway, the camping trip is in Alabama, and we’re driving there late Friday night and 20 is being rebuilt. There’s a section where about ten miles has barriers up and no shoulders. We’re moving along, and it’s pretty congested, and it’s dark, and for some reason the right lane is moving a lot faster than the left lane. Bill, my brother-in-law, moves over into the right lane and a mile later we discover the reason for the difference. Some asshole is driving twenty-five miles an hour in the left lane, the fast lane! Bill goes, ‘this guy’s just an accident waiting to happen,’ and damn if that doesn’t happen! Just as we are passing this idiot on the right, some other idiot comes blasting up the road on the left, must have been doing sixty or seventy, easy. He slams right into the back of idiot number one and lifts the rear end up off the road and to the right, and punches in my brother-in-law’s minivan! Then they go off to the left through a gap in the barriers into the median.”

Roy sipped at his beer and said, “There is no place to stop, barriers all around, no way to pull over. The guys in the back aren’t even shook up, so Bill pulls off at the next exit, which is the middle of nowhere. No cell coverage. We check and his van’s got a huge dent in the door but is okay. We get back on the road and keep going, we’ll call when we get to the campsite. He calls in to the Alabama State Police, but the guy who handled it is out for the weekend and they tell us to call back. So, we call back every day, but he’s gone, and the other guys don’t want to hear about it. That’s when it gets crazy.”

“Crazy, how?” asks Mack.

“We head back to Matucket Sunday night. Monday, he calls his insurance agent, who tells him he has to get a police report. That’s what I told him, so it wasn’t a surprise. He calls Monday morning and gets in touch with the Alabama State Trooper. He calls me up five minutes later and he is scared! The trooper demands he return to Alabama immediately! After my brother-in-law explained what had happened, the trooper tells him he has just confessed to leaving the scene of a crime and failing to render aid, and that the only reason he would have done this was because he was probably driving drunk! Bill is an accountant and doesn’t drink. He’s a Mormon! He’s probably the most honest guy I’ve ever met! The trooper is ordering him to return and turn himself in; it will save them the trouble of extraditing him! Then he tells him that he is also guilty of interstate flight to escape prosecution, and the FBI is going to be called. Bill is just freaking out! He’s telling me that his name and extradition are not words he ever expected to hear in the same sentence.”