The Other Side of Bad (The Tucker Novels) Read Online Free

see you. There’s someone who is interested in meeting you. He wants to set up an interview. Tucker, this might be a big one, and there’s something else going on I’d like to talk to you about.”
    I traced the scrimshaw etchings on the ivory handle of the Colt with my finger and said, “So I’ve got to embarrass you at the range. Then make you buy me dinner just so you’ll tell me. Tell me now and save yourself.”
    I wonder where dead-eye Archy from Boulder got his ivory.  It didn’t look old enough to be legal.
    He said, “I can’t. I’m at my desk, it could get a little touchy . . . embarrass me! Just show up and I’ll show you who gets embarrassed. Besides, if you beat me, I may not tell you.”
    Listening to Spain was like trying to wheedle a half inch of thick brown molasses out of a gallon jug. After it was all out, you realized it would’ve been faster to break the jug and scrape it out.
    “Okay. What are your terms?” I asked. “You always have some.”
    “No fast draw. Semi-automatics on the bench. Five shot groupings. We go on a three count.
    I felt like he was right behind me, fixing to take my scalp.
    “All right, Spain, who’s doing the counting, you?”
    “Naaw, I’ll give you a break. We’ll let Spark do the counting.”
    Spark owned and operated Gun World on Murfreesboro Road. He looked like a slow-moving catfish with a Clark Gable mustache, black glasses and a black receding hairline, and his favorite expression to me was ‘Well, I don’t know, Tucker.’ He would say this in a cavernous bass voice with no southern accent, since he originated in Connecticut. He usually said this right after I’d done something with a pistol he just couldn’t wrap his mind around.
    “I’ll be there even though I smell an ambush,” I said.
    “Good, see you at six.” His chuckle sounded like he was rubbing his hands together.
     

 
     
     
    Chapter 3
     
    My past has a way of slipping up behind me, with the subtlety of a freight train. I don’t hear it coming. First, I feel it, like a wave of shimmering energy being pushed ahead of it. Then the train arrives and slams into my occipital ridge with a force that used to take me to my knees. Towed behind the locomotive is a row of boxcars that contains everything meaningful, and most times traumatic, that has happened to me. It’s a long train.
    For someone who battles with staying in the present moment, this can be difficult. But isn’t that what life is?
    Over the years I’ve learned through different modalities of study to watch this train from a higher point of view. Like an eagle soaring above the train. Observe the train. Don’t be the train.
    Each car being towed is full of actions and feelings. They’re baggage cars and they are full. Who I am at this moment, is the sum total of the mistakes made and lessons learned inside each one of those cars.
    But, I am not at this moment any one of those actions or feelings. I am not anger, I am not violence, I am not guilt, and I am not grief. I’m supposed to be love. Love for everything that has happened to me, no matter what it was. Because like Stuart Smalley said, ‘I love myself.’
    There are times when I feel more love than other times. I can be any one of many feelings. This time I’m numb. Numb is good.
    From my eagle’s eye view, everything happens at the same time. So my future has already happened. I just can’t see it. The decisions I make now, in the present moment, determine that.
    Ahh . . . there’s the caboose.
    I stared at the backs of my hands that were spread out over the Colt. They weren’t big hands, as hands go, especially attached to my Alleyoop arms that were affixed to a 48-inch torso. They were strong hands. I believed the smallness of them was a major factor in the hand speed I’ve always had. The knuckles were different shades due to scar tissue. There was a perfect little round scar just to the left of my right index knuckle, exactly the size of a .25