We were working undercover in a rural area near the Tennessee/Alabama state line. Our next-door neighbor happened to be a large scale cocaine dealer who was supplying drugs to some high-level dealers in that area. There were 3 of us living in the cabin. We were all TBI Agents.
There was no informant to introduce us and assure the local folks that we were “cool”, so we just had to convince them. We were supposed to be drug dealers from Memphis and our story was that we were “hot” and needed to get out of town until things cooled off.
One night I thought I heard someone walking on the cabin’s porch. I listened intently and made sure my guns were within easy reach. There were only a few steps, and then silence. After lying awake for a while, and hearing nothing else, I chastised myself for being paranoid and drifted off to sleep.
A few nights later I heard the same noise. This time I got out of bed, grabbed a gun of course, and quietly eased into the living room. A cautious glance out the window revealed nothing. The noise had stopped by the time I got out of my bedroom. I opened the door and stepped outside, but saw no one. When I opened the front door, it awakened one of my partners and he asked what was going on. I told him nothing was going on, I just thought I heard something. I was beginning to feel a little silly about the whole thing.
On a sunny afternoon a couple of days later, I was sitting on the porch enjoying the day. There were trees all around the cabin and several squirrels were having a great time chasing one another from limb to limb. The cabin had a porch on two sides and there was a railing around the porch. In the blink of an eye, one of the squirrels jumped from a limb, onto the railing, then down to the porch, and scurried away. It sounded just like a man walking quickly. I thought to myself, “Well, Captain Courageous, there’s the bad guy that’s been keeping you up at night. A squirrel!”
That night I was just about to fall asleep when I heard the “footsteps” again and wondered about the squirrels playing in the night time like this.
Then I heard the doorknob on the front door being moved. Being the highly trained investigator I was, I quickly decided that was probably not a squirrel trying to open my door! I jumped out of bed, grabbed a gun, and ran toward the living room. There was a bar in the kitchen between me and the living room where the front door was. Some idiot had left one of the cabinet doors on the bar wide open. The more I think about it, I am pretty sure it was me. Anyway, the top corner of the cabinet door caught me square in the middle of my left knee cap as I attempted to run by it. You talk about Hurt!
I woke everybody up yelling terrible things at the cabinet door. As my buddies converged in the living room, I glanced out the window and saw a flashlight traveling through the field heading away from our cabin at a high rate of speed. Whoever was outside must have heard all the commotion on the inside and decided whatever was going on, he really didn’t want any part of it.
That was the last time I heard any footsteps around the place.
Sometime later we were grilling hamburgers and hot dogs one night and I told one of the guys at our cookout the “footsteps story”. He got me off to the side and said, “Man, I already heard about that. Ralph (the coke dealer next door) has been hiding his stuff around your house so that if the law shows up to search, the dope won’t be on his property.”
I couldn’t tell Ralph we knew what he was doing because that would have gotten the guy who told me in a lot of trouble. Maybe got him hurt, or worse. To say the least, none of us slept too soundly after that little incident. Luckily we only needed about another month to finish our business there.
The writer, Jimmie Leach, is a former Special Agent in Charge with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and was honored to serve as Vice-President of the Tennessee Narcotics Officers Association.
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