The LawDog Files Read online

  The LawDog Files

  LawDog

  Copyright

  The LawDog Files

  LawDog

  Castalia House

  Kouvola, Finland

  www.castaliahouse.com

  This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by Finnish copyright law.

  Copyright © 2017 by LawDog

  All rights reserved

  Editor: Vox Day

  Cover: Scott Beaulieu

  Version: 001

  Contents

  Foreword by Larry Correia

  Introduction

  FILE 1: Armadillo Love

  FILE 2: The Good Shoot

  FILE 3: Pogonip

  FILE 4: Big Mama

  FILE 5: The Lovebirds

  FILE 6: Box o’ Steaks

  FILE 7: Two Beers

  FILE 8: The Six-Foot Chickens

  FILE 9: Fooblic Intoxidation

  FILE 10: Pheasant Season

  FILE 11: Communion

  FILE 12: Going Home

  FILE 13: Napoleon Complex

  FILE 14: City Folk

  FILE 15: No Gun

  FILE 16: Masterminds

  FILE 17: Shift Summation

  FILE 18: Kerfuffle in West/8

  FILE 19: Contraband

  FILE 20: A Memory I Will Treasure Always

  FILE 21: The Monster Inside

  FILE 22: Detoxification

  FILE 23: Rivers of Ink

  FILE 24: The Power of Paper

  FILE 25: Unhappy Meal

  FILE 26: Dinosaur

  FILE 27: Treed

  FILE 28: A Lesson in Respect

  FILE 29: Thing 1 and Thing 2

  FILE 30: Definitions

  FILE 31: ’Allo! ’Allo! ’Allo!

  FILE 32: Chemistry 101

  FILE 33: Normal Business

  FILE 34: Universal Precautions

  FILE 35: Orienteering

  FILE 36: Dress Code

  FILE 37: The Proper Care of Handcuffs

  FILE 38: A Life, Ruined

  FILE 39: Kein Engel

  FILE 40: Wasabi!

  FILE 41: A Damsel in Distress

  FILE 42: Your Wife

  FILE 43: Canis Interruptus

  FILE 44: Buster and the Black Belt

  FILE 45: The Pink Gorilla Suit

  Castalia House

  Dedicated to Rita.

  I love you.

  Foreword by Larry Correia

  When I approached LawDog about writing the foreword to this book, I told him I would consider it an honor, because I was a fan of his stuff twenty years ago. His response? “What? Twenty years… We’re getting old.”

  Yep. That’s like ten million years in Internet Time. I was a college student when I discovered this internet gun forum called The Firing Line. Because most of the posters thought of themselves as Serious People discussing Serious Business, it could get a little dour at time.

  Until this one guy in Texas decided to introduce a little levity with some true life stories about the day-to-day adventurers of a peace officer in a small town.

  When I got to the armadillo, I about got kicked out of the campus computer lab because of—and I quote—“disruptive laughter”. Luckily, making people laugh is rewarding, so LawDog kept on telling us stories. Over the years there were more cases, more critters, and more weirdness.

  I got to know LawDog, and he ended up being one of the people who inspired me to try and become an author myself. In fact, it was a Halloween joke thread that LawDog started, with gun nuts coming up with silly horror movie lines (because let’s be honest, most horror movies would be over fast if they were about our people), but that helped me put together the basic idea behind my first novel.

  The thing about good humor writers is that they don’t just make you laugh, they make you think. The LawDog Files can get a little philosophical at times because these are basically the stories of an honorable guy doing challenging things to try and help folks, and then afterwards sharing the good bits to brighten someone’s day.

  I’m honored to call Dog a friend. I hope you readers get as much enjoyment out of these stories as I did.

  Larry Correia

  Yard Moose Mountain

  Introduction

  Hello, my name is LawDog. Thank you for buying this book.

  What you are holding in your hands is the culmination of about a decade’s worth of writing about a lifetime’s worth of experiences. It is also the result of some fairly persistent nudging by various and sundry online folks, some gentle hints from my lady, and, last, but by no means least, a firm shove by some good friends. It is a collection of tales that I have written down for posterity and shared on my blog as well as some additional thoughts tacked on for good measure.

  I generally tell two distinct kinds of stories: the first are of my law enforcement days as a small town deputy sheriff in Texas, and the second are of my childhood in Africa. This book consists of the law enforcement stories in Texas, during the closing years of the 20th century.

  Enough blathering. On to the stories!

  FILE 1: Armadillo Love

  This is the first story I ever posted to the Internet.

  Back in the late 90s I was a regular on the forums run by the old Rysher production company which was, at that time, running a show on TeeVee called Soldier of Fortune.

  Mind you, at that time I didn’t watch the show, but I did like the regulars at the Forum, amongst whom was a young lady who went by the nom de cyber of “psyche.”

  At times during the course of the Forum, the posts and debates got very serious—I’m talking complete and total Sense of Humor Failure—to the point where psyche finally posted a plea for a little more light-heartedness.

  Prior to reading her post, I had been reminded of an embarrassing incident from earlier in my career, and I figured, “Hey, nothing’s quite as funny as making fun of your own self,” so I wrote a quick anecdote based on the incident and posted it.

  And a small bit of Internet history was born.

  * * *

  In the late 1990s a lady in our fair city had gone on a date with a local fellow, and while the evening had been nice enough, the romantic connection seemed to just not have clicked for the lady in question, and she decided that they should just remain friends.

  Now, apparently the phrase “let’s just be friends” didn’t quite sink in with the old boy, or perhaps he had a completely different definition of friend, than, well, everybody else, and he began parking his car across from her place of work and staring at her from it for hours at a time. He also began making a continual series of phone calls, the usual stalker stuff, all culminating in a panicked 911 call at 0300 hours when she woke up and found his face pressed up against the glass of her bedroom window.

  He went to jail, and we had a quiet talk with a local justice of the peace, who issued a protective order for the lady in question.

  This protective order seemed to work for a couple of days until she reported that the critter was now sneaking into her garage and moving stuff around.

  The sheriff predictably went ballistic at this defiance of his directive and swore a mighty oath that Joe Critter was going to get sent off for a long time. However, in order to do that, it was felt that said critter needed to be caught in the act.

  You know where this is going.

  Since the Bugscuffle County Sheriff’s Office had a grand total of four sworn officers, and three out of the four officers were married with children, it should come as no surprise to anyone that I, as the only unmarried and unentangl
ed deputy, was tapped for this particular Special Duty.

  Now, the young lady in question lived at the top of hill just outside the southwest city limit in a big old two-story house with an apricot orchard out back and shrubbery everywhere.

  I showed up that evening, checked in with the lady, and wandered the grounds for a bit, trying to find the best spot from which to lay an ambush. The driveway was long and swept from the road up to the garage and was bordered on both sides by a pyracantha hedge. The yard was absolutely filled with bushes and plants of all varieties, and I figured that on a moonless night, the critter’s best bet was to sneak straight up the driveway rather than risk tripping over a root and going head-first into a rose bush.

  So, I found a nice little gap in the hedge near the house and figured on waiting until the critter was well within the “do not go within three city blocks” section of the protective order before dashing through the hedge and arresting him.

  I bellied down under the tree, and I waited. And waited. And waited.

  Along about 0100, an armadillo wandered up from the aforementioned apricot orchard behind the house, where he’d been feeding on fermenting apricots all night, and bounced off my foot.

  I hear the gentle reader’s question now: How did I know it was a he armadillo? Simple. The drunken little sot promptly, and aggressively, fell in love with my left boot.

  *sigh*

  He would sidle up to my boot, murmuring, “What’s your sign, baby?” in armadillo-ese, and I would shove him away, whereupon he’d sleaze back in, crooning seductive armadillo love songs.

  And so the evening went. I’d kick him across the lawn, he’d roll a not-inconsiderable distance, hiccup, and promptly oil his way back. About two hours later, I’d had it. I was just about to stand up and drop kick the Armoured Menace into the next state when I heard the crunch of feet tip-toeing up the gravel driveway. I froze, locking in on that gap in the hedge—I had a sneaking suspicion that the armadillo used my distraction to make it to third base—and saw a shadow move in front of the gap. I took off like a shot, only to find out that some commie pinko liberal had somehow moved the gap in the hedge.

  I also found out that Pyracantha is a Latin word that means “Deadly Demon Vampire Bush from Hell.” I don’t know who screamed louder: the armadillo, when his lady love disappeared; the stalker, when I grabbed a good handful of his shirt; or me, when I crashed into a brisket-high wall of finger-length thorns.

  The lady of the house heard the triplicate scream, decided that the unthinkable has happened, dialed 911, and screamed, “That deputy is getting killed!”

  *sigh*

  Meanwhile, I’m half bent over the thorn bush, trying to hold on to a panicked stalker with my right hand and a walkie-talkie with my left hand. There is struggling, there is swearing, and somehow, in the middle of all this goodness I end up halfway over the hedge, upside down. I looked past Joe Critter down the road … and all I saw were lights.

  Red lights, blue lights, yellow lights, white lights, flashing lights, strobe lights, wig-wags, you name it. All of them were rapidly coming up the road.

  About that time, Joe Critter managed to twist loose. He hot-footed it down the road, leaving me with his shirt.

  I got on the walkie-talkie, waited for a pause in the traffic from the SO, DPS, EMS, and game warden all demanding to know what had happened to me, and said, “I’m all right. Subject is a white male, no shirt. Northbound on foot.”

  It is possible, when viewed in retrospect, that in light of the circumstances, I may have lacked a little of my customary sang froid.

  You see, the various deputies, firemen, EMTs, park rangers, security guards, DPS troopers and LEOs from all eight surrounding counties and towns heard my voice on the radio and thought: the ’Dog sounds panicked. The ’Dog don’t ever panic! Therefore the ’Dog has obviously been shot/stabbed/gutted/burned/run over/abused/whathaveyou and is, no doubt, in immediate danger of expiring.

  *sigh*

  Anyone who hadn’t already been coming to the party decided they had better show. Before long, Joe Critter was spotted halfway down the road and promptly became the subject of a multi-jurisdictional pig pile.

  As for me, there I was, upside down and helpless in the grip of that fiendish hedge. And what did my friends, my brothers, my comrades-in-arms, my drinking buddies do to help me in my time of need? “Hey! Who’s got a video camera?! We have GOT to get video of this!”

  It took them thirty minutes to get me loose from that plant. I never did see that drunk armadillo again. Good thing, too.

  FILE 2: The Good Shoot

  My first story involving the Alcoholic Armadillo was a big enough hit amongst the denizens of the Rysher SOF Forum that I began to receive repeated requests for “More!”—repeated to the point of pestering. To take the pressure off of my poor email inbox, I began to write what became called “Psyche’s Story For The Week.”

  I’m not sure how many of these little scribblings I wrote on that Forum—anywhere from a dozen to twenty-something—and I never really considered them important enough to save. The short-sightedness of this was rendered apparent when Rysher was bought, the forum archives were lost, and then the forum was gone. Along with everything I had written. Vanished. All gone.

  Missing the camaraderie of the Rysher Forum, I wandered for a bit before I stumbled on to Rich Lucibella’s TheFiringLine.com, joined, and before long I noticed someone was complaining about the lack of humor there.

  Rather than posting the Armadillo Story, I recalled a later story involving Santa Claus, and since Psyche wasn’t a member of TFL, I titled the anecdote “The LawDog Files.”

  I imagine that the choice of title probably had something to do with “The X Files,” which was a wildly popular television show at the time, but I don’t know. I never watched “The X Files.”

  * * *

  A critter well known to us in our town twisted off one evening and decided to add Attempted Murder to his curriculum vitae by hitting his lady du jour in the head a couple of times with a hatchet. Not one to leave a job half done, he dragged her out to the lake, wired her up to a cinderblock, and shoved her off into the water. Wonder of wonders, she survived. Even bigger wonder, she came into town and filed charges on her homicidal boyfriend. I had been out on a date and wandered back into town about the time that the search was really getting wound up. I’d no sooner walked through the door of the office when the sheriff hit me with three conflicting orders on where to go, one of which would require asbestos underoos. I decided that going back home to change out of my date clothes would be counterproductive, so I was digging through my locker trying to find my spare set of armor when the call came in. One of our local merchants had spotted the critter climbing in the back window of an abandoned building used for storage. Since the other two deputies were on the far side of the county, the sheriff made a posse of me and a luckless Highway Patrol Trooper who had come in for a coffee refill, and we went tear-arsing off to Downtown Bugscuffle. The abandoned building in question had, at one time, been a fairly swanky department store positioned on the prize end of Main Street. However, in the intervening hundred years or so, the entire block had fallen into disuse and disrepair, leaving the once-grand old building standing all alone, used only for storing various and sundry stuff that needed storing by the locals.

  For those of you who don’t know how to search a large building with only three people, it’s really quite simple. One officer, whom we’ll call “the sheriff,” stands on one corner watching the front of the building and the west side. The second officer, or “random DPS trooper,” stands at the opposite corner of the building, watching the back of the building and the east side. The third officer, being the bravest and most handsome of the three, goes inside with the idea of flushing the critter out a window where he can be spotted by one of the other two and, hopefully, arrested.

  Three guesses who got to go inside, and the first two don’t count. Let me tell you, that place was darker than
the Earl of Hell’s waistcoat and stacked floor-to-ceiling with shelves. On those shelves were the collected knick-knacks of 20 years of Main Street stores. And not a lightbulb anywhere.

  There I was, with a snubbie .357, a five-cell Maglight, and a Handi-Talkie, and only two hands. About the fourth time I tried to answer the sheriff’s “Have you got him yet?” radio call while trying to cover a suspicious patch of darkness with the .357 and juggling the Mag-Lite, I stopped in the feeble light of the moon shining down through a hole in the ceiling to make a few adjustments.

  I was occupied with trying to figure out which I needed more, the Mag-lite or the Handi-talkie, when the SOB decided to jump me. I’m here to tell you, folks, things went rodeo from there. He lunged out of a shadow and tried to grab for my throat, and me, reacting totally out of instinct, I whacked him a good one across the forehead with the Maglight.

  Bulb, batteries, and assorted electronic parts arced gracefully into the darkness. The critter took one step back and jumped at me again.

  Things were not looking good in Dogville.

  I held the snubbie back with my right hand, trying to keep it away from the critter’s grasp, and I tried to stiff-arm him away with my left when I stepped onto what was later found to be a D-cell battery from my Maglight.

  Down I went. And the alleged aspiring axe murderer landed on top of me. Hoo boy. The gloves really came off then. We rolled around on the cold cement. I was hitting him in the head with the butt of my revolver and giving him elbow smashes to the jaw and brachial plexus, knee strikes, you name it, the whole enchilada. And he kept grabbing at my throat.

  Finally, we rolled into a patch of moonlight, and I saw the bastard had a knife!

  Folks, I hate knives. No, I really hate knives. He was on top of me, and he had to weigh three-hundred pounds, and that damn knife was coming down at me in slow motion at just about the same time the barrel of my snubbie rammed up under his chin.