by A. J. Lape
He winked at his wife, turning his gaze to me. “Darcy can handle whatever is thrown at her, Lex.”
“Sure she can,” she tag-teamed, “and I love you, babe.”
My eyes teared up with the kind words. Grabbing my sunglasses, I slid them onto my nose, but the action wasn’t subtle enough because they both spotted the tears and didn’t comment. Fear swirled in my bones because the end of the week would be a pretty good indicator whether I would pass or fail. “Thank you for letting me crash here until this day came,” I said, thinking back on how they’d allowed me to be their tenant. “I promise I’ll be good.”
“Don’t be totally good,” Alexandra added. “That wouldn’t make you Darcy. Don’t come out of the academy just another blue uniform. The people need officers they are comfortable approaching. Be you.”
Lord, that could pose a problem if I took that literally.
After she leaned through the door offering a kiss, Lincoln closed me inside, reminding me once again to KMA—cop-speak for “keep me apprised.” I raised a hand and eased out of the circle drive, reflecting on what it had taken for me to get this far in the journey. In order to gain acceptance into the academy, I had to pass a written exam. The process had been without event, but the challenging part was the background information I had to send along with it. Requested were my records of the past decade or so—where I lived, where I worked, and incidences of when and where I’d come into contact with law enforcement and the outcomes of those interactions. Uh, there had been a lot. Sophomore year, I discovered a dead body, was interviewed, and helped find the murderer. That summer, I found a head buried in the sand. Junior year was much the same. I chased an identity thief and that person tried to sink a knife in me while at work. I also was kidnapped that year, and it turned into an eighty-day vacation I hadn’t signed up for. Senior year, someone stole my identity, and for a while, I was the top suspect in a related murder. So my encounters with law enforcement? Let’s just say, I didn’t write your standard I-got-a-few-traffic-tickets and paid-my-fines paragraph. I had a full-length essay, proving how I’d solved those cases and why those incriminating me were dead wrong in their accusations in the first place.
My references included my employers at a bookstore and hot dog shop, my high school counselor and principal, two police detectives, along with Lincoln and Paddy. I was fairly confident no one else would have such a hefty list of references and accompanying essay, but I knew being that detailed—and perhaps overly confident—had placed a bull’s eye on my chest. Especially if they placed a lot of stock in my high school transcript, which was far from ideal with an ACT score that was perfect. To many, I represented the typical student who had loads of potential but couldn’t get out of her own way. Truth be told, to some extent that had been valid—unless there was something I wanted. Then those in my path needed to either jump on the Darcy train or get prepared to be run over.
Lincoln having requested I lay low was him realizing what was in front of me. I’d set myself up for scrutiny by listing my background in vivid detail, but they’d asked for the truth—so I obliged…in living color.
My phone rang in triplicate, and I answered a call from Dylan (who said Kirby York had been kicked off the team), Jaws (who said he was running the phone number through his system), and finally my father (who’d just phoned to give me a virtual hug).
“Thanks for the hug, Murphy,” I said to my dad after I’d had pep talks from the previous two.
“Kid, I didn’t sleep all night,” he grumbled. “Make sure you say, yes, sir and yes, ma’am, all right?”
“Got it.”
“And keep the jokes on the QT until you know who appreciates a good sense of humor.”
“Will do.”
“And be careful name-dropping Lincoln or Paddy but definitely let it all fly if it’s someone who might fear them.”
“Agreed.”
Murphy blew out a case of nerves. “Okay,” he murmured. “That’s all I can think of, but I’m worried because sometimes you have no self-restraint. I’m banking on that as a first line of defense on Judgment Day.”
My father and I had been on a first-name basis since I could utter a word. He wasn’t exactly the type of personality anyone would’ve predicted to be the stand-up father he’d become either. He’d fit the mold of your traditional bad boy—a good-looking, chain-smoking, silver-tongued heartbreaker. He was a guy who came from a good family but found out his parents’ gene pool didn’t do enough to erase the bad that was born in his. Except when he met my mother, and then she singlehandedly rounded out all those sharp edges. I’d only seen my father ugly-cry once…when they shut the ambulance doors and drove my mother away. As knee-buckling as her death had been, he’d still somehow gotten up every morning and raised my little sister and me, spouting out the I love yous that were taboo to most testosterone.
Pulling into the training center a full fifteen minutes early, I disconnected with my father and angled my ride next to Jon Bradshaw who’d made it there before me. Grumpy, as I called him, had wavy brown hair and was liberally listed at six feet with a stocky build. He exited his new silver Camry right as I pulled the keys from the ignition, his face and coffee-colored eyes as stoic as a diehard Puritan. He could be nervous. He could be anticipating a good lunch. With Grumpy, you never quite knew.
Slinging my purse over my shoulder, I had my handle on the door when he opened it for me. Laughter rose in my gut. “Ah, the royal treatment,” I said. “I like it, Grumpy. You’re already anticipating me being your superior officer.”
The corners of his mouth twitched, cracking a rare smile. “H-hour has finally come.”
“It has,” I agreed, referring to his slogan as being the first day of a planned attack. “Ready?”
Grumpy inhaled, his exhale coming out hard and slow. “We’ve got six months of this. I’m already wondering whose slay the day is going to be real.”
Chapter 10
IT TOOK SOME MAJOR COJONES TO GO UNFILTERED.
The Los Angeles Police Academy has a single mission—to protect and to serve, safeguarding the lives and property of those living in Los Angeles County.
The LAPD conducted its business as a paramilitary organization. In other words, it had a command structure with multiple levels of top-down authority. To be a police officer, men and women must be a graduate of a certified state “peace officer” training school. The Los Angeles Police Academy was different than many other smaller police precincts in the United States as they had their own in-house academy. Men and women who applied and were accepted would graduate with their license and then disseminate to one of the many stations inside Los Angeles.
Considering a recruit didn’t get booted from the program first.
Some days would include physical training. Others could be defensive tactics and firearms instruction. On top of the hands-on requirements, we would be bombarded with classroom work, covering everything from the history of policing, to criminal and juvenile law, to case law and ethics, to report writing. Lincoln periodically grilled me on laws and police codes, but what I wasn’t prepared for was the ethics of it all. I’d never been a person to hit a roadblock—and in this case, a law—and sit back and say, Oh well. Better luck next time. I preferred to bust down walls, forging paths and leaving forethought to the armchair quarterbacks. From this day forward, I had to consider those types of unchecked behaviors could lead to expulsion.
I’d just been issued training clothes—navy shorts, sweats, and a sweatshirt for physical training; and a white T-shirt with “Walker” screen-printed in black across the front and back. Later, I would be introduced to a GLOCK .40-caliber handgun.
Placing my things into an assigned locker while waiting for Grumpy, I walked along the side of the wall—we’d even been instructed how to walk—stopping in front of LA’s Top Ten Most Wanted wall. Nationalities and looks ranged from across the board. That was life in LA though—especially considering a border to a foreign country was nea
rby. My eyes fell on a baldheaded man, mid-thirties, whose eyes were so icy a chill settled in my core. His nose was perfectly straight, and his cheekbones were high and sculpted. In any other setting, I might find him attractive until I processed why he was wanted for questioning. He’d been seen leaving the premises of a government building not long before it blew up. A daycare was in the bottom floor and twenty children had been incinerated into ash...
Staring at the walls I’d willingly walked inside, I reminded myself I’d signed up for this, and sad stories were going to be an everyday fact—that was the nature of the beast. Swallowing the sudden urge to puke, I was approached by a group of friendly recruits and left the Ten Most Wanted and hollow feeling in my chest behind. My classmates and I did what everyone who was partly social did when meeting new people—exchange phone numbers and social medial profiles. After a brief conversation that included your typical are-you-nervous and what-do-you-think-tomorrow-will-bring blurbs, we disbursed and headed for the classroom.
In an obsessive-compulsive moment, I fell back and rechecked the things in my locker. Clothes, books, etcetera. The moment I reorganized that which was already perfect, I closed my locker door right as a guy named Ezra Huxley invaded my personal space.
“Sup?” he said after he introduced himself.
Ezra Huxley had a rich, high society name, but despite his lean frame and sideburns a little too long, something in his face suggested dirtball. Was the guy trying to pick me up? Who the H had time for workplace romance? I decided to state the obvious, stepping around him. “Just headed to class.” He tapped me on the shoulder, thinking his blond hair and pale blue eyes would change my mind. Um, no way, butthead. Think again. I reluctantly peered over my shoulder but kept up my pace.
“May I call you sometime?” he inquired, falling into step alongside me.
“About?” I pushed.
“Just to talk.”
If I said no, I could be alienating someone who could benefit me or worse yet, impede. If I said yes, I could be greenlighting a potential stalker. Rolling the dice, I decided to answer in the affirmative and figure out the rest later. While Huxley prattled on about how he was a good shot with a 9mm, I made a move to shake him when someone stopped him to ask to carpool.
While he was distracted, I hurried inside and slid into a seat in the middle of the room across from Grumpy—not up front because I didn’t want to come off as too eager, and not in the back because I didn’t want to appear to only be an observer. As recruits filed in to find a butt warmer, I did a quick eval. Just by the way most carried themselves, the class appeared to be full of Type-A personalities. Everyone was doing like me—the sizing up, the quick body scan to see who was more physically fit. The locking of eyes to determine who was the mentally sharper. As each day passed and each test was taken, our class would dwindle down in LAPD’s version of “another one bites the dust.” That being said, I wondered which of us had the grit to withstand the process.
And if one stood in the end? Which of us would get shot? Stabbed? Held hostage? Blown up by a bomb meant for someone else? Who would take a desk job? Make detective? Or go the patrol route and supervise the boots on the street? Who would be stuck behind the wheels of a car his or her entire tenure because they couldn’t cross the one hurdle that led to career advancement?
Our chief training officer was a Police Officer III named Jimmy Roper. Roper was as bald as a cue ball, and his uniform hid a powerful body born to battle—a warning that he could end a fight if someone was dumb enough to pick one. By the lack of a ring on his finger, he was either single or divorced. According to his morning remarks, if we had a problem, we were to bring it to him, and he would point us in the appropriate direction or basically tell us to grow up or grow a pair (the latter wasn’t said but was inferred).
Entering the room with a cup of coffee, Roper perched himself on the corner of a not-fancy desk, drinking from a not-fancy cup. The real no-nonsense type. Usually the kiss of death for someone like me who had a sense of humor.
When he asked for a volunteer to pass out paperwork to our class of fifty, Eugene Anthony—suck-up in training—popped up like the bread in a toaster. While Anthony did his brown-nose routine, Roper commenced to a roll call, asking for everyone to tell them a little about themselves. You could feel the introverts panic. Regardless, I never forgot a face—names were iffy and dependent upon whether I had too much or too little caffeine. But there were a few people I would remember in my dreams.
Other than Anthony—who bragged he graduated first in his class at Stanford, earning a law degree—Grumpy was the first notable. Jon Bradshaw was a man of few words, but when called upon, he’d been all fact, as unfiltered as a late-night talk show host. He told the class he came from a long line of losers, providing a brief synopsis of his brothers and how he felt his life’s experiences were perfect for navigating different personalities. True, one was a drug addict, the other a dealer, while the remaining four had rap sheets ranging from petty theft to public intoxication and indecent exposure. No lie. One Bradshaw brother literally thought everyone wanted to see his junk. After Grumpy proverbially let it all hang out, the descriptions and explanations from the class became more genuine and less scripted.
Grant Coker was the second to strike a chord. According to Coker, he’d had a mid-life crisis at forty that led him to join the academy. Retired from his Uncle Sam gig where he’d flown a helicopter, he discovered he hated shopping with his wife, hated walking his dog, hated gardening, hated meditating, and only missed his helicopter. He hoped to fly a bird for LAPD until his dying breath. With a premature gray high and tight military haircut, he was heavily muscled and a shoo-in, unless some weird psychological quirks surfaced.
After Coker, there were several noteworthy recruits, especially a guy named Kip Faulkner, but the one every guy in class appeared to give his rapt attention was Holland Hemming. Holland was a name synonymous with bodily insecurity for every female in her presence. A blue-eyed redhead and former cheerleader at the University of California-Berkeley, she was held at gunpoint in a convenience store her junior year. The officers who rescued her and the owner inspired her to leave her fashion major behind, so she quit and joined the academy. Like clockwork, the guys cooed like babies—proud, impressed, and sympathetic that someone like Holland could rise above the hate in the world and become a badass.
We made eye contact when she put the period on her last sentence. Her expression appeared warm and friendly, but she was guarded—as was I.
Next to grab my attention was Sunny Swank. Swank was a twenty-nine-year-old former beautician with a little boy at home. Her baby daddy was a thief by trade, and she’d spent her teenage years reluctantly—and sometimes forcefully—chauffeuring his getaway car, claiming she could maneuver the roads like a NASCAR driver. When New Year’s Day rolled around, her resolution was not only to ditch him permanently but to enter a career she and her little boy could be proud of. And why had she made an impression? Because she revealed the skeletons in her closet, first day. It took some major cojones to go unfiltered and not care where it landed you—especially since she admitted she’d been an accessory.
I continued with the assessing until Roper made it to the Ws. Fittingly, I was last on the roster.
“Darcy Walker,” he said, gazing around the room.
I raised my hand. “Guilty as charged.”
Those in the class who had grown tired of the process chuckled. The brown-nosers and note-takers scrutinized me as though I’d be the first to be expelled. True, it wasn’t exactly the venue to say you were guilty of anything. “Walker,” Roper murmured again, leaning back and snagging a thick folder from his desk. Opening it up, he thumbed through its contents and pulled out an application. No one had to tell me that it was mine. “I read your application packet with a bowl of popcorn one night,” he said. “Fascinating reading.”
“It’s all verifiable, sir,” I said, wondering where he was headed with the conversation.
Roper gazed at the application as he spoke. “I take it that it was, or you wouldn’t be sitting here. So you’re a friend of Captain Lincoln Taylor and Lieutenant Paddy O’Leary?” His stare bounced to my app for a few seconds, then found my eyes once more.
“We are acquainted, yes,” I said diplomatically.
Roper looked amused. More than likely he knew I lived with Lincoln—Lincoln hadn’t exactly made it a secret. “Also, by a review of your file,” Roper said, “I hadn’t expected you to be so measured in your responses.”
“Give me time,” I joked. “Right now, I’m judging you as I’m sure you’re judging me.”
Grumpy swiveled around, giving me a shut-your-mouth look. Yeah. I should’ve thought of that before my lips regurgitated my thoughts, but my word-vomit didn’t exactly have an on-off button. Roper rubbed his chin, deep in thought. “One hell of a résumé. I’d be tempted to think it was a Hollywood script if Captain Taylor and some other notable signatures hadn’t signed off on it. With Lincoln specifically, his name is like dropping the name of Jesus Christ around here. And Paddy’s? His name is synonymous with running from the Devil.”
Not knowing how to respond, I didn’t.
“Care to tell us about yourself, Walker?” Roper hadn’t placed the spotlight on anyone else, asking if they cared to divulge personal details. I wasn’t sure why—maybe it was the fact I’d listed my mother’s murder in avid detail, and he was being sensitive. But I was here. If the name of the game was to be transparent, then I would rise to the occasion. Glancing to Grumpy for emotional reinforcement, he drew in some air in synchronization with mine, wincing because he knew what was to come.
“My mother was murdered when I was nine,” I said clinically, “and I suppose that has made me want to save the world.”
Chapter 11
A PART OF ME LONGED FOR UGLY PIZZA.