Dueling Dukes Chapter 14: Out of Control, a dukes of hazzard fanfic

14. Out of Control

You got to gamble on your story
You got no guts, you get no glory
And I'm bettin' my money on an ace in the hole
Think I'm gettin' out of control*

He could act tough, he could put on a good show for young Babe Sheridan. He could pretend to have any measure of control over this town, but it was all a lie. One he told himself over and over.

Then all the pretenses would fall away again, and he'd realize what a fool he was.

He had a job; he'd proffered that as legitimizing his mustache. (And left out the part where he'd grown it out thickly on the sides so it'd cover that garish, twisted scar his cheek had collected when he wrested a knife away from a drunken Jason Steele back in eighty-two.) A job, so he could feed his mama and sisters—or they could feed him, though it was his income that bought the food. But a marshal's pay wasn't guaranteed, not like a banker's. Not like his father's.

And how he got himself paid was enough to make him wish he'd inherited his father's affinity for numbers and figuring after all.

It wasn't that he'd always minded court days, or even that he minded most. His territory covered three cities and the surrounding unincorporated towns. He'd never been sorry a single time when duty called him to court in Morganville, Wildwood or even up in Rising Fawn where he'd have to rest his horse three times on the way to the top of the mountain. But Trenton court days he looked forward to about as much as he looked forward to getting a tooth pulled. Which was to say, not at all.

Still, if he didn't go, if he didn't accept at least some portion of the subpoenas, writs and summonses that were jammed into his hands in the Trenton courtroom, there'd be nothing but beans to eat for a week while he rethought his stubborn ways.

Judge Druten over in Wildwood was a fine and reasonable man, and Rosco'd always had a fondness for wiry and snappish little Justice Petticord in Morganville, but Trenton's Justice Hogg—well, there were words for him, but Rosco's mama had raised him better than to say them out loud. So he kept them banging around inside him where if they gave him a headache, at least they were safe from the ears of ladies.

"Rosco," the man in question greeted him, already annoyed. Like Hogg figured he was perfectly within his rights to use whatever tone he wanted with the duly constituted law of the land. And maybe he was. Maybe, in his own warped and twisted way, this man ensured that Rosco would have food on his table and clothes on his back. "Did you go out to Low Ridge and arrest that Hard Luck Jones yet?"

"No, sir," he answered back, hating that he had to wipe sweat off his brow. Sure it was July, and sure, he'd had a hot trek along the dusty streets from one end of town to the other to get here, but the justice in front of him would conveniently forget those facts and assume that Rosco was nervous. "I ain't, and I ain't going to, neither. Ijit." That last thing, that little hiccup of a sound, well that annoyed him just about as much as it did Hogg. But if there was any chance to spare them both from his blurted nonsense, well, the justice would have to stop giving him that bug-eyed look that asked him just how stupid he really was. And Rosco would have to stop caring just how red and shiny those pudgy little cheeks got in the face of being disobeyed. "The county voted down prohibition."

"So they did." Rosco didn't figure that part bothered the man too much. He reckoned that if he went back into the judge's chambers and started poking through cabinets and drawers, he'd find a few bottles of whiskey stashed away. The good stuff, not the rotgut that most of the town drank; Hogg's would come with a pedigree. "But that don't mean you can just sit idly by and let any old fool that's of a mind to go brewing up liquor in a still."

Oh? It didn't? Rosco pretty much figured it did. His logic on this was quite solid. The last three Georgia marshals who had gotten themselves killed in the line of duty had been tangled up in trying to keep folk from cooking up their own special recipes, and Rosco reckoned he liked his body best without any gunshot holes in it. Besides, he hadn't been marshal of this region for the past fifteen years without knowing a few things. Like the fact that Justice Hogg probably had some poor lackeys out there right at this moment on the outskirts of his own, expansive and heavily wooded acreage, tending to a batch of something that could at best loosely be described as whiskey. On private property, so the lawman couldn't touch them, even if he'd wanted to. And it just didn't make sense to enforce the law only when the accused was too poor to own the land he did his brewing on.

"I reckon," Rosco answered back, his jaw clenched in frustration, but that was all right. That was good, in fact, it made him sound tough and sure of himself. Like someone not to be messed with. "I get to choose which of them warrants I'm willing to enforce."

"Rosco," the justice said, standing up from the desk behind which he normally presided. Nothing like the giant courtrooms of Atlanta; Trenton's was small and utterly lacked for ornate decor. Just a desk for the judge, a chair from which testimony was sworn and benches for everyone else. All completely empty right now, because court was not in session. No one to try, and that explained the surliness of one Jefferson Hogg. "You ain't got the brains of a turkey." The justice shuffled left a few steps to pull out a drawer and fumble around inside. Tobacco with which he stoked his pipe while he did Rosco the favor of listing all of his flaws for him. "You ain't got no reason to be choosing nothing. No one asked you to think at all. I decide who has committed a crime worth trying. You just got to deliver them to me."

Well, sure, it could work that way. Probably did, in a lot of jurisdictions. But then, most judges didn't hand their marshals warrants for the arrest of men whose guilt was more than a little questionable.

Hogg was right about one thing, though. It could be quite simple, and Rosco could be very rich, if he'd give in and leave all the decision-making to the judge. If he filled every warrant, dragged in every man that Hogg wanted to see, he'd get paid reasonably healthy fees and bear no legal responsibility for what happened next. And he might consider lining his pockets that way he wasn't trying to keep the town's youngsters from killing each other in the name of a feud that none of them started.

"Tell me, Marshal," Hogg said, his tone conversational as he lit his pipe. Like this was nothing more than passing the morning together and wasn't it a nice one? A little hot for anyone's liking, but otherwise it was simply lovely with the sky so blue and the birds just a-twittering up in the trees. "Who do you got in your jail now that you ain't got no room for Hard Luck?"

"Ij." That syllable was pure annoyance. "I got plenty of room in my jail." No, that wasn't what he meant to say. "I just ain't got no room for Hard Luck," wasn't right either. "I don't see no point in arresting only some of the moonshine makers in this town and letting others go free." There now, that was more like it. Too bad he followed it with a series of "oo" noises.

"So you done arrested that Babe Sheridan instead?" See now, that just went to prove that Hogg hadn't needed to ask the question in the first place. He knew exactly how occupied the jail was. "What's the point in holding him?" An exasperated puff on his pipe let out a waft of choking smoke. Rosco's eyes watered, the room swam, and Hogg went on like he hadn't noticed that he was nearly killing the rightfully constituted law of this county. "He ain't got no money. What did you arrest him for anyway?"

"Public drunkenness," amongst other sundry charges. It was weak, but it was better than the truth: Luke Duke told me to. Because that didn't make any sense at all – first, that the Duke boy had suggested it, and second, that Rosco had done it.

"Well, if men like Hard Luck wasn't making liquor," Hogg reasoned, "boys like Babe wouldn't be publicly drunk, would they?"

"Yeah, but the county done voted down prohibition." Rosco had a point in here, somewhere. Underneath the laps that his brain was doing, trying to keep up with Hogg's scheming. He might not have been a smart man, but the marshal knew right from wrong. Most days, anyway. It was just that Justice Hogg could turn that knowledge on its ear and make him feel the fool. "I reckon that it's them that drinks it that has to take responsibility for getting drunk on it."

Hogg just shook his head at dolts that managed to get themselves elected as marshal even if they didn't have any smarts to speak of.

"Here," the judge said, cramming a wad of papers into his hands. A few fluttered to the floor, but Rosco figured that was fine with him. He was only going to fulfill the warrants he agreed with anyway. There were certain flexibilities that came with his position. "Do your job. Bring these men in."

"I don't suppose," Rosco said through clenched teeth, when all he really should have done was answered with a polite yes, sir. Now he'd gone and restarted the conversation when he'd been just about ready to walk out of here and not have to see this man again for another week. "That any of these warrants is for Isaiah Hickory or Cap Porter."

The judge paused from where he'd been headed back to his desk to grab his coat off the back of his chair. It might have been July and already hot enough to bake bread on a rooftop before noon, but men like Hogg had reputations to uphold. Nothing less than shirt, vest, coat and tie for outdoor wear.

"Of course not," Hogg answered. "There ain't no reason to go bothering either of those men over nothing. Why, they're regular pillars of this community." Of course they were. Just fine gentlemen, and heck, they did the region a great service. They gave the boys of the town something to do with themselves—fighting, injuring and killing each other. "Notwithstanding, of course, the unfortunate situation that little Mary Kaye finds herself in." Yes, the young lady was with child and unmarried, a scandal that would make a less affluent family pull up stakes and run off someplace new where they could tell a fantastic lie about how she was a broken-hearted young widow. Cap Porter couldn't leave here, though. If he did, who on earth would he have to hold a lifelong grudge against? So the family would weather the crisis, one way or another, and it wouldn't be a problem, really. Just some gossip and a reason for Justice Hogg to cluck his tongue in sadness of the sort of trouble he'd never find himself in. (Of course, not, he was repugnant. No woman would get close enough to him to let him give her a baby in the belly.) "In fact, I reckon I'll go over and visit with Mr. Hickory right now."

"Because you already done talked to Porter last week?" And that went to prove that Rosco knew a thing or two about the judge's activities, too. Going from one side of the feud to the other, stoking the fires so that the feud would keep going strong, pulling more boys under its spell. Preferably not poor boys like Babe Sheridan, since they made for lousy pawns in Hogg's game of chess. More like the sons of families with money. Big money, the sort that could be used to bribe their boys right back out of trouble.

"Rosco," Hogg answered back, slowly, deliberately, with all threats implied. In the end, this man had more power than the marshal. Rosco could arrest either patriarch, Porter or Hickory, and it wouldn't amount to anything, because the judge wouldn't try them. They'd go free and Rosco would get quietly killed in the night by one set of feuders or the other. "You got work to do. I'd suggest you do it."

His piece said, an unbearably smug Jefferson Hogg waddled his fat frame right out the door. Which left the marshal with an armload of warrants for men that he had no intentions of arresting, and a tongue that wouldn't stop uttering ijits and gyus.