The LawDog Files Read online

  I squeezed off two rounds.

  The .357 magnum is a powerful round. Two of them, fired in quick succession, sufficed to blow the electronic brains and assorted stuffing of the Animatronic Life-Like Talking Santa Claus that formerly belonged to the local Thriftway halfway to Dodge City.

  You don’t want to know what a couple of .357 rounds will do to hydraulics.

  *sigh*

  So there I was, staring at the robotic Kris Kringle whom I had assaulted, aggravated assaulted, and finally brutally murdered, when the sheriff and the trooper came crashing through the darkness looking for me.

  The sheriff looked at me and the fallen Jolly Olde Elf and then began to stare fixedly at the ceiling while tugging his mustache.

  Trooper Gary holstered his SIG, got out his pipe, looked around the crime scene, picked up a piece of flaming hat trim, and used it to light his pipe.

  Trooper Gary: (puffing his pipe into life) “Obviously an assault candy cane. Bet it ain’t registered.”

  Sheriff: “Dangerous things, assault canes.”

  Gary: “Obviously a good shoot, though.” Puff, puff.

  Sheriff: “Don’t worry, boy. I’ll call the marshals first thing in the morning.”

  LawDog: “Duh, puff-pant, huh?”

  Sheriff: “Boy, there’s gonna be several million kids after your hide come Christmas. Witness Protection Program is your only chance.”

  Smartass. That was the only time I have ever directed the Universal Peace Gesture at my fellow LEOs.

  The critter was caught in New Mexico an hour later.

  FILE 3: Pogonip

  The story I wrote about the unfortunate death of Santa Claus at my hands had a sequel that I started writing at The Firing Line during my tenure there as a moderator. I say “started writing” because I had one of my frequent bouts of writer’s block about halfway through the story, and it was several years before I was able to finish it and put it on my blog.

  At the time I finished writing it, it was somewhat longer than my usual stories. I was a little worried that it was too long and that my readers would lose interest before getting to the end. I need not have worried, it turns out. This story is consistently mentioned as being one of my readers’ favorites.

  * * *

  Show of paws here: how many people know what a pogonip is?

  For the unwary, a pogonip is also called ice fog. It is basically a thick blanket of winter fog that freezes on contact with anything solid, forming a super-slick rime of ice up to several inches thick.

  So now you know.

  As penance for my brutal assassination of Santa Claus the year before, the sheriff had graciously allowed me to be volunteered to play the Jolly Olde Elf at the town Christmas pageant.

  The suit was a wonder. Even wearing armor and a gun belt, I still disappeared in its deep red depths. This little problem was solved by the addition of several pillows from the trustee cell and three crumpled editions of the Sunday Dallas Morning News. The boots were actually overshoes, which velcroed quite nicely over my ropers, and the standard-issue beard was tossed in favor of something dug up by the chief dispatcher, who also did the wardrobe for the town theater group. She glued the beard to my face with some kind of clear adhesive, which she assured me would come off quite easily once the performance was over.

  Lying heifer.

  Anyhoo, I pulled on the supplied mittens, extracted my 15-year-old Shetland Sheepdog from under the dispatch desk, and drove my cruiser over to the Fire Department. The Sheltie was looking festive too, as the ladies in the office had given her a Christmas-themed sweater, put bows on her ears, and painted her toenails in sparkly red-and-green hues.

  The night before, our area of West Texas had received one of these rare pogonips, which had rendered the entire area about as slick as a greased hockey rink, but I didn’t realize how slick everything was until I wallowed out of the cruiser and slammed the door, which sent the cruiser sliding slowly about a foot left and into the gutter.

  *sigh*

  I rode the brand-new pumper truck over to the courthouse, did the “ho, ho, ho” thing, got my lap worn out, everyone exclaimed over the Sheltie, and she suffered herself to have many, many pictures taken with various personages. It was what anyone would think of as a generally good day.

  Not only that, but after the festivities, I discovered that the guys at the Fire Department had been nice enough to pull my cruiser out of the rain gutter. Twice.

  I plunked the dog into the side seat, shoehorned myself behind the wheel, and was gingerly inching my way home when, you guessed it, the radio went off.

  Burglary. In progress at one of the local churches.

  I drove us over to the church, pulled up, and mindful of my experience at the Fire Station, I got out of the cruiser, but I didn’t close the door.

  Parked in front of the church was a pickup truck, its engine still running. Across the street was a little old gentleman with an absolutely huge mustache, holding a cordless phone and giving me the old hairy eyeball.

  I immediately assumed that the gentleman with the phone was most probably the reporting party, so I started to waddle across the street to get more information when I noticed that someone else happened to be in the act of walking from the front lawn of the church toward the pickup truck, and this person also happened to be carrying one of the figurines from the outdoor Nativity scene. This kind of struck me as odd, so I hollered, “Sheriff’s office, might I have a word with you?”

  The old boy heisting Joseph, or possibly one of the Wise Men, immediately dropped the purloined porcelain and took off at a high-speed shuffle in the direction of the pickup, thereby earning himself the title of Person of Interest Number One.

  Deciding that I really, really wanted to have a talk with that critter, I also kicked it into high gear heading for the truck.

  He got there first, snagged the side mirror, pirouetted a couple of times, and went arse over tin cups onto the street.

  However, he did this just before my feet abruptly kicked out from under me, and I went down as well. God bless the Dallas paper; I couldn’t have been better padded if NASA had given it a try. I rolled over and started pushing myself to my feet when the critter righted himself, glanced over at me, and started a high-speed crawl slash bellyslide to the curb.

  Once on the chapel yard, he found somewhat better traction, got to his feet, and abruptly took off at a dead sprint, me breathing down his neck. At the corner, he pulled a sneaky. Since he hadn’t slowed to make a turn, I figured we were in for a full sprint down the block, but he put out an arm, grabbed the guyline for the telephone pole, and made an abrupt right turn. While this was, indeed, a good move, unfortunately, it dumped him on his fourth point of contact, and the critter slid a good ten yards down the street.

  Not having benefit of the guyline, I turned right as well, only more like a battleship under full steam. I used the entire street and most of the yard across the street just to change direction, said extra room giving the aforementioned critter enough time to scramble to his feet and head back the way we came.

  Apparently, I was still a bit too close for comfort because the critter ran past his pickup without even slowing down. This put him on a direct course for my cruiser, which, you may recall, still had the driver’s-side door open.

  I could almost see the 25-watt bulb light up over his head as he Got An Idea. Visions of dog-napped Shelties suddenly flashed across my mind’s eye. Not to mention, of course, the thought of having a fully equipped sheriff’s office cruiser stolen out from under my nose, but a man has his priorities.

  Fortunately, the Sheltie chose that moment to daintily step into the driver’s seat, fix the approaching critter with a gimlet eye, and utter a short, sharp “Ah’m wee, but Ah’m wickit” bark, thereby causing my critter to rethink his master plan and to lock up the brakes. This caused his legs to shoot out from under him, and he slid right under my cruiser, slick as a pin.

  My last desperate grab for the Mang
er Bandit cost me my balance too, and I hit the ice, sliding along at full speed and scrabbling frantically at the ice because my concerns for a dog-napped pooch had suddenly been replaced by visions of my overloaded butt slamming into the cruiser and causing the whole enchilada to slide into the gutter.

  By the grace of God, I narrowly missed my cruiser and slid into the gutter by my lonesome, which was not as bad as it sounds due to the extensive Santa padding. I spun about, and there was my critter, staring at me from under the cruiser about ten feet away.

  “Right then, boyo,” I snarled, “You’re nicked. Let’s go.”

  My critter blinked at me in utter incomprehension. “What?”

  “You’re under arrest. Let’s go.”

  “No” sayeth the critter. Now it was my turn to blink in confusion. “What?” I wittily replied.

  The critter turned over and got a couple of good handholds on the undercarriage of my cruiser. “Make me.”

  I pushed myself to my feet and stomped over to the cruiser. “You’re under arrest.” I gritted out through clenched teeth, “Now, get out from under there!”

  “Work for it, fat man.”

  *sigh*

  I was digging past various pillows and the lifestyle section of the Dallas Morning News, trying to lay a paw on my pepper spray, when my gaze happened to land upon… it.

  There it was. In all its glory. Not twenty feet from the front bumper of my cruiser. A holdover from the heady frontier past of our fair city: a horse trough.

  I happily—one might even go so far as to say joyously—ambled up to said horse trough, peered over the side, and saw it was absolutely chock-full of water, with only a three-inch-thick crust of ice over the top.

  I made a few adjustments and then ambled back to the cruiser, watching my very own winter tidal wave flow down the gutter, and said, gently, “Time to come out from under the car.”

  He disagreed. “Don’t you have an elf to play with?”

  “It would really be in your best interest to come out.”

  “What are you going to do? Put coal in my sto–HOOOOoooo WHoooaaaa Ohohoho Haaaa! Haa! Huh-huh-huh!”

  I tugged reflectively upon the beard. Yep. Between a combination of Panhandle winter wind and three quarts of glue, it was stuck but good. Under the cruiser, the yodeling briefly died down to a series of gasps and then crescendoed into a sudden soprano shriek that signaled, I surmised, the infiltration of polar water into the underwear area.

  It was cold, apparently.

  The impromptu yodelfest died down to noises strongly reminiscent of a rapid-fire castanets, so I cleared my throat reflectively and remarked, “There’s hot coffee down at the jail, dry clothes, and a warm bunk.”

  “B-bb-b-bbb-bastard.”

  “Or I could come chip you loose when the cold snap breaks. I figure, what? This time next week?”

  A dripping, shivering blue face appeared above the front quarter panel and stared accusingly up at me.

  “I d-d-didn’t kn-n-n-know S-santa Cl-Claus was such-such a s-s-sumbitch.”

  “Believe it. Into the back seat, Nanook. Let’s go put you into a nice, warm cell.”

  FILE 4: Big Mama

  This was the first of the stories involving the family of Big Mama, her four Amazonian daughters, and innumerable grand-offspring, and it was another tale that I’d been telling for years before finally writing it down at the Rysher site.

  Oddly enough, it’s the Big Mama stories that occasionally get me anonymously accused of racism online. I say “oddly enough” because I’m very careful to exclude any mention of race and am equally careful to write the dialogue in a vernacular that I consider to be “Southern Trash.”

  Come to think, it probably should be the Azikiwe stories that get me accused of racial bias, but so far, that hasn’t happened. Ah, well.

  Anyhoo, Big Mama was something else. I tooled up to arrest her one time for smacking one of her offspring in the snout with a steam iron. That woman proceeded to whip my butt with nothing more than a fly-swatter, a plastic Jesus, and a diaper bag.

  * * *

  Big Mama was the matriarch of what passed for a crime family in our neck of the woods, and she came by the name honestly. I swear that woman was every bit of six foot four and an easy 400 pounds at her most athletic. While she wasn’t exactly a criminal mastermind, what she lacked in quality, she more than made up for in quantity. And she never, ever, went quietly when arrested. While the Gentle Reader might consider this to be par for the course in rural law enforcement, I can only point out that in this particular case, we’re talking about six feet, four inches, and four hundred pounds of berserk Mama Grizzly Bear.

  One glorious day I was on duty when the word came in: Big Mama had Passed On.

  We were in the middle of a Moment of Silence—“For this gift we have received, let us be truly grateful,” murmured the sheriff—when the ambulance crew called, requesting help.

  We had a problem. Hoo boy, did we have a problem. Big Mama had let her girlish figure slide a bit over the preceding several months to the point that the sheriff, two deputies, two paramedics, and the Bugscuffle Volunteer Fire Department couldn’t even get her off the bed, forget putting her on the ambulance stretcher and its 300-pound weight limit.

  After a couple of hours of creative swearing, we finally worked out a plan. Someone scooted over to the local monument company and borrowed its forklift and a spare pallet while the volunteer fire department got out the Jaws of Life and popped the exterior wall off of Big Mama’s bedroom. Six of us rolled her onto the pallet, and then we raised the pallet and put it, and Big Mama, onto the hose bed of a fire truck. Voila!

  Off we drove to the funeral home, where the director, bless his heart, had dug out a portable embalming outfit. I didn’t even realize there was such a thing! Thanks to that, he was able to do the necessary deed on Big Mama in the garage.

  Which, in retrospect, was probably responsible for what happened later.

  The day of the funeral arrived. I had to be there because, true to form, four of Big Mama’s nephews, cousins, and grandkids were in jail on various charges. My handcuffed, shackled, and leg-ironed charges and I showed up early, and I was impressed, let me tell you. Someone had somehow found a casket big enough, and Big Mama was laid out in her Sunday finest with a peaceful smile on her face.

  This was shocking in and of itself. I had only ever seen Big Mama when she was fighting mad and cussing fit to make a sailor blush. Never saw her smile until she was gone. It looked downright unnatural.

  Anyhoo, we were there early, and I was listening to the gossip, which was all based on whether Big Mama’s youngest daughter would decide to show her face or not. Years earlier, Big Mama had attempted to rearrange this particular daughter’s giblets with a set of pinking shears, and said daughter had wisely run off to California, vowing never to return.

  Well, as it happened, she came back for the funeral. And I’m here to tell you that her performance there should have gotten her an Oscar. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  Four—count ’em, four—Baptist preachers got up behind the pulpit and lied their butts off about the Recently Deceased. Three different people got up to sing muzak versions of pop songs. The eulogy was a masterpiece; it bore no more resemblance to the Dearly Departed than a toady-frog resembles a polecat, but it sounded nice.

  Then, finally, it was over. Almost. The family rose and walked past the casket to say their final farewells and to steal any jewelry left on the body, with the entire congregation looking on and sniffling. Last in line was Baby Daughter.

  Like I said, her performance was a masterpiece. Baby Daughter had to be supported by two cousins in her time of grief. She was bravely fighting back tears, and as she tenderly touched the frozen features of Big Mama, she wailed, “Oh, Big Mama, why’d you leave us!?” And the two cousins gently tried to lead her away, but she turned back to the casket and blubbered, “But I can’t leave her!”

  Someone get that girl an Em
my.

  This went on for about five minutes, until finally, Baby Daughter flung herself bodily across Big Mama and wailed, “Come back, Big Mama. Come back!”

  And Big Mama did. Sort of. Well, actually, she kinda flopped a bit and made a noise like a humpback whale singing, as a glowing green ball appeared over the casket.

  I remember thinking, “Aha! So that’s what an air bubble in a corpse looks like. I always thought that was an urban myth. Fascinating.”

  Then, I noticed that I was the only person left in the church. Everyone else was sprinting down the hill, with the head preacher and my four leg-ironed prisoners leading the pack, I might add. It was at that moment that I noticed the glowing green ball was not an air bubble emitted from a corpse but rather the tritium insert in my front sight.

  The next thing I noticed was that I was in a Weaver stance so solid that it took me about five minutes to bust my knees loose enough to sneak down the aisle to make sure Big Mama was still well and truly deceased.

  I have been told there are rumors floating about that I actually poked the Dearly Departed with a stick during my subsequent examination. I deny the allegations entirely. I couldn’t find a stick. So I stood at the Amen Pew and tossed flower arrangements at the old lady instead.

  After all, you can’t be too careful.

  FILE 5: The Lovebirds

  I was a little hesitant about posting this one as it pretty much has an R rating, and I thought my Gentle Readers wouldn’t like the slightly racy elements. I shouldn’t have worried about that, though, because my usual crop of readers loved this story.

  However, this was written when my blog was starting to get really popular, and my readers were cross-posting everywhere. So this is the first story that netted me a vociferous avalanche of accusations of racism.