That’s it. Just like he told them, that’s all it takes. He bends back over to look in the window, thumb unclipping the holster on his service weapon. He shines the flashlight on the kid in the back—Tommy. “Step out of the vehicle,” he says.
The driver reaches for the door handle.
“Not you! The one in the back.”
Tommy looks at him but doesn’t move.
“Step out of the vehicle.”
Tommy shakes his head. Damien marches around to the opposite side of the car. He grabs the handle to the back door and finds it locked.
“You open this door!”
“Jesus, Tommy!”
“Just take off, Jerry. He’s got no right to do this.”
“He’s got my license.”
“Open the goddamn door!” He hits the butt of the flashlight against the frame of the door, putting a small dent in it. He takes a breath. Don’t lose it, he tells himself. “Driver, unlock the door,” he says evenly.
“Don’t do it, Jerry.”
“Driver, I’ll tell you one more time—unlock the door.”
“Don’t you dare fucking—”
The driver’s hand moves. Damien hears a click. He reaches for the door handle, but Tommy locks it before he can get it open. While Tommy and the driver are battling back-and-forth over the lock, Damien reaches into the open window of the stunned front-seat passenger, grabs the inside handle of his door, and swings it open. With the position he’s gained, he reaches around to the back and opens the back door from the inside. He swings it open and leans half his body into the vehicle, grabbing the sleeve of this little dipshit—Tommy—who doesn’t know when to leave well enough alone.
The kid lets out a squeal as Damien pulls him out of the car. The kid is tall and probably outweighs him by twenty pounds, but he’s obviously unaccustomed to the kind of full-bore physical assault that Damien is treating him to. The sissy fucker’s probably never played a contact sport—the defiant ones, they’re usually the biggest pussies when the shit hits the shingle—whereas Damien, compensating for his size, has taken every opportunity he could ever find to let himself get knocked around on the field. That, together with a green belt in judo (which would have been a brown belt if that sensei weren’t such a sissy, asking him to “tone it down” or else “seek training elsewhere”), has taught him to maximize the leverage he can gain and the damage he can inflict with his small mass.
Damien lifts the kid to his feet. “Stop resisting!” he hollers. Standard procedure. He gets the kid in a half nelson and slams him into the rear fender of the car. “Stop resisting!”
The driver’s-side door opens a crack.
“Driver! Remain in your vehicle!”
The individual in the driver’s seat—Damien can hear the language he’ll use in his report even as the event is going down—either doesn’t hear his directive or disregards it, and the door continues to open. His pistol, as if drawn by itself, comes out of the holster. Damien finds himself holding it—his arm outstretched beside the head of the individual he’s escorting—pointing the gun over the roof of the car toward the driver as he steps out onto the road.
“Driver!” he repeats. “Remain in your vehicle! Remain in your vehicle!”
The driver—Damien has forgotten his name, and anyway, this is how he’ll refer to him when he writes his report—freezes when he sees the gun. The kid Damien is escorting starts to whimper.
“Driver! Get back in the vehicle!” The driver starts for the door. “Show me your hands!” The driver hesitates, his hands hovering between going straight up and reaching for the door. He seems uncertain of the order of operations.
“Get back in the vehicle. But keep your hands visible as you do so. No sudden movements.” God, don’t these kids know how to handle a simple traffic stop? They ought to teach this in school. If you don’t know how to comply with instructions from an officer of the law, you’re liable to get yourself killed.
The driver opens the door and pivots into the car.
“Keep your hands in plain view!”
The driver puts his palms on the inside of the door as he moves back into the vehicle and shuts the door gingerly behind him.
“Please,” says the one Damien is pinning against the car with justifiable force. “We didn’t do anything…”
“You have anything that I might catch my hands on? Needles, blades?”
“Dude, I don’t have anything.”
“My name is not ‘dude.’ It’s ‘sir’ or ‘officer.’ Or ‘Officer Edwards.’”
“I don’t have anything, officer.”
Damien pats the kid down, cuffs him, and pulls him off of the Civic. He then gives the kid a hard push in the direction of the cruiser and follows him over to it, swiveling his weapon back-and-forth between the offender and the vehicle. This would be easier if he called for back-up, but he wants to get his story straight before introducing any other parties into the situation. He opens the back door and tosses the kid in.
“Aren’t you gonna read me my rights or something?” the kid says as Damien gets into the front of the cruiser.
“Not yet.”
“Am I under arrest?”
“Keep up the chatter and you will be.”
“For what?”
“… Resisting arrest.”
“How can I be resisting arrest if I wasn’t being arrested in the first place? That doesn’t make any sense.”
…
The kid scoffs and shakes his head. “You are in such deep shit.”
“I’m in deep shit? You’re the one in handcuffs, buck-o.”
“Jeremiah’s dad’s a lawyer, dude. He’s gonna take you down so hard for this.”
Damien looks at the address on the driver’s license—Maple Hill Road. That’s out by Lake Auburn. A lot of nice houses out that way. His dad might well be a lawyer.
“Last guy they sued, he took for a couple mil.”
“Shut up.”
“By the time he’s through with you, you’re gonna be cleaning up Snickers wrappers and used condoms out on Leeds Street.”
“I said shut the fuck up!”
Damn. This isn’t shaping up the way he’d hoped. He’s violated one or two procedural protocols and shown what some might regard as a lack of restraint. If the kids had any drugs or weapons—even an empty beer can in the car—or if he could make a convincing case that they were doing anything other than driving a little too fast on a mostly empty rural route (and disrespecting an officer of the law), he’d feel a lot better about the situation. As it stands, this won’t gain him any ground with Sergeant Shithead, who’s bought hook-line-and-sinker into Chief Dickcheese’s mission to “enhance departmental credibility” and other such horseshit that makes it hard for good cops to do their jobs. As if ‘credibility’ is their problem. If he’d had to follow such namby-pamby guidelines for engagement back in Afghanistan, not one soldier in his unit would have made it out of there alive. That’s what these pencil pushers in the department don’t get—there’s a war on out there. And if someone doesn’t guard against it, it’s going to show up on the shores of Great Falls. He’s sure of that.
Presently, however, he’s in a tough spot. It’s hard to see a way forward that won’t bring with it a colossal headache. There’ll be paperwork and possibly an inquest. Even if he lets the kids go at this point, if they complain to the department, his superiors will wonder why he didn’t book the kid, get it in the system. But he isn’t going to book the kid. There’s no charge, and he knows it. You can’t arrest someone for being an idiot, at least not with two witnesses on his side and zero on yours. He could maybe get him on resisting for trying to keep the door locked, but it might be a tough sell because there wasn’t ‘probable cause’ for Damien to be going into the car in the first place. At least not the kind of cause the lawyers like to see. Obstruction, maybe? That would be a stretch.
As far as Damien is concerned, these shit-for-brains stuck their necks out by joyriding
out here in the first place, and this one went the extra mile by running his mouth. Unfortunately, some folks won’t see it that way, and he knows it. Some folks are on a mission to make cops’ jobs as difficult and dangerous as possible. Gotta worry about the perps on one end, the lawyers on the other. No safe place for a cop these days. Some folks just don’t understand—or don’t want to admit—what it takes to maintain order, to control a situation. And they do about everything in their power to hamstring law enforcement at every turn. Protocols and regulations up the yin yang—Christ, now they’re talking about putting surveillance cameras in every vehicle. What people don’t get is that sometimes you have to improvise. You’ve got to deal with the situation on the ground, and that may not leave you a lot of time to think about standard operating procedure or departmental frickin’ policy. You have to make judgment calls. And when it comes to defending his own safety and the public good, Officer Damien Edwards sure as shit trusts his own judgment better than whatever lines some desk jockey, some soft-bellied snot who hasn’t patrolled in twenty years, wrote in a handbook with a lawyer looking over his shoulder.
“So you taking me in or what?”
The kid’s voice snaps Damien out of his reverie, and he realizes he’s been sitting there for at least thirty seconds—maybe a full minute—without saying anything, the radio quietly rattling off messages while his unfocused eyes look past the steering wheel. This has been happening to him more and more lately, these little check-outs, and once or twice it’s been problematic enough that the Sarge has threatened to bench him until he sees someone about it.
Right. A shrink. That’s exactly what he needs. Like those fuckers at the VA he has to wait three weeks to get an appointment with, just so they can tell him what he’s experiencing is “text book” this or he’s “presenting as” that, slap some acronym on it and call it a day. Like any one of them knows what it’s like to be a soldier, to see your friend Mickey—a guy who always had an extra smoke and a joke, which even if it wasn’t always funny you could at least count on the fact that you hadn’t heard it before because he made it up just for you, like the jarhead version of delivering fresh-baked cookies—what it’s like to see this guy, Mickey, a guy you’re starting to feel like he’s your brother or something even though he’s probably the first black dude you were ever really buds with, having grown up in an area as yet mostly unpopulated by people of color, but this guy seems all right and then seems more than all right, seems to really get you, and plays music you like and always has those lame jokes handy—so to see this guy’s face literally peeled off by the shrapnel from a land mine but then (here’s the kicker) not quite die from it… no, those tweed-coated, pill-pushing pricks don’t have a diagnosis that can account for something like that. And so what if, in the wake of such an event, Private First Class Damien Edwards had been what his commanding officer would describe as ‘overzealous’ in the discharge of his duties? Who could blame him for wanting to rain some righteous fucking vengeance on the fuckers who did that to his friend and to thousands of other guys like him? Mickey wouldn’t blame him, he’s sure of that. And that’s good enough for him.
The kid sighs and clears his throat. Damien realizes that he has disappeared for another twenty- or thirty-second stretch. Maybe longer. Son of a bitch. He’s got to keep it together. What he needs is an exit strategy. Part of him just wants to take these kids out, cap ‘em in their car and roll it into the woods off the shoulder of the road, dispatch these motherfuckers right here and now. But they would definitely trace that back to him—the bullets, for one thing, notwithstanding the fact that this is his stretch of highway this evening. Unless…
What in the hell is he doing? He’s not actually contemplating executing three teenagers on the side of the road, is he?
This is going nowhere. He’s got nothing to hold this little shit on. Just let the kids off with a warning and be on your way. That’s what he’s got to do. It might annoy the fuck out of him, but it’s the only way to play this. If only he could find a way to save face, a plausible excuse for the about-turn, something that would allow him to leave the scene with a shred of dignity…
A dispatcher’s voice comes over the radio: “Attention all units—we have a report of suspicious activity on Moon Drive in the Bluffs. Any units in the vicinity, please report.”
Damien moves so fast to pick up the receiver, he almost puts his hand through the radio.
“This is Officer Damien Edwards—I’m out that way. I can check it out. Over.”
It’s a bit of a stretch—it’ll take him ten minutes to get out to the Bluffs, seven if he really guns it—but it’s just the kind of out he needs.
“Roger that, Officer Edwards. Over.”
“What’s the address? Over.”
“No address, I’m afraid. Caller just said there was something suspicious happening in a house out on Moon Drive, didn’t say which one or what the activity was. Over.”
Is this a joke?
“Are you responding, Officer Edwards? Over.”
Damien glances in the rearview mirror. “Hang on a second. Over.”
He gets out of the car and walks around to the opposite side. He opens the back door and tells the kid to get out.
“Are you serious?” the kid says.
He grabs the kid by the arm and yanks him out of the car. “Wait here.”
He goes back around to the driver’s side, gets in, and picks up the receiver.
“Officer Edwards?”
“I’m here. Sorry. I gotta ask… is this a joke? Over.”
“Could be. The caller sounded young. Might be pulling a prank. But we still gotta check it out. Over.”
Intent on giving this gift horse a thorough looking-over, Damien continues, “So what, I’m supposed to go door-to-door, ask if anyone’s seen anything suspicious?”
“There’s only a dozen or so houses on the whole road. It’s no more than a mile long. Over.”
“All right. I’ll check it out. Over.”
He puts the receiver back in the carriage and steps out of the cruiser, hoisting up his belt with a loud harumph.
“Looks like it’s your lucky night,” he says to the bewildered young man standing on the shoulder of the road.
When the teenagers have taken off, Damien warning them to “keep it under control out there,” he wheels the cruiser around, pops the flashers on, and tears down route 126 in the direction of the Bluffs, quietly congratulating himself on his apt handling of a difficult situation.
And who the hell knows? Maybe there is something going on at this place out on Moon Drive. The night may hold some adventure yet.
Rock & roll, he thinks. Rock & motherfuckin’ roll.
CHAPTER TEN: House Call
10:56 p.m.
Dresden stands in front of a large painting on the western wall of the great room, a cigarette dangling from his lip, a can of black spray paint in his hand. Hard rock blares from a pair of enormous speakers mounted to the opposite wall. The painting is a recent acquisition from the Boston-based artist Miguel Santangelo, the seventh piece in his series on the Ten Commandments, this painting fittingly inspired by the dictum “Thou shalt not steal.”
Val has been watching Dresden as he’s geared up for the past half-hour with more beer and some cans of Red Bull he pulled from the stash their sons keep in the basement. He inspects the artwork with the interest of a seasoned collector, standing so close that he could literally lick the paint off the canvas. Then he raises the can of spray paint, gives it a hard shake, and sweeps it in a vertical line down the center of the painting.
This is the fourth piece of art he’s ruined among the dozen or so that grace the walls of the great room and the adjoining hallways. Though he’s concocted a variety of embellishments from the revolutionary to the randy, the one recurring motif is a horseshoe shape bisected by a vertical line, rather like the Greek letter psi (ψ). It’s the same graphic Val had spied on the front page of the ‘Declaration.’
> Dresden takes a swig of beer, then picks up the remote for the speakers and turns the volume up another notch. The band is Radiohead, an early favorite of Jacob’s. The sound is deep and clear, as one would expect; Val had, after all, been convinced by her sons to shell out eighty grand for the system on the occasion of their father’s fiftieth birthday.
“I just can’t see spending close to six figures on a pair of speakers,” she had protested.
“But Mom,” Matthew had said, “these are not just speakers. They’re totally amazing. Mac’s dad got some, and they’re like the coolest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“It completely transforms the sound,” Jacob confirmed. Then he added, “They’re pretty dope.”
The last bit hadn’t helped their cause, but as the boys knew, if their mother didn’t say ‘no’ outright, they had a good chance of winning her over.
“I feel like this is more of a gift for you boys than for your father. He doesn’t even listen to music all that much.”
“Did you ever think,” said Matthew, “that might be because of the quality of his speakers?”
Val’s face screwed up, looking to stall the decision she knew was coming. “They look like a couple of space heaters. Or air purifiers.”
“Well,” said Jacob, “you could go for the Sonus Fabers. They have a more classic design.”
“How much are those?”
“About two hundred.”
“Two hundred thousand dollars?!”
Jacob shrugged. “Turning fifty is a milestone.”
Later, Val hadn’t been sure whether she was more surprised that she had actually bought the damned things or that her sons had proven to be such good salesmen. Where had they gotten that? It was a dubious skill to possess, unbecoming of her well-raised boys. She knew, of course, that her family’s wealth—both the family she’d grown up in and the one she’d made—came from selling things, and on a massive scale. But that had more to do with innovation, managerial finesse. Her father hadn’t been in the business of peddling goods, and she doubted John could sell a lifeboat to a drowning man. She had hoped never to see her sons involved in activities like this. They ought to be making, mending, or managing things.
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