Speaking of idiots...

Ok, so we weren't, but that's beside the point.

I had to go to the co-op this morning and pick up a load of fence posts and some feed (did you know a short bed F-150 with semi-bald tires will hydroplane on a wet road with half a ton of feed and a quarter ton of fence posts in the bed?). I took my buddy DR with me so I could get him out of the house (his house not mine) because he's being whiny again about his refugee-from-the-Jerry-Springer-show ex-wife.

Anyway, he's a pretty good storyteller and he knows all kind of local gossip about people I haven't seen since high school.

He asked me if I remembered this one idiot that we'd went to school with and I told him that I did, but wasn't he a deputy somewhere now and he told me no that CB had lost that job (which is another story altogether) but he went on to me about CB's post police career as a bounty hunter. CB was one of those fellers who was very full of himself, with an over inflated sense of self-importance.

CB decided after he lost his deputy job that he was going to be a bounty hunter. He bought himself a ex-county LTD, a Taurus 9mm and a tie and went to work (on commission) for a bail bonding company. Bonded and insured, or so he thought.

It seems that there was a fellow that had skipped bail that CB knew where to find. The fellow was hiding out at his mother's house. CB got her phone number and called the house, the skip answered the phone. I guess CB must have pretended to be someone else when he called (it's hard to say, the boy ain't real bright) Anyway, he asked the guy if he was home alone and the guy said yes, so CB jumps in the car and heads over there to "arrest" this miscreant.

Well, it seems the feller lied to CB. He wasn't home alone. In fact he had two of his buddies with him and they were all sitting in the backyard drinking beer.

CB pulled in the driveway and somehow or another figured out they were in the backyard. He went back there and confronted the feller, but he evidently didn't learn a whole of tradecraft during his stint as a deputy, because he let one of the three guys get behind him. This feller figured out that CB wasn't a cop and whacked him in the back of the head with a beer bottle. (it ain't like the movies, beer bottles ain't that easy to break)

When that happened all three of 'em jumped on him. One of 'em got aholt of a baseball bat and they were in the process of beating him to death when he remembered that he had a gun. He tried to pull his pistol and somewhere in melee he managed to drop the magazine... He still had one round in the spout and he was terrified that they were going to take his gun away from him and kill him. So he pointed it straight down between his feet and fired. That had the unexpected effect of scaring the three guys off, who promptly made a run for the woods.

In the middle of all this, the miscreant's mother comes home and in witnessing all this has a heart attack and calls 911. CB goes staggering over to the house next door and starts beating on their door. They flipped on the porch light and saw this guy, nicely dressed but covered in blood, who starts screaming at them to turn off the light (he was afraid the three guys would see him and come back after him) and spouting off ten-codes (DR assures me that ten-codes are police talk, I don't know myself).

These poor people naturally assumed he was a police officer and called 911. So the call went out, officer down...

City police, Sheriff's department and the State patrol ALL responded. The ambulance that was on it's way to pick up the lady who was having the heart attack also diverted to the call.

Everybody got there and discovered that CB wasn't dying and decided to pick up the heart attack victim instead. I'm sure the police raised hell at CB for being any idiot. If they didn't, they should have. I think the police ended up taking CB to the hospital.

After they got CB stitched up, he called his bonding company to tell them what happened. They told him that they were sorry to hear about his troubles and real sorry that his skip had got away. He said, "well, what about these doctor bills?" and was informed that they didn't cover that. That "bonded and insured" only meant that they'd take care of him if he got in trouble with the law. His medical expenses were his problem.

They kept him in the hospital for a day or two, he had a pretty fair sized medical bill to go with the knots on his head for his troubles.

This pretty much ended CB's career as a bounty hunter. He decided to try to go back to being a deputy because it was safer. (I'm not sure which county was dumb enough to hire him, but I'd like to think that they found out pretty quick he was an idiot and sent him on down the road)