One Department

by Thomas A. Young

  “I don’t believe so,” Randy replied. “but what can I do at this point?”

  “You know things that others don’t,” Terrence said. “Things that can help people. You have to make people hear these things, however is necessary. That, my friend, is your calling.”

  Randy began to feel the crushing responsibility settle back on his shoulders. The doctor was right. This was a war he could not just walk away from, in any fashion. If they took him alive, he’d have to live, and he’d have to justify his actions, no matter what the outcome. “I see your point, and you’re right,” he said. “If you make that call now, I can get that underway.”

  “I’ve thought about this long enough, and I see no reason for us to get involved in this. You’re an injured man who arrived at my door and got treatment. That’s the extent of my responsibility, and the circumstances are none of our business.” Dorothy got up from her seat with a smile and undid Randy’s handcuffs. It felt good to have his hands free again. The doctor turned Randy’s Glock over in his hand and held it up. “You’ve sworn to leave citizens out of this, right?”

  “It’s on the Internet, so it has to be true,” Randy replied.

  The doctor laughed, and then handed his gun back to him. Randy hefted it and it felt strangely light. “You’ll probably want to reload it, just please do it after you leave,” the doctor said. Randy stared at him with a look that said are you insane? “We don’t really know how to use those things. It seemed safer.”

  * * *

  Elena had never seen the inside of a TV studio before. It was impressive. The lights, the equipment, and the amount of technospeak going around was almost enough to take her mind off what she was getting ready to do. There were papers being passed, information conveyed, plans and preparations going on, all being done in the name of their ongoing mission to inform. This place was cool.

  She was standing in the corridor outside a small interviewing studio that had only two chairs inside. She could hear the regular news broadcast being run from down the hall, and the subject of Randy’s conflict was just coming up.

  Rosemary was in a nearby office, talking to a few executives. She emerged and pointed into the interview room. “We’ll be on in five minutes, so take the seat on the left. You know what you’re going to say?” Elena nodded. “Be very careful where you tread now. Confession is good for the soul, but it’ll piss your lawyer off something awful.”

  * * *

  Randy watched the news on the television as he stared out the front window of the house. The broadcast was detailing the door-to-door search being currently employed, and the flashing blue lights several blocks away bore this out. The search was coming in his direction, and it was time to get moving.

  The doctor walked up with a couple pills in one hand and a glass of water in the other. “This is cephalexin, enough antibiotic to get you by for the next twelve hours. We can’t give you more because…”

  “It could be traced back to you. Don’t worry, I won’t let that happen either.” Randy swallowed the two pills. “Besides, I’ve got antibiotics with my gear. I order them off the web.”

  “You do what???” The horror in the doctor’s voice was unmistakable. “Did no one ever tell you that between the questionable quality of internet drugs, and the fact that people who are not under the care of a physician typically fail to take the entire course, that all new manners of resistant pathogens are coming to life? Are you trying to create Super-MRSA and wipe out humanity?”

  Randy was a trifle taken aback, but he didn’t miss the irony that he was being screamed at for this while he was, in fact, in the midst of trying to wipe out a significant patch of humanity. “I promise to finish the entire course,” Randy said. “Assuming I live that long.”

  “I guess that’ll have to do.” The doctor sighed and shook his head, and as he did so the news program caught his attention. “Hey, isn’t that your wife?”

  Randy looked at the TV and was stunned to see that in fact, his wife was there. She was sitting in a chair across from a woman he’d never seen before. “Turn it up!” Dorothy already had the remote in her hand and was doing so. Rosemary’s voice was the first they heard.

  “…We’re joined by Elena Gustin, the wife of Randolph Gustin, who is currently the subject of an extensive manhunt. Elena, I understand you have a side to this story you’d like to share.”

  The camera view shifted to a close-up of Elena, with her name in the caption beneath. “I want to say that my husband didn’t start this fight,” she said. “He was attacked first, and he has been every step of the way. We both were.”

  “You both were attacked?”

  “That’s right. I’m talking about the roadblock.”

  Randy heard those words and fell to his knees screaming.

  * * *

  Jack Hayward was less than a quarter of a mile from where Randy was, and he was busy managing the search when his phone began vibrating. He didn’t want to take the call, but a look at the outside screen told him it was his chief, so he figured he’d better. “Hayward, this is Burt,” the voice came through. Gustin’s wife is doing an interview on KXMQ right now. We’re notifying Seattle PD, how fast can you be there?”

  “Not fast enough.” Hayward started his car, lit up the overhead lights and floored it.

  * * *

  Elena knew she was doing the right thing, but that didn’t ease the ball of lead she could feel in her stomach right then. The admission she had just made could very well be the end of her life as well as Randy’s, and she knew what that would do to him. She was going to have to toe this line very carefully from here on out.

  “So you were with him at the roadblock scene, is that correct?” Rosemary was already beginning to questioning the wisdom of this, but she had to go on with it.

  “Yes it is. He came home to try and get me out of there because he didn’t want them catching me alone at home. They had already tried to shoot him in the back once, and he was afraid of what they might do to me to get back at him.”

  “What was it like when he came home and you first found out about this?”

  “It was… like it wasn’t really happening. It was just a normal night at the house for me. I had some music on, I was cleaning the place and playing with the cats. Then he came peeling in.”

  “What did he tell you at first?”

  “Only that the cops had tried to kill him, he had shot some of them, and that I had to get out of there before they showed up. He didn’t have time for any details or smalltalk, he just pointed at the car keys and told me to get going.”

  “How did you take all of this at first?”

  “At first, it felt like any other emergency. I mean, we all have emergencies, and when they happen, we deal with them and then life goes on. But then it started sinking in that this emergency was different.”

  “How so?”

  Elena wasn’t sure exactly what the right words were, but after thinking about what these events meant for her life, they came to her. “This was the end of everything,” she said.

  There had been a time or two in Rosemary’s life when she had felt just that way, and she wished more than ever she could take this pain away from Elena. “What happened then?” she asked.

  “I had enough sense to know that I didn’t want to get caught alone on a country road any more than I did at home. So I told Randy he had to get me somewhere safe.”

  “How did he feel about that under those circumstances?”

  “He didn’t like that idea a bit. He knew they were going to try to kill him on sight and I’d be in the crossfire. But he weighed the options and decided to try.”

  “So you left home together. Did he tell you more about what happened then?”

  “Yes. He told me that one of them had tried to shoot him in the back right there in his drivers seat, after he had told the cop his own gun was put away out of reach.”

  “How did he survive?”

  “I don’t know exactly. He only s
aid the cop stood too close.”

  “What happened after that?”

  “Well, I already knew the answer to this question because of the gear and weapons he had grabbed at the house, and the conversations we’d had about this subject in the past. But I asked him if he planned to turn himself in.”

  “It sounds as if the answer to that question was decided well in advance.”

  “It wasn’t like we decided that’s how it’d go, but we had given it a lot of consideration. You see, there’s a big difference between a cop shooting a citizen and a citizen shooting a cop, even if it is in self-defense. A cop will always get out of the charges somehow. We’ve been seeing a lot of that lately. But if one of us shoots one of them, even in self-defense? It’s like Randy says, if it’s you who does it, your life is over.”

  “Which means…”

  “There’s not a lot of point in surrendering.”

  “What about a jury trial? Wouldn’t that be a fair way to resolve it?”

  “They can find too many gullible people to stack the jury with. People who believe all the ‘cops are heroes’ nonsense. People who believe they can’t do any wrong, and if they do then you’re just supposed to bend over and play along, and then settle it in court later. People like that will vote you guilty no matter what the cop did to threaten you, and finding twelve of them in a crowd is the easiest thing in the world.”

  “Elena, I’m going to have to challenge you a little bit here. What if Randy had thrown the gun down after shooting the first one, the one you say really tried to kill him? Assuming that’s what happened, isn’t that the only one he really needed to shoot?”

  “What if he did that, and the next one killed him anyways? He’d be dead now, and the cop who did it would walk. And even if he was taken alive he’d still have to face the stacked jury. He did what he did, and because of that he’s still alive, and he’s not going to settle this in court. He’s going to settle this in Dodge.”

  Rosemary took a deep breath. “So tell us what happened at the roadblock.”

  “Well, he was driving me into town, and we came around a corner and there it was. Three cars with men pointing rifles at us. We stopped about a couple hundred yards away.”

  “What did Randy do?”

  “He tried to surrender. It wasn’t what he wanted to do, but he knew if the shooting started that I’d probably die. So he stuck his hands out the window for all of them to see, and can you guess what happened?”

  “What?”

  “One of the cops down the road screamed that he had a weapon, and they opened up on us. So you see, he did try to surrender once, and that’s what it got him.”

  “What did Randy do then?”

  “He dealt with it, and he kept me safe. That’s all I can say about it.”

  “And what did you do during this?”

  Elena paused, considering her answer. This was the ground she had to tread very carefully on if Randy’s choices were to amount to anything. “I stood by my man,” she finally said. “And that’s all I can say about that.”

  Rosemary sighed with a bit of relief. “What would you like to see happen now?”

  “I’d like to see the police admit they were wrong. I’d like to see them give this up, cut their losses, and let us have our lives back. But they’ll never do that. They’ll never tolerate you or me thinking that they’re anything less than gods over us, because that’s what power does to people. And you’ll never see one of them oppose the actions of their department either, or call the back-shooters among them murderers. So Randy will have to keep fighting them. They want people to believe they’re omnipotent, so that people will be too scared to challenge them, but fact is that they’re not. You see what the score is already. And I know Randy, he’s got a lot of dirty tricks up his sleeve that they haven’t seen yet. If God wants him to, he might just get them all, and I hope he does. These sons of bitches took everything away from us over nothing, and I hope he does.”

  As Elena finished that sentence, the sound of commotion came from down the hall. Seconds later Elena’s worst fear came true as a dozen police officers marched into the room. As if this wasn’t distressing enough, Jack Hayward was at the front of the group. Rosemary got up and tried to step in front of them but was shoved aside. Elena jumped up and backed away behind the chair, but it proved to be no barrier. Hayward knocked it aside as well, then he and one of the Seattle cops slammed her up against the back wall. From there, Hayward grabbed her right arm, locked it out straight, and they flung her to the floor with their weight on top of her.

  There was the sound of a snap, and then Elena screamed like she seldom ever had in her rather brutal life.

  Chapter 14

  Back To Business

  Randy saw it happen on the television, as did all of Western Washington. Elena was brutally slammed to the floor, there was a grotesque sound of something breaking, and then came the screams.

  The strange thing was, the doctor and his wife seemed to be taking it harder than Randy was. Randy was, without a doubt, boiling over with rage, but he was comparatively composed. Terrence and Dorothy however, were completely beside themselves. Randy knew what to expect from such thugs, so what he had just seen didn’t really come as a great surprise. His hosts had no such preparation.

  Hayward had held her in an armlock as they took her down, with one hand holding her wrist and the other braced against her elbow to force her to the floor. It’s a type of takedown that, if done properly, puts the person down, under control and ready to be handcuffed. Done improperly however, something breaks. In Elena’s case, that something was her elbow breaking the wrong direction. It’s one of the most incredibly painful types of fractures there is, and while she would eventually get the full use of her arm back, she had surgery and a long road of physical therapy ahead of her.

  Despite what had just happened, the Seattle cops pulled her arms behind her and cuffed them, with her screaming the whole time. Then Jack Hayward stepped up to the camera to address it. “Randolph Gustin, I hope you’re watching.”

  Doctor Kletz’s eyes widened with recognition. “Mother of God, that’s the same man who killed McCaslin…”

  “You heard the things your wife just said,” Hayward went on. “She is now complicit in the murders of every cop you’ve killed already, and she’ll also be complicit in every murder you commit from here on forward. Give yourself up while you can. Do it in a public place if you’re worried about getting shot. But every round you fire at a cop is going to be more time on her sentence too, so you’d better end this now.”

  * * *

  Hayward stepped away from the camera. The station took that moment to cut to commercial, but the cameramen kept filming the scene. One cop was holding Rosemary back, as she watched with tears streaming down her cheeks. Then the Seattle cops dragged Elena to her feet and out of the room.

  Hayward walked out of the room alongside the commander of the Seattle cops. “Put her in my car,” he said. “She’s going back to our jail.”

  “She’ll be going to Harborview first, then she’s going to King County lockup,” came the reply.

  “She’s complicit in the murders of police officers in my town,” Hayward retorted.

  “That might be, but she was arrested here, and you’ve got enough PR issues going on without holding her up as a hostage.”

  * * *

  In the garage of the Kletz home, Randy climbed back into his recently acquired Toyota, as the residents of the home stood by to see him off. “Mister and Mrs. Kletz,” he said, “it’s been wonderful meeting you. Please remember what you just saw on the TV and never breathe a word of our meeting to anyone. You don’t want to be her.”

  Dorothy smiled. “If I was her, I’d be pretty confident that rescue was coming.”

  Randy managed a smile, though he didn’t share her optimism. “I don’t think you want to be at home when that search comes by,” he said. “They’re trained to spot fibbers.”

  “Tha
t works out fine for me,” the doctor replied. “I have to be getting to work anyways, and Dorothy can tag along to help out. It’s looking like a busy night.”

  Randy got into the car, and Terrence pushed the button to raise the door. He waved the Kletz’s goodbye, pulled out into the dusk, and the door closed behind him.

  * * *

  Preston Mintz was in a hurry to get back to work, but he had time for one stop. He had just gotten the only sleep he’d had in the last thirty-six hours, and it amounted to four hours. That wasn’t going to cut it, so he needed some pick-me-up. And hopefully a smile to go with it.

  He walked into the Forza coffee shop that had been the stronghold of the Forest Hill police force since it had opened nearly a decade ago. It felt like home, as it always had. It was the place where they worked on their laptops, and swapped news and stories from their latest shift. It was kind of their sanctum. Like doughnut shops used to be, but without all the wisecracks.

  He sat down in their customary booth, which he had to himself. At that point in time he was unaware of what had just been broadcast on the news, and was being rebroadcast ad nauseum. But the employees and patrons in the shop had seen it.

  Cindy was working, and he was thankful to see that. A barista’s real job was to brighten your day with a smile and some meaningless chat. Some did it better than others, and Cindy was the longtime pro. She came to his table. “Headed back to work?” she asked.

  “Yep. The point came at around noon today when I finally had to get a little bit of sleep.”

  “How’s the search coming?”

  “They know approximately what part of town he’s in, so it’s being scoured.”

  “I’ve seen. They’re pulling the stops right out to get him, aren’t they?”

  Preston wasn’t sure, but he didn’t think her voice sounded all that supportive right then. “Well, after what this guy has done to us, I think it’s pretty understandable.”

  “I’m sure his wife would agree wholeheartedly.” Preston didn’t know what she meant by that, but he would before long. “So what can I get you?”

  “I guess I’ll have my usual, only with three shots instead of two.”