“Sure thing,” she said. She took out her pen and began to reach for the notepad in her apron pocket, then suddenly paused. “Just so you know, I have to reach in my pocket to get my notepad.”
That was the point where the hints stopped being subtle. “Cindy?”
“I just don’t want there to be any misunderstandings.”
Something was amiss all right, but Preston still had no idea what it was. His voice lowered down to that of a puppy that wants forgiveness. “Cindy, it’s me.”
“I know. And I don’t feel safe right now.”
There it was for all to see, and all saw. Preston looked around the establishment, and though no eyes were on him directly, he was nonetheless the center of attention. There was an unwelcome elephant in the room, and he was it. That’s when the TV on the wall finally caught his attention.
It showed Elena being slammed yet again, complete with horror-movie sound effects, and it was the first Preston had seen or heard of this. Only after the clip ran this time, it was followed by a reporter who described how the incident was getting a great deal of comparison to a similar one that took place after Hurricane Katrina. Then a second clip ran, showing a 58-year-old Patricia Konie being similarly bodyslammed by two California Highway Patrolmen who had generously volunteered their assistance after the disaster. After this woman had refused to leave her home during a forced evacuation, the two cops had tricked her into showing them her small pearl-handled revolver, so they could construe her as a threat and thus justify their attack. In this case, the elderly woman’s shoulder had been broken.
Preston glanced only momentarily at the door, which appeared more inviting going out than it had coming in. Cindy caught that and she moved. Just a tiny bit to her left, but the meaning was plain enough. She was getting out of his way. Preston thought back on the amount of time that had been spent here, in this very booth, among friends, and he couldn’t believe this was happening in his time of greatest need. He had just been shown the door.
Preston Mintz wasn’t the world’s most socially astute man, but he knew how to take a hint. He got up from his seat and left, never to return.
* * *
Randy knew what his next move would be; he just didn’t know exactly where he would make it. It was going to be close to where the search was coming through though, so he drove back and forth on the residential streets, looking for what he needed.
It was really hard to concentrate on business after what he had just seen happen to Elena. Randy was a long-term thinker, so he was able to keep it in perspective that while Elena might be seriously hurt now, she would get better, and life would go on for her. At least that was true as far as her injuries were concerned, but what about the things she had said on TV? Clearly she had made the effort not to make any specific admissions, but was that enough to save her? If she were found to be complicit in killing cops, that might not result in all of her remaining years being spent behind bars, but it would certainly polish off the good ones in a hurry. He wished to God that she had laid low as he had asked her to, and let him do the sacrificing. But at the same time, he had to admit to himself, he was proud of her. And one thing was for certain; the image in his mind would go far toward keeping his trigger finger from wavering.
Randy began to turn a corner and nearly froze as he saw a patrol car with lights flashing up the street. It was moving slowly down the street toward him, with four cops in SWAT gear walking behind it. They were walking in pairs, going house to house on each side of the street banging on doors. Randy corrected his course just in time and continued on past, praying they didn’t notice the stolen car.
This was where he wanted to be, now if he could just find… and there it was, the sign he wanted to see. For Sale. And vacant. Randy drove to the end of the block, hung a left and went into the alley behind the house.
* * *
Robin and Preston didn’t like what they were doing. The house-to-house search they were engaged in amounted to little more than a show for the cameras. It wasn’t like they had a right to storm inside of every home and search it. All they could do was question people at the door and look for signs they were hiding something. If there weren’t any, they had no choice but to move on. If there were, then the truth was that there were any number of possible things a person would be hiding from a cop If no one answered, it was This door’s locked, move on to the next one.
This was just a show, but it wasn’t only for the cameras. It was also about letting people know who was still in charge. Robin and Preston didn’t consider that to be a productive direction to be going under the circumstances, but then it wasn’t like their department was having a great deal of luck at that particular objective either.
Preston looked at the next house, which didn’t look like a good prospect. It was for sale and appeared vacant, which meant that no one would answer and they would have no choice but to move on. And if the man they were looking for did happen to be inside, all he had to do was stay quiet and he had no worries.
Preston tapped Robin’s shoulder and pointed at the house. “Think we should hit that one?”
Robin shook her head. “I don’t see any point.” They had almost passed it when the front room light came on, illuminating the curtains. “What do you know, somebody is home,” she said.
The walked to the door, took positions to the sides, then Preston pounded on it. “Police, open the door please,” he shouted. The only reply they heard was an older sounding, unintelligible voice. He pounded again and repeated his command a little louder.
“Can’t understand ye, jes’ come in!” came the reply. Preston tested the doorknob and it was unlocked. They glanced at each other and shrugged. They had a lot of ground to cover and needed to get moving, so they opened the door and stepped inside.
Seeing Randy appear from behind the door, aiming his Glock, was so unexpected that it didn’t even register for a moment as being real. When he said, “Inside, NOW!” then it registered. Their M-4 carbines were at low ready, but even that wasn’t ready enough for this. Gustin could pop both their skulls before they could get a shot off, so they stepped inside and Randy closed the door behind them.
Once they were inside, he said, “Rifles on the floor, now,” and they complied. “Pistols too,” he said, and they slowly removed their pistols with their left hands and put them down too. Randy waved them back from their weapons. “Put your ‘cuffs on,” he said.
“We already disarmed,” Preston replied.
“You’ll be wearing them in ten seconds or else.” They didn’t quite do it in ten seconds, but it was close enough that neither of them got shot.
“What do you want from us?” Robin asked.
“These.” Randy took their department-issued cellphones from their belts. While he was at it, he noticed Preston’s fancy lighter in his shirt pocket, and he plucked that out too. It just seemed like a use for that might come along.
“I’ve got to ask you something Randy,” Preston said. “What the fuck? I went to school with you. You were always a small-time troublemaker, but now you think you have a right to be a mass murderer?”
“I remember you too, Preston,” Randy replied. “As older kids went, you were one of the decent ones. You weren’t one of the bullies. But now you work for one of the most rogue departments in the whole fucking state, and you’re right on board with them. Not only are you one of the bullies, you’re one of the worst.” Randy began scrolling through information on Robin’s phone.
“Randy, give this up,” Robin said. “We’re not the ones who tried to murder you, and we’re not the ones who hurt your wife.”
“No, but you stand by the people who did, don’t you?”
“That’s not true…” she replied, but her voice trembled as she did.
Randy didn’t find what he wanted in Robin’s phone so he started searching through Preston’s. “That so?” he asked her. “You can both prove it now. Call Troy Meade a murderer.”
Both of the cops s
earched their thoughts for the right thing to say. They were fully cognizant that their lives might be saved by giving him the answer he wanted, but there were certain things that cops just didn’t do. Calling another cop a murderer was right up close to the top of that list. “What are you offering us, exactly?” Preston asked.
“A chance to prove you’re with the people, and not with the monsters who think they own the people.” As Randy fished through the information on Preston’s phone, he saw something he liked and smiled. “Ahh, that’s what I need.” He put the phone in his shirt pocket.
“Look, that’s a complicated case,” Preston said.
“I figured that’s what you’d think,” Randy said, and then he swung his Glock in a wide circle and struck Robin on the side of the head with the solid steel top of his pistol. She fell to the floor, almost completely unconscious.
Preston stared with horrified disbelief, but before he could react Randy tackled him, knocking him down into a corner inside the empty house. The cop was lying turned to the right, and Randy jammed the muzzle of his Glock just under his armpit, which was unprotected by the vest. He braced his left hand against the back of the slide and pulled the trigger.
The noise level was pretty low, as the muzzle blast went into his torso, and since he was holding the slide shut, none of the noise escaped from the ejection port either. But the damage done by the shot was gruesome to the point of being downright inhumane. Preston would have no final words, he would only have half a minute of agonized convulsions.
Randy had no more time to spend on him, so he turned his attention to Robin, and kneeled down beside her. This was going to be an extremely hard test of his resolve. There’s beautiful, and then there’s really, really beautiful, and the second category was the one she fit into. Firm, fit, shapely, and she had the face of an angel, even if there was blood dripping down her cheek from where he had hit her. Randy caught himself trying to think of excuses not to do it and put a halt to that train of thought.
Robin became cognizant again. She saw what had happened to Preston, and she watched as his consciousness faded, and the light went out of his eyes. Tears welled up in her eyes, and she looked at Randy with pure, absolute hatred.
“How about that question?” he asked her.
“Murder is always wrong, and what you just did was murder. There’s your goddamn answer.” Her answer was a little vague, but it was perhaps tangled enough to find a loophole in, if he thought about it long enough. But part of him had to be honest too. There was a level of cold-bloodedness he just couldn’t go beyond. “So are you going to kill me, or what?” she asked.
“No, I’m not. You’re not one of the monsters. But you wear their uniform, and you take their side, and today nobody does that for free.” Randy lowered the pistol to her left knee and pulled the trigger. This time the muzzle blast was full volume, as were the screams that followed.
“Kneecapping” was something that mobsters typically did with a .22 caliber pistol. That’s all it took to shatter the kneecap and permanently cripple the joint, while inflicting a kind of pain that the strongest of men cannot endure. Randy’s .40 caliber pistol did substantially worse. Fortunately, his aim was a little low, so the knee joint itself was mostly spared. But the top of Robin’s tibia was demolished to the point where her lower leg would have to be amputated.
The news for her wasn’t all bad though. For one thing, she was alive, which was more than a lot of her comrades could say. And with the joint mostly intact, doctors would eventually be able to fit her with a prosthetic leg that allowed her knee to bend, enabling her to walk almost normally with practice. But her days of jumping, stretching, and running triathlons were over.
After the ordeal had been put behind her, she left police work and took up personal training. In the course of that work she finally met the man she would marry, a like-minded individual who had both been to Iraq, and was a fitness buff who couldn’t shut up about Joe Weider and amino acids. And while she lost the top spot as the gym hardbody, she remained a strikingly beautiful woman.
All in all, it wasn’t a half bad deal.
* * *
Out in front of the house, the patrol car driver and the other two SWAT cops who were conducting searches had been growing concerned for some time, and the sound of the unmuffled shot finally alerted them that something actually was wrong.
Darren Tomlin and Raymond Ward were the two men wearing the helmets and body armor, while Ralph Waterbury drove the patrol car. Darren didn’t know if the shooter intended to hole up inside or escape out the back, so he shouted at Ralph to drive around into the alley and cover the back until backup arrived.
Ralph floored it and sped around into the alley. Sure enough, the white Camry they were looking for was pulling out from behind the house and headed out the other end of the alley. He floored it again, intending to ram the car, but the car’s driver stepped on it too. And strangely, he took the time to throw what looked like a piece of garbage out the window and onto the road.
Ralph couldn’t be distracted though, the man they wanted was right in front of him and there was no way in hell he was getting away. The Camry pulled onto the road, with Ralph closing in behind him, and that’s when he heard the noises. Something was hitting the inside of his wheel well, and his steering was suddenly becoming shaky. He floored it one last time in an attempt to hit the car, but his steering wheel was pulling too hard to the left and he couldn’t get up to speed. He watched in agony as the Camry zoomed ahead and turned onto a side street, disappearing from view.
Having little choice, he stopped on the side of the road and called for backup cars to find him and pursue. Then he got out to see what had happened. What he found was a piece of high strength twine, with pieces of metal tied to it down the length. The pieces of metal, he would find out later, were half-moon shaped chunks of handrail pipe, which had been taken out of the ends of the pipes by a coping machine so the handrail pieces could be fit together. Two of these pieces, welded together crossways and pointing away from each other, made an excellent four-pointed tire popper. These particular ones had been made in a welding shop, the same one operated by Randy’s construction company.
* * *
Randy didn’t feel so good. What he had just done had been hideously cruel, on a level he had never thought himself capable of. Those screams, and the way she had looked at him, were burned into his memory with every bit as much vividness as the image of what had happened to Elena.
But he had to keep his mind on business. Leaving that house might not have been such a great move, because it was a perfectly good place to polish off some more of them. But things had changed when they had gone after Elena with the intent of hurting her. They had made a statement when they did that, so now he had to make one in return. After all, making a statement was what this whole thing was about.
Randy glanced at the address he had looked up in Preston’s phone. Then he pulled up Google Maps on his smartphone and entered it. Pretty quickly a red dot appeared, along with directions.
Handy gadgets, these phones.
* * *
The Forest Hill police didn’t have any helicopters, but Seattle did. And they had one on call, waiting for word of a sighting. As soon as word had come in, it was off the helipad and en route.
* * *
Randy kept an ear tuned to his police radio, and he did pretty well at avoiding other patrol cars. His choice of a Camry had been a good one. There were a couple sightings of such cars, with felony stops ensuing, but neither of them was him. He was halfway to his destination when he heard the beating of the helicopter blades. And unlike the ground units, it hadn’t zeroed in on the wrong car.
Randy stepped on the gas, hoping he might make it to his destination before he was cut off. But the chopper flew up right overhead and hit him with its spotlight. Randy realized he had only alerted the pilots that they had the right car.
“Target sighted,” the voice came over the radio.
; “Copy, stay on him while we cut off his escape routes,” came the reply.
“There’s no way he’s getting away from us,” the pilot responded.
What that pilot had just said rather ticked Randy off. Who the hell did they think they were chasing? He was the guy who had already set the new record for police officers killed, and fully intended to double it before the night was over. He was only running from them now because it suited his purposes. He decided that perhaps another lesson was in order.
Randy stopped in the middle of the residential street. He picked up the police radio and keyed the mike. “You people sure about that? Let’s just see.” He dropped the radio, grabbed the M1A Scout, and put in the magazine that contained tracer rounds. Then as the chopper hovered closer, he got out, swung the rifle upward and fired one shot.
The glowing red tracer round went right up in front of the cockpit and hit the rotor blades. There was a ding that was audible even over the noise, and the bullet careened off to the side and disappeared into the blackness. Randy didn’t expect that would do any real damage, but suddenly the sound of the chopper changed. The beating of the rotors wasn’t so rhythmic anymore, and the helicopter itself began to shift back and forth, looking less and less stable as it began trying to back away from the line of fire. Randy raised the rifle again, and put the crosshair right on the engine.
“That’s a Seattle chopper, it’s not from this town!” Randy looked over and saw an older man who had stopped and jumped out of his car. “Your fight isn’t with them, remember?”
“They joined in on their side though.”
“All they are is eyes in the sky, and you took care of that already. They didn’t try to shoot you, so let ‘em go.” Randy considered that for a second, which was just enough time for the chopper to get turned around and headed away. Which was just as well, because expanding the conflict would bring a much bigger hammer down on him before he was ready for it. Besides which, crashing a helicopter into a residential neighborhood would make for some lousy PR.
“If you ever meet those pilots, tell them they owe you their lives,” Randy yelled back, then he got back in the car and left.
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