You can run, you can hide...
Until the law turns up at your side.
Until the law turns up at your side.
The Strong Arm of the Law by Russell Johnson
It looked like a Satanic cavalry charge
invading her little town. Sheriff Mary Beth Cain watched them cut through the
fog, winding down the mountainside on steel horses, dressed in black leather
with emblems of skulls and serpents and flames. She counted them as they passed
by--40 in total, everyone armed--pulling up to a roadside bar called Lucky’s.
“I really think we just need to leave
this alone, Sheriff.” Her chief deputy, Izzy, was still trying to talk her out
of this but she’d worked too hard busting up the local meth dens to let this
hoard of interlopers move in now.
“It’s like a whole army battalion of
bikers over there,” Izzy continued. “How are we supposed to handle this with
just six deputies?”
“You just stick to the plan,” Mary
Beth said. “I’ve got a secret weapon.”
That weapon was her cousin Raelyn. More
specifically, her ample cleavage, which she had on full display at Lucky’s,
while balancing a tray of beers and walking with a switch so pronounced it’d
make a street-corner hooker blush.
She’d been told to look for the alpha
dog and he hadn’t been hard to spot: 6’ 3”, with tree-trunk arms and a long
black beard twisted into braids. Raelynn zeroed in on Blackbeard and flirted
shamelessly until provoking him into belting her across the cheek.
That’s when Mary Beth and her
deputies went in, ratcheting their scatter guns. “Freeze! Anybody moves, shoot
‘em,” Mary Beth said. She shoved Blackbeard out the front door with the nose of
her rifle.
Raelynn followed behind while the
deputies kept the other bikers at bay.
There was a bench outside where Mary
Beth told the man to sit. “Cuff yourself,” she said, tossing him the silver
rings.
“What the hell is this?”
“It’s for your safety and mine, while
we have a discussion. Do it!” Mary Beth
raised her shotgun.
“This is fucking bullshit,” the man
said as he cuffed his wrists to the back of
the bench. Mary Beth patted him down
and found a nine- millimeter Beretta.
“I got a permit for that.”
“I don’t really care.” Mary Beth
unloaded the pistol and chucked it on
the ground.
“Listen, this bitch assaulted me. You
should be arresting her.”
Mary Beth looked to her cousin. “That
the way you remember it, Rae?”
“Nope,” she said. Mary Beth used her phone
to take a picture of Raelynn’s cheek that was swelling up nicely.
“Fucking entrapment is what this is.
You sent her in there to provoke me.”
Mary Beth adjusted her Stetson like
she was really thinking it over. “Entrapment,” she said. “That’s a big word.”
Blackbeard was shaking his head in
disbelief, looking at Mary Beth like she was crazy, wondering what kind of
two-bit backwoods operation he was dealing with.
“You know what, lady, go ahead and
take me in. Little assault charge; my guys will have me bailed out by the end
of the day.”
Mary Beth looked at him like a kid
who just ate a booger. “Oh, Sweetie, you just don’t get what’s going on do ya?
You see, this here is Raelynn Logan.”
“So?”
“So, her father is James Edward
Logan.”
“Who?”
“My Uncle Jimmy.”
Blackbeard shrugged.
Mary Beth pulled up a Wikipedia page
on her smart phone and showed it to him as she read:
Gunnery
Sergeant James “Jimmy” Edward Logan, U.S. Marines, Retired.
One
of the most prolific snipers in American history, with 75 confirmed kills
during the Vietnam conflict and a suspected 50 more officially listed as
unconfirmed. In addition, because much of Logan’s service was highly
classified, it has often been asserted that his true kill tally was well over
200, which, if true, would make him, by far, the deadliest American sniper of
all time.
“Listen here,” Mary Beth said.
“You’ll like this part.”
Since
returning to civilian life, Logan has also been accused of multiple
assassinations over personal disputes but has never been formally charged.
“This is crazy,” Neko said, tugging
at the cuffs.
“Crazy. You could say that about my
Uncle Jimmy. Especially when it comes to his girls. Last one who laid a hand on
Rae was a fella named Buck Davis. When Uncle Jimmy found out about it, he
exploded Buck’s head like a fucking watermelon, using a Remington seven hundred
bolt-action from over a thousand yards away.”
Blackbeard squirmed, desperate to get
away from this wiry strawberry blonde sheriff who he outweighed by a hundred
pounds. “Look, if you’re going to arrest me, let’s go ahead and get this over
with,” he said.
Beads of sweat had popped up on his
forehead. Mary Beth wiped them gingerly with a handkerchief. “Honey, I’m not
arresting you. I’m just gonna email a picture
of you to my Uncle Jimmy. Along with a picture of what you and your friends did
to his baby girl.” Mary Beth snapped a photo of
Blackbeard and a few of their bikes, then made a show of sending it off to a
yahoo address. The whole time, Blackbeard struggling with the cuffs, telling
her she was fucking nuts.
“How many guys you got in there?”
Mary Beth asked. “Forty? Fity? That ain’t nothing to Uncle Jimmy. So many
places to hide in these hills, so many good vantage points. You know he’s been
really cranky since that American Sniper movie came out about that guy from
Texas. Jimmy’s really been wanting to increase his numbers.”
As the last of the bikers roared off
into the distance on their way out of town, Mary Beth gave them a little wave
goodbye. Izzy laughed at how Blackbeard fell for the bogus Wikipedia page she
cooked up.
“I guess that’s really your secret
weapon, huh?” he said. “Your ability to bullshit.”
