by Hawk, Nate
For a variety of reasons he had not re-upped after his four-year enlistment had expired. So he could empathize with Jen’s hesitation. Some things didn’t need verbalized. Some things needed compartmentalized and left in the past. Jen had gotten on with her life and he had gotten on with his life. Instead of relisting, Kelly chose to move on to a lighter side of life after war. He was ready to take it easy.
Working with the Boston Police Department was his idea of slowing down. After he had put in five years as a patrolman he was promoted to detective. During that time he had distinguished himself on several cases and had also volunteered for part time work with the Bomb Squad on an on-call basis. God knew he had seen enough IEDs in Iraq, but being on the Squad was a way to keep his senses sharp and occasionally keep the adrenaline flowing. It also gave him a way to pay back the EOD guys who had kept him from coming home from Iraq short any body parts.
In addition to a job that he enjoyed, Kelly had met Jen in a bi-fecta blessing. Perhaps it was a karma reward for his selfless sacrifice in the Corps. Or maybe it was luck that those two things had happened about the same time. Perhaps Kelly would go to hell for what he had done as a Marine. He didn’t know. He’d eventually figured out that war was a racket and reasoned that he’d helped perpetrate it. Either way, after his long trek for happiness, there was no need to muddy up his newfound life with jealousy or control over his fiancée’s past. He knew he needed to let it go and he mostly had. Besides, if she ever wanted to talk about it, he wasn’t going anywhere.
Later in the evening, the conversation moved along to Brady’s blossoming academic accomplishments. His teachers had suggested that he was a candidate to be advanced forward one grade-level in school. They had assured Jen that it would be easier now rather than waiting to do it when he was older. She found herself taking an alternative position, struggling with their assessment, because she just wanted her son to enjoy being a kid. The discussion had found no real conclusion that evening and so their talk had changed courses to a new topic.
They’d begun planning for the following winter’s vacation. Kelly had invited the two of them on an ocean cruise that was to take place the following February. February, he had said, was a great time to get away from the cold weather in Boston and to cruise to Key West… or to any other tropical island, for that matter. The Caribbean was naturally perfect that time of year, he had said. Jen hadn’t travelled much, so she was excited but at the same time a bit insecure. Will we have to take our own bottled water? she had wondered. Do they drive on the other side of the road in those revolutionary Caribbean countries? she had asked with a laugh. She didn’t know. Most of her adult life seemed to have been wrapped up in the responsibilities of motherhood. Finding Kelly had been a huge step in her happiness. So traveling was a luxury that she had never really considered.
That night, as he was driving his personal vehicle, his cell phone began to ring, half startling him and abruptly putting a hold on their conversation. He slowed the Dodge Magnum down as he began to brake for the now changing traffic light.
“Hello,” he said, more as a question than a statement, as his caller ID had shown him who was on the phone.
“Maclean, it’s Sergeant Gibbs. We’ve got a situation, damn it,” the black woman began, not pausing long enough for Maclean to comment. Gibbs had been a cop all of her career, and had seemed to add a dress size with every promotion. Kelly had not been particularly impressed with her when he was assigned to her section, but his Marine training allowed him to work effectively under her command, and he had, over time, come to appreciate her skills as a supervisor. She was particularly good at keeping her people out of trouble with her superiors, and he had, on more than one occasion, benefited from that trait. Early on in his career, he had tended to instinctively act more as a Marine and less as a cop in stressful situations, and she had intervened on his behalf. That had not come without a price though; afterwards she had made sure that he understood that his instincts had to be those of a cop in the future. As he began to appreciate her, she in turn, began to understand his potential and without his knowledge, did things to further his career. Working with Kelly’s lieutenant for his appointment to the Bomb Squad was one such thing.
“An ongoing domestic over here just off the Southeast Expressway, on Bellflower Ave,” she explained, pausing to take a breath.
“Yeah?” he inquired.
Detective Maclean remained professionally attentive, yet mostly silent, as he listened to his superior’s words. She intermittently paused as she made an effort to gasp for a wheezy breath.
“The damn idiot says he’s got a device and he’s going to exterminate us all. I was gonna work with him before he called me a cockroach…”
Gibbs paused for a breath and Kelly subverted a chuckle.
“You know the drill Maclean; you’re on call tonight. We need your ass over here on the sixty-nine hundred block of Bellflower, ASAP,” she commanded, not asking for his input. After some hacking, she continued, “SWAT wants to go in. The man says he has an antipersonnel mine…”
I bet he has a claymore, Kelly thought sarcastically.
“OK,” he said as he pierced the silence on his end of the phone.
That moment the light turned green and he hurried the long white car on its way.
“Yes, ma’am, tell SWAT I’m there in 10 minutes,” he assessed, looking up from his watch, as he pressed the button to terminate the call.
He turned towards Jen in the passenger seat just when she asked, “They want you to go in again? You spend more time with the Bomb Squad on your days off than you do when you are scheduled,” she estimated dryly, as now, both saw their evening going much differently than they had planned.
“You know I’ll make up for it but I’ve gotta go. Kinda a shame though. You’ve had me all worked up tonight with that dress that you are wearing.”
She began to ever so slightly blush as a thought raced across her mind, transforming a slight grimace into a growing smile.
“Don’t change! I’ll hurry back,” he promised, a slight tingle rising within his body.
She moved her hand over onto the inside of his thigh and looked him in the eye as she professed, “I hope you will,” her eyes adding a suggestive enticement to her comment.
Kelly smiled as something caught his eye in the car next to him. A kid had pulled up parallel, right beside him in a loud import and was expressing his desire to race. His flashers were on and his car was doing some stupid lurch forward.
Kelly looked at Jen and asked, “Wanna have some fun?”
She searched his eyes to see if he was serious as she seemed to think about it for a second.
“Aren’t you a little old for that?” she inquired with a condescending tone to her voice. Yet, after she uttered those words, Kelly picked up on something else in the margin. She seemed to be signaling that she didn’t mind some excitement but wouldn’t commit herself verbally to something that her conscience identified with as unbecoming behavior. Kelly just smiled at her. One of his better qualities was that he was always smooth. He looked at her delicate face, one that he knew would never be ruined with too much makeup or an artificial tan, and gave her a slight wink. He sure loved her level of elegance. How had he been able to find a woman like her?
Just then the next light began to turn so both cars hit their brakes to get stopped in time. Kelly rolled down his window and antagonized the kid, “Oh, man! Is that a Honda?” he asked, controlling his amusement as he gave the kid a hard time. The younger driver probably would have rolled up his window if it was electronically powered but it wasn’t so he didn’t. Instead he just looked straight ahead as he turned his hat around backwards and revved his engine. Kelly had cleanly removed his own car’s badges with a heat gun so the kid had no idea the car he was up against was a special edition vehicle.
The match-up wasn’t even close to fair. The light for the opposing traffic turned yellow and the kid continued revving his motor. This is embarra
ssing, the detective began to think to himself. He began to realize that Jen had probably been right. I hope nobody on the department sees this. Half a second before the light switched to green, the kid jumped prematurely off the line. Kelly pressed the gas, additionally to the brake and revved the motor. The 425 horsepower engine with its monster torque curve caused the muscle car chassis to twist ever so slightly right before he released the brakes. Consequently, the all-wheel-drive locked up with the pavement, launching the car like a sling-shot-propelled marble. Kelly was past the small import before his automatic transmission had even come close to shifting to second. By the time it had shifted to third he was letting off of the gas pedal. Kelly, nearly doing a hundred miles an hour then, was only focused on getting Jen home. The other racer knew he had been beaten.
He slowed his vehicle and made a face-saving turn onto a side street as he disappeared into the night. Kelly didn’t look back. No need for that. Had the kid known that he had just raced a cop, he would have thought Kelly to be a complete hypocrite and scoundrel. In reality, Kelly didn’t join the force to write speeding tickets. He became a cop to take down bad guys. In fact, he had made it a point to avoid writing speeding tickets, all together. He had written some warnings but enforcement of the traffic laws was never his forte, hypocrite or not. He quickly continued on the familiar route to his fiancée’s place and dropped Jen off with one more sincere promise of a quick return. Then he accelerated hard, now on his way to the nearby Bellflower Avenue.
***
Chapter 3
Pulling away from the apartment building, Kelly took out a magnetic red and blue strobe light. He plugged it into the cigarette lighter, ran the cord through his window and placed it on top of his car. He enjoyed driving his personal vehicle but driving it at that moment wasn’t really his choice. He had driven several squad cars over his multi-year tenure on the force. The problem wasn’t his driving; it was his luck. Two cars ago, the oil pump stopped while he was on the interstate, responding to a crime scene. The car broke down on the side of Interstate 90 in a cloud of black smoke and professional embarrassment. He even thought the damn car was on fire for a moment. A fellow officer had to retrieve him and his gear so he could complete his run. The circumstances had been annoying for Kelly but understood professionally by his sergeant. After all, the department had issued the car and was responsible for its maintenance. This sure didn’t stop Kelly’s fellow officers from cracking more than a few jokes, though.
“Hey Maclean! Don’t you know you’re supposed to check the oil every 20,000 miles or so?”
“C’mon guys,” Kelly had said reasonably. “I think I just blew a seal or something…”
A quick-witted cop had said, “Maclean! What does your perverted sex life have to do with poor vehicle maintenance?”
On and on the locker room jokes went.
The department was always carrying on about being short on funds and didn’t even have a pool car for him some of the time. What a pain in the ass that was. Then his last car… where to start? He’d only had it three days before a woman rear-ended him as she was surely distracted by some digital device. Nobody was injured but damn if he wasn’t without a patrol car again.
“Hey Maclean! What did you do… slam on your brakes jus’ to get her number, you horn-dog, you?”
The jokes never seemed to end but his quick drive to the crime scene did.
Kelly quickly arrived at the address on Bellflower and donned his protective gear at a near record pace. He knew most bomb runs were bullshit and this one had all the usual indicators. The chances of a wife beater having a claymore mine in downtown Boston was between unlikely and non-existent. Perhaps he’d be surprised, though. Kelly had had tons of training, too. Much of it had been while he was on active duty in the Marines, so he knew most of the various bomb components and styles well. Nevertheless, Kelly was a methodical person as one must be in that line of work involving explosive devices.
Sergeant Gibbs was there squawking and carrying on, wondering where he’d been. More like fifteen minutes! she had commented. He wasn’t sure if she was razzing him or if she was genuinely peeved. She quickly got to the point though, giving him the Intel that he needed to get started.
“Alright, Maclean. Look,” she said in an exaggerated motion as if there were something to physically see.
“This asshole over there claims that he has an explosive device by the front door. SWAT has seen the device through the windows and has verified that there is some type of a wire going from it to a back bedroom where the perp is apparently holed up with a hostage. It is hard to see the device or the wire, in much detail, from the window. If you clear the device as non-operative, SWAT is a go. If not, you know the drill.”
“Ok, sergeant. I’ll run a tube camera under the front door and check it out,” Kelly suggested. “As soon as I know something, you’ll know something,” he added.
Kelly placed the camera in a small bag he was carrying with him and crept toward the door. Officers had already taken cover in positions all around the house and had carefully evacuated the neighboring residents well before Kelly had arrived. There was plenty of random landscape and vegetation around the residence so he was able to hide himself from view as he advanced towards the front door. He knew the call signs so he gave his radio a quick check.
“Tac seven one this is Mike one. How copy, over?”
“Mike one, loud and clear, over.”
“Alright, standby, Tac seven one. Mike one out,” Kelly said, now focused on climbing the steps.
The stairs were wooden, which Kelly knew to always squeak no matter what their age. These steps clearly had many years and a lot of traffic on them. Kelly kept his weight to the outside edges as he climbed. The second stair squeaked but with all of the red and blues flashing and the added commotion outside, he doubted that anybody inside had noticed. He slid down on his stomach as he crossed the threshold onto the porch and retrieved the tube camera from his bag. Powering it on, he carefully slid it under the door. He looked left. He looked right. He repeated the process up and down and had no trouble identifying the location of the device. Positioned in the center of the room was a medium sized can with writing on it. The wire seemed to come from the back so Kelly bent the tip about 150 degrees and slid the camera back over to the device. He realized instantly what type of components he was looking at, but he double-checked just to be sure.
“Tac seven one, this is Mike one,” Kelly whispered.
“Go ahead Mike one,” the Lieutenant said with a slight irritability in his voice.
The annoyance was likely from having to deal with the ongoing goat rodeo on his evening off, when he too had anticipated something different. There were several things that he would prefer to be doing after all of the years spent chasing these types of guys around the block.
“Tac seven one, I’ve identified the device. It’s a sealed can of SPAM with a string tied to the pull top, over”
The seriousness of the hostage situation inside stole the humor of the moment, if there had been any to begin with.
“Roger that Mike one,” Lieutenant Cross said matter-of-factly. “Extract yourself from your position.”
“Copy that Tac seven one. Out.” Kelly said.
Kelly grabbed his gear and ever so silently slithered back to the steps. In his top physical condition, he moved around gracefully. This time he avoided the second step from the bottom altogether. With a wide, cowboy-like stance, he tiptoed down to the landing. As soon as Kelly was back to the mobile command center the Lieutenant gave the order.
“Tac three zero you are clear for entry on my mark.”
“Roger that Tac seven one. On your mark. Out,” a man rapidly said, slightly over-enthusiastically as his adrenaline was beginning to dump.
“Tac four two, you are clear for entry on my mark.”
“Roger that Tac seven one. On your mark. Out,” another, more steady voice replied.
There was a brief pause as the me
n readied their MP5s and stacked up outside the front and back doors. The polymer fixed stocks were brought up to the officers’ shoulders and the Aim Point red-dot optics quickly checked again for functionality. There wasn’t a local force that could compete with the Boston SWAT Team. These guys were not to be messed with. They had trained incessantly for the procedure that would come next. The night was eerily quiet now and the men on the teams were concentrating solely on the mission that lay ahead.
“Mark after one. 3, 2, 1, MARK! Go, go, go!!!”
Both of the doors were breached with heavy entry tools purposed only for jobs like this one. They splintered and shattered like a lucky hit to a piñata on a child’s birthday. Team One quickly made entry from the front and simultaneously the second team entered from the back. The man and his hostage were in the bedroom, wholly unprepared for the momentum and speed of the armed men that descended on them.
Due to the layout of the house, the bedroom had two access points. There was a main door and then a second where access was made through a bathroom. Agents went in both ways and found a red-faced man fiddling with the end of the string as if he himself almost expected it to activate an explosion that would keep his troubles at bay. There was a mostly empty fifth of Jim Beam, lid off and haphazardly tossed on the bed, that had apparently given the man too much courage and entirely too much confidence in his bullshit device. He probably had other drugs in his system but the men on the teams took no time to ponder his chemical profile at that particular moment. Lucky for him, the drunken man had no weapons. He was only armed with his shenanigans and they were coming to an end.
Damn! It had been a good run, though.
“Why don’t one of you pussies fight me one on one?” he’d yelled. “Look at me… I work out!”
He began flexing his flabby bicep skin right before the SWAT team pummeled him.