One Department

by Thomas A. Young

  I have to be a little bit fair to myself and point out that many police officers do believe in the occasional sacrifice of an innocent person, be it their rights or their life, to keep their stranglehold on power secure. The name of Jack Hayward comes to mind as an example of that mentality. Officers like that make examples of people who challenge them, whether those people were right to challenge them or not. It’s wrong that they do so, but when I did the same thing myself, I must concede that I brought my own fight down to their level.

  The real enemy we all must contend with is extremist thinking. This can be defined simply as the belief that one’s cause justifies the killing or sacrificing of innocent people. It’s the kind of thinking that gave rise to the Taliban, the Nazi’s, and many other manners of murderers. Its existence perpetuates the urge in people to retaliate in kind. Wherever it springs up, it must be quickly recognized and called for what it is before it results in something bad happening. This kind of thinking is wrong in every case, as the killing of innocent people is never justified. I certainly wouldn’t put myself in the same category with the Taliban, but I myself am guilty of it too. Being civilized is about putting this kind of barbarism behind us, and as civilized people, we can and must do better than this. It means keeping in mind that we’re all on the same side together, and it means being willing to admit when we or our comrades are wrong, so that things can be made right. I am not the only one who failed at these things in this instance by a longshot. However I am one of those who did, and because of that I accept my fate.

  The future still lies ahead, and even though I won’t be a part of it, it’s all that matters to me anymore. The Forest Hill Police Department will eventually be reconstituted. No man and no city can save the whole world, but we can take what’s been learned here and create an example for others to follow. From the ground up we can build a new department that does the right thing, values the people it serves above all else, and in turn is valued by those people too. It’s true this might be a lofty vision, but if it doesn’t happen, then all these lives have been lost for nothing.

  This is my last wish for you. God bless.

  --Randolph Gustin

  Epilogue

  Kim Trang had yet to decide if he liked this new job. It wasn’t what he had ever really pictured himself doing with his life, but like his Vietnamese mother had always told him, callings come from places you’d never expect. And when they come, it’s not a good idea to turn your back on them. So while he wasn’t sure if he liked the job yet, there did seem to be potential.

  The twenty-one year old man was sitting in the passenger seat of a police cruiser, in full uniform, next to Chief Grandstone. It was something of an honor to be riding with the chief, or so he understood it. He was one of many new-hires for the department, and as such he needed an experienced officer to show him the ropes. But as the department was still a bit limited on experienced officers, the chief was doing a lot of the training rides himself.

  Nearly a year after the execution of the mass murderer of the Forest Hill Police Department, the department was finally being reconstituted, and Kim was happy to be a part of it. It was like being a part of history, a player in a new chapter of a book that had a lot of people following it. It was a part that carried a lot of responsibility, because if this train went down the same track as the last one, it could well be headed for an identical wreck.

  “See that place?” Burt told him. Kim looked over and saw Bourbon Street. It was before noon and the parking lot was pretty empty, and to Kim the place looked fairly unremarkable.

  “Is that our hangout or something?” His Asian accent was noticeable, but not overtly, as he had done the bulk of his growing up in the U.S.

  “Nope, that’s a place where troublemakers hang out. It’s been a while since they’ve gotten the attention they need, but we’ll be stopping in there quite a bit in the near future.”

  “That what the old department used to do?”

  Burt cracked a smile. “Kid, this is the old department.”

  Kim nodded with understanding, as he took out his personal phone to check the screen. He pushed a few buttons and put it away.

  “I’m sure you know the history of this town and this department, everybody does,” Burt went on. “The thing about dealing with mass murderers is you have to make sure they don’t get what they want, or you’ll encourage more of the same. Gustin himself had some things to say on that before all the shit started. Like for one example, what school shooters want is to see helpless people flee in terror, so they can feel powerful and in control. What prostitute killers want, among other things, is to feel like they can get away with anything. You get the drift.” Kim nodded as he listened. He certainly did get the drift. “What Randy Gustin wanted was to change the whole way we do business. He wanted to put himself and the rabble we have to contend with on top of the pecking order. That just isn’t the way police work gets done. The whole country is watching to see how this turns out. If he were to win this, it would be the beginning of the end for our position in society. That’s not going to happen on my watch.”

  As Kim took all of that in, a call came in on the radio. Nothing much, just a 911 hangup call, but it was they who were closest to respond. Burt stepped on the gas as they drove to the location of the call.

  “So I get to be part of a great experiment?” Kim asked.

  “Indeed you do.”

  They drove to the fringes of the city limits where houses were fewer and further between. They came to the one they were looking for and Burt was surprised to see a For Sale sign from one of the local realty companies in front of it. He pulled into the driveway and stopped.

  The place had enough trees on both sides that the view from the surrounding properties was pretty obscured. The garage door was open just a couple of feet, and the bottom of a car could be seen inside. Not much of a car, it appeared to be a run down import of some kind, and they couldn’t see the license plate. And, the front door of the place was ajar.

  Burt radioed to dispatch that they were checking it out, and they got out of the car. Burt took the lead as they walked to the door, and he drew his Glock.

  “Is that necessary yet?” Kim asked.

  “If there’s one thing to be learned from that episode with Gustin, it’s what can happen when you don’t shoot quick enough,” came Burt’s reply.

  He nudged the door open and looked inside. Seeing nothing but an empty front room, he called out. “Police, whoever is in here come to the door,” he said. Then he stepped inside and Kim followed.

  The house was a two-story with a basement, and it was creaky. The uncarpeted floorboards, he had no doubt, were announcing his presence to whomever might be inside. He rounded a corner into the dining room, and had to wonder about that no more.

  A Government .45 was leveled at him from the corner to the right. “Don’t fuckin’ move,” the man holding it said, and Burt quickly recognized him as Vincent. Burt prepared to make a move anyways, when a second voice came out of the other corner.

  “Don’t listen to Vince,” Elena said as she held her new .380 on Burt’s head. “Just make your move now.”

  By Burt’s estimation, they hadn’t seen Kim yet, and the rookie was in a good position to get Vincent at least. Burt pointed his gun upward so he’d at least live long enough to give Kim the chance, then he began to back out of the dining room. Vince moved to follow, and that put him right into position. Burt heard the sound of Kim drawing his weapon, but there was no shot. He turned to see what the holdup was, and Kim’s weapon was staring him straight in the eye.

  “Randy Gustin was my godfather,” Kim said, and a sense of blackness fell on Burt like a landslide. Vincent took Burt’s pistol, and then the chief faced his rookie.

  “Seriously, et tu?”

  “Randy’s father spared my grandfather in the war. They became great friends, and Randy was a great friend to my mother too.” Kim didn’t look the least bit like the passive young man who had mad
e Burt wonder if he was really up to this job. He looked pissed. “When you go after a man who has friends, don’t be surprised if they come back with a grudge.”

  Vincent motioned for Burt to put his gun down on the floor, and he did. Then Burt turned his attention back to Vincent and Elena. “So you set this all up for revenge?”

  “Randy got all the revenge any man has a right to ask for,” Vincent replied “This is all about you.”

  “How so?”

  “Randy wiped the slate clean for us, all except for you and the ones he allowed to live. But you’re fixin’ to fill that slate back up with all the same shit we had to contend with before. We just can’t have that.”

  Burt began to have some difficulty with breathing. “Just how you figure on getting away with this?”

  “That’s easy,” Elena replied, “we’re going to make up a phony, bullshit excuse for wasting your worthless ass. But we’re doing it for a good cause, so that makes it okay.” Elena’s gangster side was coming back to the surface, and it didn’t look like it wanted to play. “And it gets even better. I’m writing the headline myself.” She might be kidding about that, and she might not. Elena had been hired by the Gazette only a few months before. For the most part, she had done only fluff pieces, but she was gradually working her way into the crime-reporting department.

  “The story we came up with,” Vincent interjected, “is that you entered the house with a drawn weapon without identifying yourself. The person inside, who was merely looking at the house for sale, saw the gun first, panicked and fired, killing you.”

  “You think they’ll accept that as your reason for killing me?”

  “Actually it wasn’t us, it was a lone black male wearing a tie,” Vincent replied.

  Burt pointed at Kim. “So how are you going to explain his survival?”

  “That’s easy,” Vince went on. “After the guy realized what he’d done, he pistol-whipped Kim, left him cuffed to the banister and fled.”

  “They’re not going to buy this shit.”

  “I guess you hadn’t heard,” Kim replied. “They never question the word of a cop.”

  That’s when it finally dawned on Burt that this was completely, utterly real. He backed slowly toward the center of the living room of the empty house. The three of them followed him with weapons aimed, Vincent on his right, Kim on his left, and Elena right in front. She was holding a shiny stainless gun that was nearly identical to the Colt Mustang she had lost, but it wasn’t another Mustang, as those had been discontinued by Colt years before. This was a Sig Sauer P-238, which was a very close reproduction of the Mustang.

  “You’re using your own gun even? They’ll get ballistics off of that,” Burt said.

  “We’ll be picking up the brass,” Vincent replied. “And the ammo’s frangible, so there won’t be any ballistics to match. So with all the explanation out of the way, you have any last words?”

  “This fucking sucks.”

  All their eyebrows went up. “That’s it?” Vincent asked.

  “That’s it. Write it down and make sure they carve it on my fucking gravestone.”

  “I’ll write it there myself, in lipstick,” Elena said.

  “That’ll do.”

  Then Elena held up her gun for him to see. “They took my last .380,” Elena said, “but I got a new one. It’s not as pretty, but you know what it has that my last one didn’t?”

  “What?”

  She pointed at the night sights on top of the gun with her left hand. “Three dots. You know what three dots means?”

  Having worked on a gang task force, Burt knew exactly what it meant, and the three-dot tattoo on her left hand bore out the fact that she meant it. But he still wanted to hear her say it, so he motioned her to do so.

  “My, Crazy, Life,” she said. Then Elena stuck the gun right up to the bridge of his nose and pulled the trigger. The shot was perfect. It blew his glasses in half, and Burt hit the creaky hardwood floor on his back, the two halves of his glasses lying on the floor beside his head. He was dead without ever having felt what hit him.

  Elena couldn’t take her eyes off what she had done, but Vincent’s mind was still on business. He took out a cellphone and handed it to Kim. “Gimme the other one,” he said, and Kim handed back the prepaid phone they had done their signaling with.

  “You remember how to take the memory card out of the dash cam?” Kim asked.

  “We’ll get it,” Vincent replied, then he tugged on Elena’s arm. “We gotta go.”

  “You think Randy’s happy about this?” Vincent saw that Elena’s eyes had tears in them, and he put his hands on her shoulders.

  “I think he knows it had to be done. So no one else would have to do what he had to do.” Vincent picked Burt’s pistol up off the floor and turned his attention to Kim.

  “Ah, this is the part I’ve been waiting for,” Kim said.

  “Sorry bud, but we gotta get this on the road,” Vincent said. “So what you gonna do after this?”

  “Want to hear something funny? I kind of like this job now. There’s some promise here, so I might just keep it for a while. Besides, somebody has to come out to question you guys about this.”

  “Well, it’ll be nice to have an excuse to visit without bein’ sneaky,” Vincent said. “And you want to hear somethin’ even funnier? I think this is shapin’ up to be a department I could work for.”

  Vincent made sure his finger was off the trigger and pulled back his arm. Kim closed his eyes, but kept his smile right where it was.

  * * *

  They left Kim cuffed to the banister, where he would be found shortly by officers investigating why they had dropped out of touch. Then they took the car that Vincent had paid cash for in a town halfway across the state, drove it to where their own cars were parked, and abandoned it there. From there they wasted no time in vacating the area for home.

  Elena had a lot to think about on the way home, not the least of which was the fact that she’d have to help write the story about this herself, just as soon as the Gazette called her about it. That would be tough to do with a straight face. She could handle it though. Now she could handle anything.

  Business was finally taken care of. Ever since Randy had been taken from her, what had kept her going was her will to make sure that his death, and the deaths of those that he and she had killed, had not been for nothing. Things were now going to play out as they would. A new chief would be selected, and the man who was currently first in line for that position would be a lot more amenable to working with the public than his predecessor was. There was hope on the horizon, but her part in this was finished, so now she had to get back to her own life.

  And that life had a big hole in it. There was no question that she had a lot going for her now, more than she had ever dreamed of having, and she had Randy to thank for that. She had her own home, she had friends, and she had a good paying job that wasn’t in the service industry. What she didn’t have though was her husband. She had everything he had to give her, and that was a lot, but she didn’t have him. Nor had any suitable replacements come along, and it wasn’t because she wasn’t open to the idea. Elena knew Randy would never want her to spend her life alone mourning him. She had been on a few dates since his death, but it didn’t seem like anybody would ever measure up. But then again, maybe she was just aiming too high.

  She was so lost in thought that she scarcely noticed the Sheriff’s patrol car passing her in the other direction. But when it pulled a U-turn and flipped on its overhead lights, then she noticed. “Oh Christ, what now…” she said, as she pulled over and stopped. Her scanner was still on, and what had happened earlier hadn’t been discovered yet, so this couldn’t have anything to do with that. Besides which, their tracks were covered as well as they possibly could be. She hoped.

  The young deputy got out and walked to her window. He was in his early thirties with jet-black hair, and as much as Elena detested uniforms, his didn’t look bad on him. His n
ametag read E. Bowles. “Hello ma’am, can I see your license and registration please,” he began pleasantly enough. But as Elena knew too well, that was often just the calm before the storm. She gave him the papers as he continued. “I pulled you over today because you didn’t have your seatbelt on,” he said.

  “Oh, you are NOT serious…”

  “I’m afraid I am,” he replied, his smile still intact.

  “Come on, do you really think we need the nanny state to tell us how to do every little thing?”

  “In truth, I don’t. I have plenty of reservations of my own about that law, and in fact I usually don’t write those tickets. But at the same time, I once personally knew two brothers who went off a road and rolled down an embankment. They both got thrown from their truck and crushed underneath, and they both would’ve been fine if they’d had their seatbelts on. That’s just one example of many I could give you.”

  He asked her to wait while he took her papers back to his car. While she waited, she searched her memory for a time when a cop had offered a real reason for doing something in the way that he just had, and came up empty. This was new.

  E. Bowles returned with her paperwork, and to Elena’s dismay, another sheet of paper too. “Ma’am, I’m going to have to give you a citation on the seatbelt.”

  “Does this have something to do with who I am?”

  “You mean your being the wife of Randy Gustin? Not at all. I’ve only been working here for a few months and that was all before my time. The reason I’m writing it for you is because of the amount of time I’ve spent working accidents. I’ve had to see the crushed skulls and ribcages, and I’ve also had to see a few people out of this world. It’s not a fun part of this job. I believe in free choice and all that, but given the choice between respecting your right to decide, and keeping you all in one piece, I’ll have to go with the second option.”