Never the Crime

by Colin Conway

  “Yeah,” Hahn said. “It could work.”

  “Hell, yeah, it’ll work. And if we don’t do it, people are going to start looking sideways at us, wondering if we’re into the same illegal shit Armstrong is.”

  “Allegedly,” Hahn corrected.

  Patterson waved her hand dismissively. “Allegedly, my ass. I knew as soon as I read it that it had to be true. The guy is slime. That’s why we have to take him down, and get the credit for cleaning house. Then when council president rolls around, you run for that position and I throw my support behind you.”

  “Council president?” Hahn said.

  “Yeah, sure, Denny. You’re a good guy. You’re smart. You’re a family man. That plays great on TV. If you run for council president, you’ll be a natural.”

  “Council president,” Hahn mumbled.

  “Then maybe I’ll run for mayor in three years. What do you think? You’d be council president, and if you throw your support behind me, I’d be a shoe in as mayor.”

  “Council president,” Hahn whispered and looked up at the ceiling.

  “Don’t you see it? It’s sitting there for our taking. All we have to do is build our brand. Let that brand be reformation. That’s who we are. We’re the reformers and we’ll start with Armstrong and Buckner. Saying it like that makes them sound strong, but they’re not. One’s a thief and the other’s a pervert. We’ll take them down. We’ll take their souls. They’ll be crying like little bitches when we’re done with them.”

  “Like bitches,” Hahn whispered, still staring at the ceiling.

  CHAPTER 20

  Officer Ray Zielinski brushed the sandwich crumbs from his uniform shirt while looking at the empty baggie. It looked clean enough to use again, and it wasn’t like he’d had mayonnaise on the sandwich. He didn’t think he’d get botulism from any residual peanut butter.

  He folded the baggie and put it back inside his lunch sack. Twin stabs of shame and anger hit him at the same time. Here he was, a veteran cop making a good living with great benefits, worried about whether he could get another day out of a two-cent plastic sandwich baggie. It was goddamn pitiful.

  You did it to yourself.

  The sentiment rang true in his ears, but that did little to alleviate his anger about it. His life right now was shit piled upon worse shit, and he refused to accept that all of it was his fault. Maybe some, but not all.

  Early in his career, eating alone in his patrol car was something he’d done on graveyard, when there weren’t many restaurants open. On day shift, however, the ritual was for cops to meet for lunch in threes and fours. There were plenty of dining choices, and Zielinski’s platoon had more than a few foodies who were out trying new places every day.

  Not him. He couldn’t afford it.

  He figured some of his new mates thought his habit of eating alone in his car was antisocial, the actions of a grumpy veteran, and he let them think so. Better that they think he’d become an old grinder than to know he was reusing sandwich baggies.

  He scanned the pending calls for service on his mobile data computer (MDC). All were normal or low priority, so police radio didn’t dispatch any of them over the air like they did with high priority or emergency calls. Officers were left to pluck the holding call of their choice off the screen.

  Zielinski went call shopping. He rejected a couple of obvious report calls. He’d already been tagged with two today, and it was early yet. Let someone else catch the paper. Instead, he looked for something he could clear without paperwork. He landed on an Assist Other Agency call, which rarely led to a report.

  When he pulled up the details, the address jumped out at him. It only took a moment for him to realize why. It was the house he’d gone to a couple of days ago with ol’ Charlie Bravo, the Chief’s Bitch. They’d gone to see the crazy letter writer in the wheelchair.

  The agency assist request on his screen came from social services. A case worker was standing by, asking for police presence before making contact. It was a pretty common request from social workers with potentially violent clients.

  Zielinski put himself on the call. His MDC beeped confirmation at him as he put the car in gear and headed toward Lyle Bunney’s house. As he drove, he wondered what brought the social worker to Lyle’s house. Did it have to do with physical issues, or was it a mental one? He glanced over at his MDC, and used his middle finger to tap the screen, bringing up the call. His eyes flicked back and forth between the road and traffic to the screen. According to policy, he was supposed to pull off the roadway or be at a stop in order to operate his MDC. Zielinski, along with every other patrol cop, ignored the impractical rule. Time was too limited to adhere to it.

  Besides, the stop-and-go traffic on the arterial afforded him plenty of opportunity to read through the details of the call.

  The social worker was Lindsay Wagner, and she worked for Mental Health Division (MHD). Zielinski grinned at that. That was the name of the actress who had played The Bionic Woman on TV back in the seventies. His older brother, Neal, who was nine years his senior, had had a poster of her on his bedroom wall. Zielinski had a little boy crush on her.

  What was the character’s name? Zielinski frowned for a second, surprised he couldn’t remember. Steve Austin was The Six Million Dollar Man’s name, but what was hers?

  Zielinski smoothed his mustache, unable to come up with the name despite his fleeting childhood affection. He glanced back at the MDC instead.

  According to the text of the call, the visit was essentially a welfare check on Lyle Bunney. He imagined that consisted of making sure the guy had food in the place, that things were sanitary, and that he wasn’t going all cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs in whatever special way his crazy worked. Recalling his visit to the house with Stone, Zielinski’s expected that Lindsay Wagner would be satisfied with the food and cleanliness situation, but maybe not so much with the crazy part.

  Jamie Summers!

  Zielinski snapped his fingers. That was it. Lindsay Wagner played Jamie Summers, The Bionic—

  At that moment, he suddenly noticed that the car in front of him had stopped for traffic. Zielinski stomped on his brakes. The police cruiser lurched to a stop, but he felt and heard the unmistakable sound of the push bar on the front of his vehicle striking the rear bumper of the car in front of him.

  “Shit!” Zielinski hollered. He restrained himself from slapping his palm on the steering wheel in frustration. The other driver was already looking at him through the rearview mirror in wide-eyed surprise.

  He activated the emergency flashers and got out of the car. As he approached the space between the two cars, he could see a black mark on the white bumper of the Saturn.

  The driver of the vehicle was already out of his own car.

  “You okay?” Zielinski asked.

  The man was tall and slender, wearing a pair of slacks and a dress shirt open at the collar. “I’m fine,” he said, his expression worried.

  “Wait here a second,” Zielinski directed.

  He walked to the front of the Saturn. There was an older Honda Accord ahead of them both, and the driver wasn’t moving, even though traffic in front of the fender bender had started forward. Zielinski motioned for the driver to roll down his window. The man, a twenty-something with a baseball cap askew on his head, complied.

  “Did you get bumped by this car?” Zielinski asked, pointing to the white Saturn.

  “Nope.”

  “You sure?”

  “Positive,” the driver answered. “Can I go?”

  Probably has a suspended license, Zielinski thought. Or a warrant.

  “Take off,” he said. Today’s your lucky day.

  He returned to the driver of the Saturn. “You’re sure you’re not hurt, sir?”

  The man nodded. “I’m fine. You barely hit me.”

  Zielinski almost cringed at the words hit me. Big or small, a crash was a crash, and this one was on him.

  �
�Do you have your driver’s license, sir?” Zielinski asked.

  “Sure.” The driver took out his wallet and fished out his license, handing it to Zielinski. “Am I in trouble or something? I mean, I was stopped for traffic, and—”

  “You didn’t do anything wrong. I just need the information for my report.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  The man wandered over to look at his bumper while Zielinski jotted down the information from the license into his notebook. The driver’s first name was Neil, same as his brother’s, but spelled differently. When he’d finished writing, he joined Neil at the point of the collision.

  The guy glanced up at him and shrugged. “I don’t see any damage.”

  Zielinski examined the bumper. To his eye, there weren’t any cracks or creases in it. He ran a finger across the black mark, and some of the discoloration came off. He spit on his finger and rubbed a little harder. With some effort, the black cleared up where he rubbed, leaving a clean streak through the mark.

  “See?” Neil said. “No damage. I can clean that off with a sponge when I get home.”

  Zielinski considered. Technically, this was a collision, and every collision required a supervisor response and a completed report. In addition, his sergeant would have to initiate an internal review of what occurred. No doubt how this review finding would come back. This was an entirely preventable crash and would end up in his internal affairs file. While he doubted he’d be disciplined due to the light damage, it would still be considered as part of his record when other complaints were reviewed.

  Like the demeanor complaint hanging over his head now.

  What if he didn’t call this in? Since there was no damage and no injury, it was arguably not a reportable collision. At least, that’s what he could say if he ever got called out on it.

  The idea was risky. If it came back on him later, either because Neil called it in, reporting an injury or unseen damage to his vehicle, there’d be repercussions. He’d likely get both a preventable collision and a policy violation for not reporting it. The cheese eaters in IA might try to push an ethics charge, to boot.

  “Hey, do you know Tyler Garrett?” Neil asked him.

  Zielinski broke out of his reverie. “What?”

  “Officer Tyler Garrett,” Neil repeated. “You know him?”

  He nodded slowly. “I worked with him on power shift for a few years. Why?”

  “I ran track against him in high school,” Neil said. “And I knew him some out at Eastern, too. Great guy.”

  Zielinski nodded again.

  Neil lowered his voice a little. “I thought it was pretty shitty what the city tried to do him. I mean, do you think they would have treated him that way if he was white?”

  “Maybe,” he said, cautiously. “I don’t know for sure.”

  Neil’s expression scrunched briefly in thought. “Yeah, maybe not all of it was him being black. It seemed like at least some of it was about him being a cop, too.”

  “You’re probably right.” Zielinski wondered where this was going. He felt the urge to wrap things up. The longer he stood here in traffic with his patrol car lights flashing, the faster the window closed on him having any choice on how to handle this.

  “My cousin’s a cop in San Jose,” Neil said. “I don’t talk to him all that often, but whenever we have a few beers…” He shook his head. “I mean, the stuff you guys have to deal with is intense.”

  “Sometimes.”

  Neil motioned toward the bumper. “I don’t know if this’d cause you any hassle or not, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s no harm, no foul. I’m not hurt, you’re not hurt. All we got is a little mark on my bumper. I’ll buff that out with a towel when I get home, and it’ll be like it never happened.”

  Zielinski considered. Neil seemed sincere, and what he said was true. Why should he suffer a preventable collision that only amped up whatever discipline he might get from a founded complaint later on? Besides, if this were a collision between two civilians, all he would do is facilitate an exchange of information and send the drivers on their way. No report, no ticket.

  Neil watched him, waiting. Zielinski made his decision. He removed a business card from his shirt pocket. After a moment’s thought, he wrote his personal cell phone number on the back, then handed it to Neil.

  “If anything changes, give me a call,” he said.

  Neil took the card. “Nothing will change. You barely touched me.”

  “Even so.”

  “I’ll be fine, Officer…” Neil glanced at the card for a moment, then looked up sheepishly. “Zee…?”

  “Zielinski.”

  Neil nodded, repeating the name. Then he stuck out his hand. “Nice to meet you.”

  He shook Neil’s hand. “Likewise.”

  When Neil returned to his car, Zielinski slid behind the wheel of his patrol car. He waited for Neil to pull away before turning off his flashers and following.

  That could have gone much worse.

  As he drove, he felt increasingly uneasy at not reporting the collision Yeah, he’d been lucky that there’d been no damage or injury. He was rolling the dice that it would remain unreported, and if he crapped out, there’d be hell to pay. He hadn’t even told dispatch he was out on a contact. That wasn’t even a One-David stop. It was a black hole stop, the type certain officers did when they knew they were on the edge of the law or pushing the boundaries of policy. Zielinski had never conducted one in his entire career.

  He dug in his patrol bag while driving, fishing out some antacids. He tossed three in his mouth and chewed.

  Hell to pay, but at this point, it was risk worth taking. He figured it had to be, since he’d just taken it.

  Shit.

  Instead of climbing out of the hole he was in, he was digging it deeper. Now he had one more variable to worry about.

  He wondered how much of Neil’s attitude had to do with his cousin in San Jose versus his association with Tyler Garrett. He suspected it was at least fifty-fifty, perhaps even more heavily weighted in Garrett’s favor.

  Thinking about Garrett made his stomach gurgle, despite the antacids. Zielinski had always liked and respected Garrett. He’d been a hard worker and was tactically sound, even serving on the SWAT team for a period. When the shooting happened the summer before last, Zielinski had been the first backup officer to arrive on scene. The events that followed cast Garrett in a bad light, at least for a while, but what stuck with Zielinski was how his own first reaction had also been one of uncertainty and doubt. Even though he wanted to believe Garrett, there were a couple of things that bothered him from the beginning. A missing gun and a suspect shot in the back, for starters. Garrett’s later behavior and his eventual arrest added more to his concerns. Garrett was eventually cleared officially, but the whole thing had a stink to it. He still wasn’t sure whether to doubt Garrett or doubt the department.

  Was Garrett dirty, or was he set up? And if he was set up, was it Detectives Talbott and Pomeroy that did it? They’d been the ones who supposedly found the drugs in Garrett’s house, after all. Then again, the reaction of city hall and the department made Zielinski wonder if they had a hand in it, too.

  Even though Zielinski had been grappling with his own issues since the shooting, the Garrett question never left him. Part of the reason he left power shift was because he was no longer sure about his fellow officer. If he was right about him being dirty, then he simply couldn’t work with the guy. But if he was wrong, then he’d be too ashamed to work with him after having doubted him. Moving to day shift solved both possibilities, along with the more important advantage of affording him the opportunity to snag extra work in the evenings.

  Changing shifts didn’t answer his questions, though. The question still burned in him.

  Zielinski turned onto Lyle Bunney’s street, and immediately spotted a Ford Tempo parked in front of the house in virtually the same place where Officer Gary Stone had parked two
days ago. Even at this distance, he could see someone waiting behind the wheel.

  “Idiots,” he muttered. “The world is full of idiots. Hopefully, she’s at least a beautiful idiot.”

  He parked a couple of houses away and walked toward the Ford. A pudgy man with a thick, full beard got out of the car and approached him, sticking out his hand.

  “I’m Lindsay Wagner,” he said. “MHD.”

  Great. A man. With a beard.

  Zielinski gave him a perfunctory handshake, eyeing the spiky wooden earring Wagner wore and the bristly beard that obscured the top half of his tie. The guy looks like he should be working in a brewpub in Seattle, not getting a government paycheck. “Why am I here?”

  Wagner smiled. “Well…let’s just say Lyle can get a little excitable sometimes. Deep down, he’s got a kind heart, but he has a couple of mental health issues. I never know what I’m going to get when I talk to him, so my supervisor says I need to have you guys with me whenever I check on him.”

  “How often is that?”

  “Monthly.”

  “And that’s what this is? A welfare check?”

  Wagner nodded. “That’s it. I’ll check on his mental state, for enough food in the—”

  “I know what a welfare check is,” Zielinski said shortly.

  “Oh. Of course.” Wagner cleared his throat. “Well, then, let’s go talk to Lyle.”

  He followed the social worker to the door. Wagner stood in front of the door, like he was there to visit a friend, apparently oblivious to the danger. Zielinski scowled, and stood off to the side opposite the hinges.

  Wagner knocked the same kind of polite knock that Stone had used a couple of days before. Zielinski wondered if he’d have to apply some power shift pounding to get Lyle to come to the door, but the man surprised him by answering on the second time.

  “Hello, Lyle,” Wagner said. “How are you doing today?”

  “What the hell kind of question is that?” Lyle answered him. “Do you know what is going on in the world?”