The Crossland ShootoutA Novel by JOHN MYERS
Chapter 4
The Yellow Brick Road Leads Home To Crossland,
or, The Search Begins For Hector Cruz, Bad Guy
Home for me now is a country place, just the sort of house I'd always wanted, but figured it would never be my lot in life to own.
I was raised in a two-story country farmhouse just outside Crossland with a big wide front porch where you could set of an evening in a rocky chair and enjoy the cool breeze.
I'd always wanted a place like that, but the problem with that dream is those old country farmhouses are just that, old and in need of a lot of fixing up to start with, plus cold and drafty and impossible to heat, too.
They're just fine in the summer, with their high ceilings, which allows the heat to rise and keeps the rooms cool naturally. But in the winter, all the heat rises to those high ceilings and down where the people are on the floor, it gets downright cold.
A fella who was fool enough to buy one of those old houses would have to spend a fortune trying to fix one up to be livable.
I guess we just didn't know any better when we were kids, the five of us who grew up in that drafty old farmhouse near Crossland.
We thought it was just fine and with the passing years I forgot about those cold mornings when those bare wood floors felt like ice on bare feet when you first jumped out of the bed.
I forgot about that north-facing front bedroom and living room we closed off and never used in the winter, because when the wind was whistling "Nearer My God to Thee" around the chimney, that sunny North Carolina climate wasn't very sunny at all. It was cold.
I suppose I must have inherited my cold-natured ways from my mother, because she was always complaining about that cold, drafty old house when us five kids were growing up. Daddy was hot-natured, so he was always turning the heat down and sitting around in his t-shirt during the winter time, while mama always wore a sweater.
When daddy died in 1987, mama sold the homeplace and bought a snug, brick home up in Crossland, where she is still living.
I remembered all the good and forgot all the bad of old farmhouses when I rented one of those the first year I was back in Crossland. I remembered the bad that first winter, when I burnt pretty near a cord of stovewood almost every day to keep warm.
But after that winter, when I was about to resign myself to finding a modern home, I ran across a fella I knew from years past who had built a place outside Crossland, in the edge of the Uwharrie Mountains, a chain that slips down from the Great Smokies.
Some folks are amazed to find mountains in central North Carolina, but strictly speaking they're not mountains, just foot hills. This region is called the Piedmont, and as I learned in my high school French classes, that is French for "at the foot of the mountain," or an even more apt translation would be "foot hills."
The Uwharries used to be real mountains, but since they are believed to be the oldest mountain chain in North America, they're just plain wore out, mountains worn down to foot hills.
And when I saw that house built on a little flat spot jutting out from the side of a hill in the Uwharries, well it was love at first sight. Jeff Hardy owned a little hosiery mill in Crossland and he had built his dream home out in the woods.
It has all the good features of that two-story farmhouse of my youth, and none of the bad features. It has a nice, wide front porch that looks out toward the gravel road winding down the hill.
It has an even wider deck on the back side with a spectacular view of the mountains. Since the house faces east, you get shade on the deck in the mornings, shade on the front porch in the afternoon, and the end of the house faces north, giving minimum exposure to those northerly prevailing chilly winds in the winter.
And if you like to come out on the front porch and watch the sun rise, as I do, being a habitual early riser, it's picture perfect, watching ol' sol come up over those Uwharrie foot hills.
A lot of thought went into how and where to build this two-story house with its full basement underneath.
It has nice, shiny hardwood floors inside, upstairs and down, which Jeff had the good sense to cover here and there with a nice collection of those warm Indian-design and braided throw rugs.
But the best feature of all is how this home was built.
Instead of clapboard walls with little or no insulation in between, which is how all those old farmhouses were built, this house is made of two layers of solid logs, squared-off timbers a foot thick, lag-bolted together tighter than Dick's hatband. (I'm not sure just who Dick was, or how tight he wore his hatband. That's another one of my daddy's sayings. But Dick's hatband was supposed to be so tight his hat wouldn't blow off in a hurricane.)
The outside has natural finished one-inch clapboards and the inside of the log walls are covered with knotty-pine paneling, not that flimsy, glued-on-surface stuff that's nothing but a thin coat of sawdust stuck together, but inch-thick genuine pine boards.
It looks like a casual country home, which it is, but it's easy to stay as snug as a bug in a rug in wintertime when the modern gas furnace does a fine job, with no wood toting unless you just feel like starting a fire in the big genuine rock fireplace, wisely located in the center of the house to help spread heat.
And of course, it has air-conditioning for the summers, which are quite hot here in central North Carolina, even if I am living in the far eastern edge of the mountains. And with those solid walls, the heat stays outside in the summer, and the heat stays inside in the winter. A rather nice arrangement, if it is modern.
And down at the end of the house, overlooking the sloping hillside that falls away down to Deer Creek, bubbling by some quarter mile below, is the most unusual feature of the home.
Jeff Hardy told me he always wanted a tower, like a castle, for some strange reason, so he designed one in his dream home.
Stretching from the ground, anchored on the basement, downhill end of the house, he built a genuine round castle tower that rises three and a half stories tall, extending above the second floor.
Inside, the tower has a winding, circular staircase of steel steps, with landings on the basement, first and second floors, leading up to the round observation room on the top, which Jeff called his retreat. It's a great place to sit and enjoy the view.
And if it's good for nothing else—which it really isn't, other than a ridiculous extra expense as an inside staircase—the view from the top is worth it all, looking out over the Uwharrie Mountains which stretch into the smoky haze in the distance.
The outside of the tower is faced with genuine stone, just like a castle, painstakingly laid in piece by piece into concrete-mortar laced with steel reinforcing rods. The interior structure of the tower is built from cinder blocks with concrete poured in the hollows.
Jeff explained all these building features proudly to me as he showed me around that day when I first set eyes on his dream house.
With those solid-beam walls anchored at the end by that tower, I commented to Jeff that he had built a fort as much as a home.
I'd been looking at this piece of property for a long time, and the wind blows pretty strong up here sometimes, so I knew I had to build strong for it to stay on the side of the hill," he said.
The builder told me when he got through, 'Jeff, I ain't promising the wind won't never blow 'er off of this hill. But if she goes off some stormy night, she'll all go in one big piece.'"
The only problem with Jeff's dream was the hosiery business.
Like every business, it has its ups and downs. And along about the time I was looking for a house in and around Crossland, Jeff's hosiery business had taken one of those downs, a real bad one.
I didn't know it at the time, but Jeff was also having some woman trouble, and getting rid of the house was part of all that, so he was willing to sell cheap to pay off his small mortgage.
Anyway, that's what brought me back to Crossland, too, was woman trouble. My wife of some 15 years had decided she wanted to move on to greener pastures, so we had parted company and split our worldly goods up in the big city, or about as big as a city gets in North Carolina. So I was back in Crossland with my half of the proceeds of the sale of our former home and possessions.
And Jeff Hardy's misfortune turned out to be my fortune. Because even half of what our former home in the big city cost was enough cash to buy Jeff's home in the country with a very small mortgage. And that was a big reason why I finally took the chance of trying to make a living as a full-time freelance photojournalist—no huge house payments to worry about.
I've come to look at this house in the years since as a gift from the Good Lord. Sort of like He said to me, "Here's a get-started present to help you put your life back together. From Me to you." Thank you, Lord, was all I could say for my home.
I didn't really need half or even hardly a tenth of the space in that big house Jeff built. By the time the wife and I agreed to disagree, our son J.J. was ready to join the Army and our daughter, Suzy, was getting ready to leave home to start college for nursing.
Since my ex-wife was making plans to remarry, and Suzy didn't much care for the new man in her mama's life, she and her mama also agreed to disagree, so Suzy left the city and came to the country to live with me.
She came to Crossland during that first year and finished high school here. And not long after I bought Jeff's house, she was off to Chapel Hill for college, much to my everlasting chagrin.
I say chagrin because I went to North Carolina State University in Raleigh for a year or so after high school, majoring in partying until I drop/flunked out and joined the Navy.
For those who don't know much about my home state, NCSU fans are the everlasting enemies of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, those despised Tar Heels, who dominate just about every sport there is, or at least quite often beat the Wolfpack.
Oh well, you raise your young 'uns the best you can, and try to train them up in the way they should go and hope and pray they won't depart from it, and then they'll go and do just the opposite.
Me, an old Navy gob and a State fan, with a son who joined the Army and a daughter who ran away from home and went to Chapel Hill.
What's a poor, old gray-haired daddy to do? Grin and bear it.
So that's how I came to be the proud possessor of my country home, along with about 10 acres of property out in the Uwharrie wilds, even though most of the acreage is of the up and down kind.
There's not much front yard or back yard, just hills, and what little grass tries to poke its head up, the pine needles smother.
But then I never was one of those masochists who enjoys mowing grass and sweating like a dog in the summertime anyway. I like pine trees, which is about all that will grow in this sand-clay soil.
So that's where home is to me now, as I drove back there, pondering what I had learned about full auto AKs from Bob and Jim. Which was very little. All I really had was a name, Hector Cruz.
My daughter was home for the summer and met me at the door with a hug and a hello and good smells coming from the kitchen.
And our dogs, a pair of Dalmatians named Bonnie and Clyde also met me at the door. They were both Suzy's birthday presents a year before, Clyde from her brother, Bonnie from her boyfriend. She came up with those ridiculous names, appropriate for their actions often, as I frequently refer to them as a pair of hoodlums for their mischievous ways, but a bit absurd for pets in the household of a crime reporter, which is what my specialty has become. Even when news is slow in other regards, there's always plenty of crime going on, even here in the small towns of central North Carolina.
I say they're Suzy's dogs, but guess where they stay when she's off at school? They've never been to Chapel Hill and probably never will. And guess who feeds and waters them and gives them baths, even when Suzy's home? Sure, they're Suzy's dogs all right.
Bonnie and Clyde met me like they hadn't seen me for a month, instead of just since I left home at noon. Clyde shoved his way to first in line, wagging his whole rump along with his tail, just as happy as if he had good sense, which he don't, jumping all over me, which I allowed him to do since I had on my jeans that Saturday.
Bonnie was more restrained and ladylike, waiting for Clyde to calm down a bit. When he subsided somewhat, she came over and jumped up, putting her front legs on my belly and holding her head up for a brief ear rub. Then she was satisfied and went back and lay down on the cool, hardwood floor and got comfortable again.
But seeing Bonnie get some attention set Clyde off again, so he had to come back for seconds. To paraphrase the old saying about a horse, there's nothing so good for the inside of a man as the outside of a dog. Who can keep from smiling at a pair of dogs as happy as Bonnie and Clyde? They've both got a bubbling kind of personality that's catching, particularly young dogs like this pair, only a year old and just coming out of the puppy stage.
Of course, all Dalmatians are like that, the kind of dogs who are everybody's friend. Clyde greets everybody like he greeted me, with a wagging tail and happy expectations. Bonnie is a bit more reserved, especially with strangers, but I'd never seen her even growl at anyone, in the year we'd had her. However, according to a book Suzy has on Dalmatians, they do get more aggressive and protective of their owners as they mature.
If he sees somebody he doesn't know, Clyde will bark, but if they're bold enough to come on up, the only danger they're in is the possibility that they might get licked to death.
Bonnie is more alert than Clyde, quicker to hear a strange noise and bark. The female of the species, according to Suzy's Dalmatian book, is also more likely to get aggressive as she matures, and do more than just bark. The female will also get more protective after she has offspring, the book says. We planned to find out about that soon, when it came time to breed our dogs.
But the best feature of Dalmatians is they are not the bark-at-the-moon kind of dogs. When they bark, you can bet they've actually heard something out of the ordinary. They never bark without reason, or just to hear the sound of their head roar.
And out where I live is ideal Dalmatian territory. They were bred as English coach dogs, trained to run in front of the horses as sort of pace dogs, helping the horses set a nice easy trot.
And Dalmatians have just got to have plenty of room to run. If you kept one cooped up for long, I think he'd just explode into a cloud of white fur with black spots, scattering spots everywhere.
Bonnie and Clyde's favorite game is chasing each other in endless circles around our yard, first one chasing, then the other.
Out here where I live, half a mile beyond the pavement's end on a gravel road, we get very little traffic, mostly hunters in fall and winter, lovers and campers in the spring and summer.
It's an area right outside Crossland where I did quite a bit of all three when I was growing up, hunting, camping and a nice quiet place to take a young lady to when a young man's heart turns to other pursuits, such as love, in the great outdoors.
And because I did my share of the latter here, I was even married under a cedar tree near where my home is, those many years ago when I was young and foolish and in love.
It seemed like the thing to do at the time, anyway.
My house is built alongside a pretty steep hill on the gravel road that winds around the hill, forcing drivers to go slow heading up and to keep the brakes on coming down, lest they slip off in a curve and drop off the steep edge.
Even Clyde, careless as he is when he's out running, always has had plenty of time to dodge the occasional vehicle on our road.
And the vehicles are only occasional because my nearest neighbor is half a mile away at the end of the pavement, in the direction of Crossland, and three or four miles in the other direction, where the gravel road comes back to civilization after winding through a corner of the Uwharrie National Forest.
As I settled in at home that Saturday night, I pretty much just forgot all about Bob and Jim whoeverhewas and Hector Cruz. Or I tried to tell myself I would take Bob's advice and forget it.
I finished off the weekend with my usual Sunday, starting my day at 6 a.m. as usual, and digesting with breakfast my usual dose of newspapers, the four dailies that are delivered to my home, one of the benefits of Crossland's growth.
I suppose that was the biggest surprise upon my return home after some 25 years away from Crossland in school, the Navy, then college and working, to find that some actual growth had occurred.
Crossland was a sleepy little burg of less than a thousand souls when I grew up here, raised with two brothers and two sisters on a small farm on the outskirts of town. My daddy was a long-haul truck driver and part-time farmer, gone most of the time on the road trying to earn a living to keep us kids fed and clothed, and my mother, in between vacations to have children, was a schoolteacher.
My grandmother on my daddy's side, after she was widowed the second time, moved onto the farm and built a house next door to ours, and exercised her iron hand of discipline to keep us kids in line while daddy was on the road and mama was in school. It was a relief to get old enough to go to school, to get a vacation from grandma, who also believed strongly in hard work on the farm.
But after school and in the summers, us kids were expected to do our part on the farm, and any farm work is hard work.
We grew cotton in a small patch which seemed to me then to be larger than the Great Plains, but was only two or three acres.
I saw a racist bumper sticker a while back which said, "I wish I'd picked my own d--- cotton!" Well, I agree that using blacks for slaves was a terrible idea and lousy economics, too, but anybody who has ever picked his own cotton, even if only an acre or two, will have no nostalgia for "Way down yonder in the land o' cotton." Old times there may not be forgotten, but they are gladly gone.
My daddy raised tobacco, too, but one particular year's crop of that turned out to be the end of his part-time farming days.
Daddy had borrowed enough to lease land to raise about 100 acres of tobacco, which was his largest crop ever. And for whatever reasons, he had a disastrous year. I'm not sure what year that was, somewhere in the 1950s, but I was old enough to remember the figures. When that leaf that refused to cure properly was finally sold, he averaged 10 cents a pound. Which means he lost his behind.
That was the year my daddy quit farming altogether and went back on the road trucking full-time. He told me later it took him a long time to pay what he borrowed to gamble on that failed crop.
And that's what farming is, a gamble. Reminds me of the farmer who won a million dollars in the lottery. They asked him what he was going to do with his money and he replied, "Well, I guess I'll just go on back home and keep on farming until it's all gone."
I resolved in my heart early that whatever I did in life, one thing was for sure. I was not going to be a farmer. There is entirely too much hard work and sweat involved in that for me.
And I never was any good at gambling, either. Always lost.
School provided me with an excuse to pursue what early became my escape from the troubles and cares of the real world, books. When we were kids, I used to go hide so I could read unhindered.
I recall as one of my fondest memories the day us third graders at Crossland Elementary School were first allowed over into the "big" section of the school library, out of the "little" section where the reading material consisted primarily of skinny little books with mostly stories about Dick, Jane and Spot.
See Dick. See Jane. See Spot. See Spot run." That may have been pretty exciting stuff in the first grade, but by the third grade I was past ready to move on to bigger and better books.
And the wonderful world of reading "big" thick books, which began with Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mystery stories and has never ended, was a logical first step to becoming a writer. If you're not a reader, you'll never wonder what it takes to become a writer.
I remember the day that idea first bloomed in my young head.
There was only one newspaper in the world, so far as I knew when I was growing up, The News & Observer of Raleigh, the state capital paper and very strong on Democrats, which it still is.
And all the Barton voters, mama, daddy and grandma, were all dyed-in-the-wool, yellow-dog Democrats. Those are the kind who would vote for a yellow dog if it was on the Democrat ticket.
Back in those days, the Republican Party in North Carolina could hold its state convention in a phone booth, and all the action in election years was in the Democrat primary. Whoever won the Democrat primary was going to be elected, no question at all.
It's still that way here in Morgan County and Crossland.
Anyway, I went out to the mailbox to get the N&O one day when I was a kid (The mighty Raleigh paper didn't have delivery routes for little burgs like Crossland back then, you had to get it by mail) and as I was reading a front-page story as I walked back to the house, the thought came to me, "Could I ever write a story like that? Nah. No way, impossible, never, ever," I answered myself.
But you have to ask the question before you can try to answer, and you have to dream before you can do, and that was the start of the dream of maybe, somehow, someway, I could be a newspaperman.
Be careful what you dream about. You might get it someday.
So now here I was back in Crossland, many years later, more years than I cared to count up, reading four daily newspapers delivered to my door. Or at least delivered to the boxes out at the end of my driveway out here a mile or three out of town.
And that says a lot about Crossland's growth in the years I was gone. The town has a population now of three or four thousand, and I heard a lot of griping going on after the 1990 census that another thousand, maybe two, of local Mexicans weren't counted.
It's not too surprising that many of the Mexicans might lie low when some government official comes around with a clipboard, asking questions. Particularly if they didn't get in the U.S. legally. Of course, I'm sure we don't have any illegals here.
Census was the only time I've heard any griping in Crossland about the Mexicans that was positive. Folks want them counted when it comes to getting state and federal money based on population.
Otherwise, most folks around Crossland would just as soon all these Mexicans, who were brought in here as migrant farm workers and stayed on to try to better themselves in the land of the free, would just go on back to Mexico. I suppose the folks over in Anson County back around 1800 felt the same way about the Barton forebears who came over here from the old country in Europe.
But along with the "undesirable elements" that growth brings, there's a few bright spots, too, in addition to daily newspapers delivered to your home. We have a Food Lion and a Winn Dixie and a Wal-Mart and a K mart and the other usual clutter of commercial development that comes with growth. It sure beats having to drive 30 or 40 miles just to get a good grocery selection at the store.
Yet there is a bad side to growth, too, those "undesirable elements." Crime, which was a big-city problem way off somewhere else when I was growing up, has come to Crossland. I remember once when mama and daddy loaded up us five kids to go to Florida for a vacation and we left the doors to the house unlocked while we were gone. And not a thing had been disturbed when we got back home.
I went to church a while back on Sunday morning and forgot to lock a window. When I came back, the place had been robbed, even though Bonnie and Clyde were both left in the house. They could probably have told me what flavor the thieves were, as I'm sure they tried to lick them to death when they came in the window.
But they were just puppies then. Maybe as they grow older and mature they might turn into some kind of watch dogs some day.
After I had plowed an initial furrow through my Sunday papers that morning with my second and third cups of coffee, it was time to get ready to go to Sunday School and preaching, thieves or not.
Just before 10 a.m., Suzy and I headed into town to Crossland Baptist Church, where I teach the adult class in Sunday School.
Our class had been working through the Gospel of Matthew, and our study was nearing the end of that book as I read from chapter 26 that day.
The scene was the arrest of Jesus and one of His disciples fought for Him, taking a sword to cut off the ear of one of the servants of the high priest, who sent the mob to make the arrest.
But Jesus rebuked that disciple bearing the sword, telling him, "Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword," in Matthew 26:52.
I should have listened to my own Sunday School lesson.
And then the preacher's message also provided food for thought, if I had been paying attention then, which I really wasn't as I can see clearly now, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight.
He preached about following the example of Jesus, who forgave His enemies, even Judas in his moment of betrayal. And he added in Jesus' words about doing good to your enemy, walking the extra mile and turning the other cheek. "Overcome evil with good," he said.
Never return evil for evil. That's like trying to put a fire out by throwing gas on it. It'll never work," he said. I should have listened. I would have saved myself a lot of trouble if I had.
I believe the Lord speaks to us in many ways, but primarily through His written Word, the Bible, and through preachers who preach it. I would come to wish I had listened better that day.
Monday morning, after consuming my usual breakfast, coffee and newspapers, I rode up through Crossland and out to Moonshine Road.
My daddy told me when I was a kid that Moonshine Road got its name from the branch of Deer Creek that runs along it, which was supposedly one of the prime spots for making white liquor, or moonshine as it's called, back in Crossland's wild and woolly days.
Out on the edge of town on Moonshine Road, there's a new subdivision, at least new to me since I moved back home, named Sandspur Acres. I suppose the developer had a sense of humor, because a sandspur is hardly one of the attractions of the area.
It's a hardy little weed that grows seeds which are covered with sharp spines, ready to catch any passerby and spread its growth hither and yon. Once you get a patch of sandspurs started, it's just about near impossible to ever get rid of the critters. Pull 'em up and burn 'em and they'll sprout more plants from the ash pile. They're just a permanent part of life in the sandhills.
So I guess that developer gave up on trying to rid his farmland of sandspurs and just laid it off in lots and named it for the pesky suckers. I didn't count them, but I suppose there are 50 or 60 homes in Sandspur Acres, and down at the far end, about a dozen or so of those neat brick homes have been bought by Mexicans, plus several other Mexican families are in homes scattered throughout the subdivision.
I stopped at the first Mexican home and asked if anybody knew Hector Cruz. The nice Mexican lady who came to the door looked at me kind of funny when I spoke that name, but she pointed on down the street and then she closed the door quickly in my face.
I tried the third house down and got another funny look, another pointing hand and another quickly closed door in my face.
By the time I got to the final house, some three stops later, all I had collected were a lot of funny looks and no Hector Cruz.
I drove on back home and loaded up my daughter, who speaks Spanish passably well, having studied it in high school and making several Mexican friends during her two years at Crossland High.
She took me to the house of one of her girlfriends, one of the houses I hadn't stopped at before, and they hugged each other and chatted away for a while in Mexican and English, catching up some.
But when Suzy asked her buddy about Hector Cruz, the laughter and smiles dried up suddenly. She fired some machine-gun Spanish at Suzy, who listened, then turned to me. "Daddy, she says Hector Cruz is a bad man. She says he is a very rough customer."
Does she know where he lives?" I asked.
Suzy translated that.
After another somewhat slower machine-gun burst of Spanish, Suzy translated again. "She says he stays some times at the Cruz house down the street. He's a distant cousin or something."
As we left to drive down a block or so to the Cruz house, Suzy told me, "Daddy, she said we'd better leave Hector Cruz alone."
Honey," I answered, "sometimes the people I deal with aren't all choir boys. I've got a good reason to talk to this Hector Cruz, and believe me, I won't hang around him any longer than I have to."
But when we got to the Cruz house, we found no Hector Cruz.
Suzy talked and listened to the man of the house there for a minute or two, then told me, "He says Hector is away right now. But he said he expects him to be coming back in about two weeks. He said they're planning a big party. Hector will be back for that."
So that's where we left it. I took Suzy on back home and I went off tilting at other windmills. But I still had Hector Cruz on my mind as I was working on another story at the courthouse later.
I was rooting around up in the Register of Deeds office, following up the faint odor of a land transaction that smelled fishy, but after several hours of fruitless searching, I quit.
That's what the big majority of newspaper work is, work. Not the glamorous stuff like meeting Deep Throat in a parking garage, who will tell you some secret that you then expose the evil with.
Most of it is just plain old work, digging through dusty old deeds and mortgages, trying to uncover the tracks of somebody who wants to hide them, asking a thousand questions to get one answer.
It's sitting through boring meetings, trying to decipher boring court dockets and a whole lot of other tedious work, but it's worth it when you can put it together into a good story.
The Bible says you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. Well I believe that is my calling, to root out the truth and get it out there for people to read and act upon it.
But every satisfying story I have ever wrestled into shape to be printed in a newspaper has involved hours and hours, sometimes days and days and even weeks and weeks of just plain ol' hard work.
Anyway, it was getting late that Monday, but before I headed home, I decided to drop by the basement of the courthouse to see if the major was in his office in the sheriff's department.
I remember a sign I saw in another deputy's office one day in another sheriff's department. The sign said, "It's not my job to run this train, to toot the horn, nor ring the bell. But let the d--- thing jump the track, and see who catches hell."
Major Jimmy Worley doesn't have a sign like that in his office, but he ought to. He may not be the man who officially runs the train that is the Morgan County Sheriff's Department, but he sure enough is the man who keeps his hand on the throttle. And I'm sure if something goes wrong and it jumps the track, Jimmy Worley would be the man who catches hell from the high sheriff.
Even if I had been inclined to look, I knew there was no way Sheriff Frank Murphy was in his office across the hallway. In the years since I've been back home, working in Morgan and the surrounding counties, I have yet to see Sheriff Murphy in his office past 11 a.m. He comes in about 8:30 or 9 each morning, stands around and drinks a cup of coffee or two, laughs and jokes with the deputies on duty, goes to his office to check his mail and then goes home. And doesn't come back until the next morning. Nice work if you can get it, particularly with a $50,000 a year salary.
I guess he figures when you've got a good man like Jimmy Worley to run the show, why bother to stand around in the way?
The major was in, so I strolled on in his office and had a seat, exchanging pleasantries back and forth for a minute.
Then I asked him, "Do you know a fella named Hector Cruz?"
I got the same funny look from the major that I got from those Mexicans down in Sandspur Acres when I spoke that name to them.
What in the hell are you sticking your nose in this time?" he asked, adding, "One of these days, you'll get that nose shot off."
Without waiting for an answer, he plowed on, "For your information, Hector Cruz is the biggest dope dealer in this whole area. We've been trying to catch his Mexican a-- for several years now, and he's just too slick for us. This is off the record, ain't it?" the major finally asked, as he slowed down and paused.
Yeah, sure," I replied. I told him about my story idea about how to buy a full auto AK-47 and the major just smiled at that.
Yeah, I'm sure Hector would know all about that, but I doubt very seriously he's going to give you the time of day. He just might show you what the business end of an auto AK-47 looks like.
You better leave this dude alone. He's one rough customer."
Yeah," I agreed, "I've already been told that about him."
I explained to the major how I had learned that Hector Cruz was out of town for a couple of weeks, but was coming back in town in time for a big party at his cousin's house in Sandspur Acres.
You're d--- right he's out of town," the major added. "We know exactly where he is. He's down in Mexico buying a load of dope to haul back up here. We know he's been dealing dope for years, and Crossland is just the last stop on his route on his way back.
The trouble is, he's always got rid of the dope by the time he surfaces back in Crossland. But we'll get him one of these days.
And you better not be standing around when it happens, because we hear he goes armed to the teeth all the time. And he's got a whole gang of troops around him armed and ready, too.
If we ever catch him with some dope on him, I doubt he'll go to jail nice and peaceful. It'll probably be a big d--- shootout."
If you don't mind," I told the major, "don't call me for that arrest until after the shooting is over with. I think that's one I'll just have to take your word for instead of being there."
As I stood up to go, I noticed a new piece of apparel hanging on the coat rack in the corner of the major's office, an armored vest, but it looked a lot lighter and flimsier than any I'd seen.
"What you got there?" I asked, pointing to the new vest.
That's the latest thing in technology," the major answered. "It's a new kind of armored vest that's a lot lighter and easier to wear than the older, heavier bulky ones we already had.
We got a few thousand dollars from a federal grant so we got some of these for the men. It's supposed to be a good as the heavier ones, but more comfortable and not as noticeable, either.
But when it's hot like it's been lately, I can't get any of the deputies to wear these things. They're still too uncomfortable.
And it's still too bulky for the most of female deputies to wear, at least the ones who have these great big bumps on their chest that sort of get in the way."
Well I had to smile at the major's little joke, and I added, "Well, maybe the flat-chested deputies will like them anyway. They're about the same color as your tan uniforms, so they'll be nicely color-coordinated when they wear them."
The major then made another one of his small jokes.
Yeah, they call that light tan 'flesh-colored.' But some of the deputies' flesh tones are a little bit darker than that color."
I replied, "Well, black or white, male or female, you better make sure your deputies have those things on when they run up against Hector Cruz, if he's got one of those full auto AK-47s."
Hell, an AK-47 round will shoot slap through any armored vest we've got, old or new," the major replied. "These things are supposed to stop a pistol bullet, not a high-powered rifle round."
Will the new vests stop an AK-47 round if you put a steel plate in them?" I asked.
We've got steel plates that insert in a little pocket over the chest in these new vests, but they won't stop an AK-47 round. There's never been a vest yet that would stop a high-powered rifle bullet. Any rifle will shoot right through any vest on the market, steel plate and all.
That's why this crap about outlawing assault weapons is so stupid. Any hunting rifle is just as dangerous as an assault rifle. Outlawing assault weapons won't help us any. And even if they outlawed all rifles, shotguns and pistols, that won't mean squat to guys like Hector Cruz. They don't abide by the laws anyway.
You better leave Hector Cruz alone," the major concluded.
Well, I left the major's office and chewed on that thought as I drove on home. Again, I should have listened to his sound advice.
I should have listened to a lot of sound advice I ignored.
Ever hear that still, small voice in your head speak to you?
Back in my wild and woolly days, I heard that little voice, telling me not to do a whole lot of the things I did. But there was always another voice, too, telling me "Why not? Go ahead. Try it."
And try it I did, about anything you could imagine. I smoked a little dope, no, that's not true, I smoked a trainload of dope.
I had more than my share of wine, women and song, though I never was much for the singing. I went to the rock and roll concerts of my youth and let somebody else do the singing for me.
I was introduced to dope in the faraway ports I visited in Uncle Sam's Navy, and when I got out in 1971, I let my hair and beard grow long and woolly and enjoyed being one of the "hippies."
I got married that same year, had a couple of kids, went back to school and somehow stumbled my way into the newspaper business.
Then everything changed in 1977. I got saved. The old things passed away and all things became new, as Paul says in Corinthians.
And it all happened almost by accident. But as I said earlier, there are really no such things as accidents.
The Lord knows what He's doing, and He knew what He was doing that day when my wife asked me if I wanted something to read when she was headed uptown shopping.
Yeah," I said. "Pick me up a book, maybe science fiction."
And she picked up a book that looked like it was science fiction, but there was no fiction in it. It was full of truth.
The book was "The Late, Great Planet Earth," by Hal Lindsey.
In it, Lindsey writes about the times we are living in today, and explains how the Bible predicted much of it in prophecies, thousands of years ago.
And this "science fiction" book that grabbed my attention with prophecy kept my attention as Lindsey turned to God's answer for all the troubles He predicted would come, His Son, Jesus Christ, the One sent to earth to die for our sins and raised from the dead.
And Lindsey explained God's plan of salvation in simple terms. Confess your need of the Savior, then believe in your heart that God raised Jesus up from the dead, and then claim God's promise, "Thou shalt be saved," in Romans 10:9.
I remember what I said that day. "Well, Lord, I've tried everything else. I guess I'll try You." I did, and He saved me.
I quit doping and drinking, and started singing in the choir.
Somewhere along the way since, I lost the wife I had got along just fine with back in my wild and woolly days. Seemed like the closer I got to the Lord, the further I got from her.
But you can't go back once salvation changes your life.
And along this new way, I've learned to listen to that still, small voice inside, the One who directs along this new way.
Call that voice the Holy Spirit, or an angel, or the Lord Himself, or conscience, or guilt, or even common sense, which I've learned is very uncommon. But I've learned the hard way that when that still, small voice speaks, you better listen to it.
And right now, that still, small voice was fairly shouting at me, "Leave this Hector Cruz alone. Have absolutely nothing to do with him. He's a very bad customer. Listen to what everybody says."
Of course, just because I'm a Christian now doesn't mean I don't still hear that other voice, too. And that other voice was saying, "What's the big deal? You just want to talk to the man. Sometimes you have to take chances in order to get the big story."
Chapter 5
A Front Row Seat at the Crossland Shootout, Act I,
or, 'Don't Take Your Gun To Town, Jay, Stay Home'
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