Love and Death on I‐80 West by Connor Mays
11 TUCCI JOURNAL: PART FOUR The first murder was an accident. Sort of. A lot of dead people know their murderers. Husbands and wives, girlfriends and boyfriends, children and parents, the usual combinations. Someone gets pissed and/or scared of the other person in the room. They grab an instrument of death designed for one thing: ending life. Shooting a gun is like driving: everyone thinks they can do it and nobody will get hurt. We’re raised on Westerns and police dramas and space operas where a gun is used like it ain’t no thang. Here’s the truth: it takes under nine pounds of pressure to pull the trigger on a .38 Special. Nine pounds. Lighter than a big bag of dog food. A touch over a gallon of water. A unplanned twitch of the finger on the trigger. Remember the last time you were drunk? Remember how hard it was to stand and how easy it was to fall over? A soft wind could trip you up. The push from a child’s hand. A child’s hand can pull a ninepound trigger with no problem. They do it every day with tragic results. Guns are fucking everywhere but often around people who drink for entertainment. The Army taught me to use one to kill people, then they sent me to MP school where they taught me how not to kill people. The mostimportant thing I learned from my enlistment is I’m scared of guns. After I left the Green Grunts, I never owned one again. No need with these big Wop hands. I’ll tell you later about the exception to this. When I was sentenced to Leavenworth (the United States Disciplinary Barracks), we took the short ride across Missouri Route 7, and they stuck me in a transitory cell to get me acclimated to prison life. I learned penitentiary rules and regulations, and the
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Love and Death on I‐80 West by Connor Mays
amount of control the staff had over our lives (sound familiar?). The clothes and cells were clean and expected to be kept that way. We were all military, so this was not a big deal unless an inmate decided to make it one. Transition was supposed to be days, but after a few weeks I was placed in a different transition cell, except it was one for outgoing inmates. I was on my way to being released. It was The Old Asshole at work again. When I got detained, he sounded the bugle call, and his asshole buddies across the Army of the United States and those on distant shores circled the wagons. First: get rid of the witness to the crime. When Lieutenant Pencilneck’s broken jaw healed, he got orders to South Korea to “watch the wire,” a local phrase for patrolling the hostile border between the two Koreas. The war there never ended. We signed an uneasy armistice that’s sixty years old and counting. Second: get a new trial. Courtmartials are called at the behest of the convening authority, this being the commanding general of Fort Leonard Wood. CGs are aware of this awesome power and responsibility, and they tend to wield it with care, especially when the socalled victim was a dickhead. When the CG learned the depth of dickheadedness, plus the death of Private Avery, which somehow had escaped his attention, he made his feelings understood on the subject of retrial. It didn’t take long for his lawyer, the Judge Advocate General, to find “legal inconsistencies” in the proceedings during the mandatory review of my courtmartial. (The JAG reviewing my case received orders to Hawaii upon submitting his findings to the CG, much to the JAG’s delight. Pure coincidence.)
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Love and Death on I‐80 West by Connor Mays
Three days after a new courtmartial was approved, Lieutenant Pencilneck stepped on a landmine and was blown to smithereens. The ensuing investigation, published months later, found the placement of the mine to be “unusual but consistent with North Korean terrorist techniques.” The Lieutenant was awarded a useless medal, and his body parts were sent home in small boxes, a kind of justice, considering what he did to Avery. The CG had a military trial to conduct with no witnesses other than the accused and, having learned more of the true facts regarding the personality of the nolonger lamented officer in question, had no desire to continue the charade. He informed his command sergeant major it was the CG’s desire someone shove PFC Tucci out the front door with minimal fuss. Guess who volunteered to give me the news. I was wandering the streets of Leavenworth, Kansas, in brandnew civilian clothes and a secondhand suitcase. My head was spinning, because I was a convicted felon a few days ago. I was free in every definition of the word, with my discharge paperwork was in my satchel, and Angelina’s parents took her to Reno when my sentence was handed down and got her a quickie divorce. The three of them made it clear I was to have nothing to do with my exwife or my son. Maybe they heard what I did to my sisterinlaw (I swear, she said she was eighteen). Bad move on my part. I should not have let them raise my son, but I wouldn’t learn of the consequences until years down the road. Back to Leavenworth, Kansas, and my search for fast food was interrupted by an old guy in a ragtop. The Old Asshole gave up on vans (and his family) years ago and
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Love and Death on I‐80 West by Connor Mays
drove what he liked for convenience. He took me to a Chinese place, and the conversation was short and not sweet. He was leaving the country for a long overseas tour with my little brother so the kid could finish high school and enter the service academy of his choice. My presence was not desired. As a last favor, he secured employment for me as a scab worker on the docks around Galveston and Trinity Bays near Houston, thousands of miles from his home address. The labor was hard, and the pay was decent, and the women were plentiful and cheap, which was right in my wheelhouse. He dropped a twenty, a bus ticket, and a buddy’s contact information on the table and disappeared from my life. Houston was tough, ballbuster tough. A lot of quality labor was on the streets looking for work, and I was lucky my dad’s old friend was a foreman at a warehouse specializing in “questionably purchased” goods. If you kept your mouth shut, you got paid in cold cash on Fridays. The weekends were for partying and screwing, and like in San Bernardino, I became good friends with the local working girls, and one working girl in particular. Dana was a freak of nature and one of the few women who could keep up with me in bed. It got to the point where we fucked to see if we could outfuck each other. It was a natural conclusion we get married, though it was the most screwed up of my three marriages, which is saying something. When we weren’t naked, we were fighting, and I mean all the damn time. Psycho Bitch kept screwing up the checking account and our credit cards, and she wouldn’t stop screwing her clients when we had more than enough money, and she always, always, always lied. That’s what ended us, once and for all. Looking back, I’m surprised we lasted four years.
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Love and Death on I‐80 West by Connor Mays
The worst lie? Not having kids. I was hung over something bad when I answered the door one day to see Noel and Jodi looking for their mom, with their dad in desert camos standing behind them. He was going to the Middle East and warned Dana they were coming. She failed to mention to me they were staying for the duration, and she didn’t tell the exhusband or their kids about the new hubby: me. I could have walked out, but the twins were and are special. It’s funny how some people thrive after a terrible childhood, but you can’t choose your gene pool. One thing on our side is I wasn’t much older than them (it didn’t take me long to figure out Dana lied about her age, too), and the three of us clicked. Hookers disappeared for a year when these kids moved in. It wasn’t all unicorns and rainbows. They missed their real dad, and they had the usual teenagertoadult adjustment problems, and we fought like we were supposed to, but they understood I was looking out for them when their mother wasn’t. They knew a twentysixyearold horn dog wasn’t trained to be a father figure for teenagers. We met halfway on a lot of things. When Jodi went on her first real date, I scared the shit out of the little dude by promising to break him into little pieces if he hurt her. I showed Noel how to talk to the ladies and gave him his first beer when he got shot down. I taught them how to drive and watched them get their licenses on the first try. Maybe the saddest day of my life was when their dad came to collect his kids. They were ecstatic to see him, and he shook my hand, a class act through and through, but it still sucked when I stopped being their fulltime father. Their departure started the egg timer on the end of Dana’s and my marriage.
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Love and Death on I‐80 West by Connor Mays
What am I forgetting? Oh, yeah. The dead guy. After the twins left, this couple moved into the apartment next door. We had the usual “How are you doing?” thing when I saw them outside, but I never learned their names. No need. I tagged him as “Dumbshit” and her as “Dumb Bitch” pretty quick because they fought night and day, and the apartments had rice paper for walls. It got distracting to where Dana and I stopped fucking, the one thing we had in common in our last few months together. The idiots next door didn’t bother her because she was still hooking at night downtown and sleeping through the day when everyone was at work. I ignored them until Dumbshit started beating Dumb Bitch. I don’t have many rules. Treat me fair, and I’ll do right by you. You want to fight, I’ll win. You want to kill me, you’re gonna die first. I don’t hurt women unless they want it, and a few do. Some hookers love pain. Feel like they got to be punished. Some want to be slapped, others spanked, even beaten with a fist. The last ones are the sick ones and not my cup of tea, but I got no problem with a spanking or two on request. I draw the line on nonconsensual domestic violence, so when I heard her screams of genuine pain, I dialed 911. They picked up his ass, and he was released after a couple of nights in jail. She refused to press charges, which is not uncommon. He was her sole income, and she had no place else to go. It didn’t save his ass when he went after me. I don’t remember which dock I was covering, but it was a double shift, and scab workers like me moved a lot of small freight from Place A to Place B. It was serious physical work, and I was still in some of the best shape of my life, better than when I was the teenage San Bernardino whorehouse fuckboy even. It doesn’t matter how
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Love and Death on I‐80 West by Connor Mays
Dumbass tracked me down. It was late, and I was the last one to clock out. Before quitting time, I was fixing a cranky hydraulic pallet truck stuck in down mode. While I was on my hands and knees looking in the guts, someone snuck up and dropped a rope around my neck, intending my death. Names didn’t matter. When it’s him or me, I’ll always pick me. I elbowed him in the breadbasket while backhanding him hard in the nuts. The air whooshed out his lungs, and the rope loosened, so I threw my head back against his face and heard the satisfying crunch of bone collapsing under the impact. He let go of the rope, so I spun and gave him one good elbow to the temple. He disappeared from sight. Oh, right. We were on a freight dock high over water, it was nighttime, and he lost track of the edge. Two seconds later, there was a splash. I watched him drown, figuring out who attacked me on his third attempt to breathe. It took him a while to die. Dumbass couldn’t swim. God’s truth, I mulled over saving him, but I can’t swim, either. When his body washed up across the bay days later, nobody connected him to his nextdoor neighbor, the dockworker. They pegged it as a suicide, which it was, all things considered. Me, a minute after he disappeared in the oilrich watery depths of the bay, I went back to work on the pallet truck and didn’t give him a second thought for the rest of the shift, but the adrenaline was flowing. I was amped and hornier than hell. I tracked Dana down later and fucked her ass off. Lying there in the dark afterwards, sucking on a Marlboro, with one hand rested on her bare ass, I examined my morals and wondered why I wasn’t feeling guilty or
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Love and Death on I‐80 West by Connor Mays
some other shit. “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” There’s no selfdefense clause in the Ten Commandments, and there’s no telling what a jury would decide if I turned myself in (never an option), so I decided I had to be answerable to me and me alone. I liked the power of life and death. It was a serious high, very much worth killing for. I also recognized the danger of such a decision. One wrong move, and it was incarceration for life, with or without a courtsanctioned execution at the end. I had to get training. Like I said, the Army taught me how to kill people, but with no finesse, no methodology, and zero training how to cover my tracks. To be a real murderer, I needed a mentor.
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Love and Death on I‐80 West by Connor Mays
This serial and book are solely owned by its creator, Connor Mays (a pseudonym). Copyright © 2016. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. This creation of literary art was drafted and edited via public wifi networks. The owners, operators, and employees of these networks have no ownership claim in any form of this work or the residuals, if any. For more information and permission requests, the author may be contacted via email only: connormaysbooks at gmail dot com. Website: http://www.connormaysbooks.com
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