Previous chapters here:

One

Two

Three

Barbara was no dummy, and she really didn’t want to know, nor did she care about what her husband was doing with me and Kim, and she genuinely liked me and Gerry, although she could not stand Kim, mainly because he was not good with animals, especially Charley-the-cougar, not to mention she just didn’t like his arrogant personality.

Barbara was a vivacious redhead, bright green eyes, slightly stocky, about five-seven. And she had a temper. Best not to fuck with Barbara. Her husband loves telling a story on her. While she was still working the oil rigs and had just started dating John, they went out to eat one evening after flying in from a rig. The establishment was just a hole-in-the wall bar on the coast. Barbara ordered a double cheeseburger, an order of fries, an order of onion rings and a pitcher of Budweiser. (“That Gal can put away some groceries!” John would say.)

They were seated at the bar, John on the left and another roughneck on the right of Barb. When the food arrived and Barbara was flooding her fries and onion rings with ketchup, the roughneck (who should have known better), thought he’d fuck with Barbara. He picked up her cheeseburger and feigned taking a bite.

“Look you son-of-bitch,” she said, “Put my burger back on my plate right goddamn now.”

The guy switched the burger to his right hand and said, “Or what Barb?” He had his left hand resting on the bar top.

In a flash Barbara grabbed her fork and stabbed the guy’s hand, damn near nailing it to the bar.

“Or that!” She said.

The burger fell to the bar top unharmed.

Having come to the agreement with the Mexicans, all we had to do was wait for them to prepare the shipment for pickup. John and Kim would fly to McAllen, pick up the marijuana (125 pounds) and fly it back to Lake Charles where I would be waiting with the Impala to transfer it from the plane. We could not find a good landing zone in Lake Charles after several days of diligent searching and heated debate between me and Kim. Out of necessity I decided we would land the plane behind the Calcasieu Parish Sheriff’s department. There was a very large empty field there, nice and flat and good enough John said to land on. Now, you may wonder why land right in the backyard of The Law, but actually it made good sense. No one in his right mind would try to land a plane full of pot behind the Sheriff’s Department. No one except us. They would never suspect a thing. (I hoped not anyway).

Everything was ready on our end. It was now mid-summer. We waited for word from our boys in McAllen/Reynosa.

And waited.

And waited.

We had several telephone conversations with Pablo during this time and he kept assuring us that things would be just fine; just a little longer… perhaps mañana …

Things were beginning to become unbearable around the house for Barbara. She did not understand (and rightly so) why Kim and Gerry and I were living there and not working (Me and Kim anyway)–just hanging out—waiting on some ‘business deal’ to come through.

The waiting was killing me and Kim. The two of us, and with our history, just hanging out with nothing to do, was a recipe for all sorts of boredom induced mischief and it didn’t take long to become manifest.

One night as we were all leaving an Italian restaurant and heading toward the car parked out back, Kim says, “Hey Lance, Y’all wait up.”

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Just hang on a sec,” he said, as I saw him heading back over to the building and a small door off to the side.

As I watched him disappear into the building, uneasiness came over me. “Now what?” I whispered to myself.

Kim reappeared, or at least his head did from behind the door (Kim had red kinky hair and he kept it long in what could best be described as a ‘Ginger Afro.’) and motioned for me to have John bring the car around. After our car pulled up, I followed Kim back inside the building and discovered I was in a storage room of the restaurant. There must have been fifty cases of Italian wine. Just sitting there. With our names on every box. I don’t have to tell you the rest. One thing you may be curious about however, how did Kim know of the place and why wasn’t it locked? During the course of our meal, Kim had excused himself to go to the bathroom. He was gone for quite a while, but no one noticed (or cared). Apparently he had discovered the storage room entrance when he had gone to the bathroom, had gone in and broken the lock to the outside. After that everything else was a foregone conclusion in his mind and I didn’t chastise him about it either. Money was, after all, getting very tight and good wine is always appreciated.

During the long hot summer days Kim and I would play chess, watch Daytime TV (The Gong Show became our favorite and we never missed a single episode), go to the gym, play with the cougar, and otherwise just wait for John, Barbara, and Gerry to come home in the evenings. I hate to say it, but Kim and I had become ‘housewives’ to the other three. We just didn’t do any of the housewife stuff, although I did mow the yard from time to time. It was certainly a strange situation and actually, aside from the uncertainty of what we were waiting to do, it was a calm period in my life. Well, sorta…

Our friend and partner, Joe, had been stricken suddenly with some horrible medical malady and he damn near died. They put him in ICU at one of the hospitals in Lake Charles and as soon as he was well enough, Kim and I made plans to go for a visit. We finally got the go ahead late one afternoon, but just before we had planned to set out for the hospital we began drinking some more of the wine we had liberated from the Italian restaurant. Several things happened to delay our trip, not the least of which was about 3 bottles of good red wine. Along about midnight, we decided to go and visit Joe. We were slightly inebriated. Actually, we were shit-faced, but still full of the pent up energy from our ‘waiting game’ with the Mexicans.

We arrived at the hospital, carrying one of the bottles of wine we had not finished off, and as we were walking toward the main entrance it dawned on me that visiting hours were probably over for the night. I told Kim we would have to wait until morning to see Joe. He would have none of that, so I said, “Well, Einstein, what do you want to do, sneak into the hospital to see him?”

He did, in fact, intend to do just that. So, being the veterans we were of breaking into Honey Grove High School upon numerous occasions, we reconnoitered the building for access points and quickly found one that seemed suitable. We gained entrance to a room which was slightly below ground level. Turns out it was a storage room for hospital uniforms and scrubs. We made our way out of there and stealthily to the third floor where we knew Joe’s room was located. To that point, we had gone unnoticed and were quite proud of ourselves and we still had the wine we intended to share with Joe. As we were walking down the empty corridor counting down the room numbers looking for Joe’s we came upon something that made our hearts sink: There was a bloody nurse’s station just across from what we determined must be the room we sought. We did an about-face and hid behind a corner.

“Shit!” I said, “Now what?”

“Why don’t we just casually walk on in?” Kim said.

“Yeah, right. We’re drunk; we have a half-gallon of wine, and we’re Texans in Louisiana. Any more brilliant questions?”

Kim was quiet for a minute. I took a slow drink of wine from the bottle. Then he announced, “I got it! You remember that room we came into on the bottom floor?”

“Kim, no, no, No. Hell no!” I said, a little too loudly.

“Don’t you see? It’ll be perfect. We dress up like orderlies from the stuff in that room, you hide the wine underneath you outfit, and we’re good to go. We just waltz right on past those nurses. Easy.”

“Why do I have to carry the wine?” I asked, and by so doing, de-facto agreed to the foolish plan.

“You’re bigger than me. Easier for you to hide it.”

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Stay tuned for Chapter Five tomorrow.

Thank you for reading