The Complete Cooper Collection (All 97 Stories)

by Bernico, Bill

  We pulled the squad car up to the booth and got out of the car. The black man came out of the phone booth and just started casually walking away. Phil hollered at him to stop and said that he wanted to talk to him, but the man just kept walking away. Phil ran up to him from behind and grabbed him by the arm and spun him around.

  “You deaf or what?” Phil said. “Didn’t you hear me yell for you to stop?”

  The man spun around, pulled a .357 magnum from his belt and shot Phil point blank in the stomach and then started running across the street through some yards. I pulled my service revolver out and took some shots at him, but missed. He kept running. I yelled into my radio for an ambulance and stayed by Phil’s side until they arrived.

  After our backup had the names of the patrons and their statements, they joined me in the search for the three gunmen. They pulled their cruiser up to the curb a block away from ours and began searching on foot, between the houses with their flashlights. They saw the man come running their way and drew their weapons. As they did, the gunman turned and shot at them, hitting one of the officers in his lower leg, shattering the bone. He went down in a pile and called out to his partner to keep after the man. His partner wasn’t able to get a shot off and lost the gunman in the dark, between some houses.

  I ran to where I heard the shot come from and saw the officer on the ground. I grabbed my radio and called in for an ambulance and another backup to be dispatched to the scene. By now the downed patrolman’s partner had returned and stayed with the wounded cop while I hurried back to my cruiser for the shotgun we kept locked in the front seat area.

  I ran with the shotgun to the last place the assailant had been seen and continued my search. I got behind a very small tree that was there as the gunman turned from the alley and came running between the houses right at me.

  I had the shotgun raised and pointed at the man and ordered him to halt and drop his weapon. He turned and took two quick shots at me. One bullet hit the tree right where my head was and the other bullet hit the tree where my abdomen was. I stepped out and returned fire, hitting the gunman in the hip. He went down but immediately tried to get back up, all the while aiming his gun at me. I shot a second time and killed him. I hurried over to where he’d fallen and kicked his gun away. Bending down, I felt his neck artery for a pulse and wasn’t surprised when I didn’t find one.

  If I hadn’t been behind the tree, I would have been the third cop shot that night. Little as it was, that tree saved my life.

  Phil was rushed to the hospital and had emergency surgery done on his stomach. The bullet had passed entirely through him, hit some vital organs, and had exited his back one half inch from his spine. Had it hit his spine and blown it out he would have died, but luck was on his side that night.

  When Phil came back to work, he kept complaining of sharp pains in his abdominal area. His doctor kept telling him that this was his imagination, that it was just psychological and that everything was fine. But Phil kept suffering with the pain nonetheless.

  He finally decided to go to another doctor and one of the first things the second doctor did was perform exploratory surgery on him. When they opened Phil’s abdomen, they found the source of his pain. During the first operation, they had used stainless steel staples to close up the wounds inside his stomach. Eventually these staples had opened up and all of the sharp points were sticking out in different directions, causing his pain.

  They removed all the staples, patched him up and made him rest in the hospital for a few days before releasing him. When he came back to work the following week, he had a handful of staples. He showed them to me.

  “This is what the so-called professionals told me was all in my head,” Phil explained. “Well this,” he said patting his stomach, “is NOT my head.”

  Phil was very close to death for a long time but he did survive. He was off the job for quite a while before he came back. When he did return, he spent the next eighteen months as the desk sergeant. Phil was never again assigned to street patrol and after another six months on the desk, Phil put in for disability retirement.

  Once again I was riding in the patrol car alone until they could assign me another partner. I felt a little ill at ease being alone after the last couple incidents, but I had a job to do. One evening I got a call from dispatch.

  “Car nine, see the man. Sixty-five twenty-one Franklin Avenue. Domestic disturbance. Code two.”

  “Car nine, copy that,” I said, hurrying to that address.

  I pulled up to the curb and got out, looking over the property before proceeding. As I approached the porch, I looked through the open door and saw a young man there who had a rifle aimed at his mother’s head. She was sitting in the living room chair, a terrified look on her face.

  I’d only gotten one step up on the porch when the gunman yelled out to me. “Either you take your gun out and throw it in the house to me or I’ll shoot her in the head.”

  Policy forbids officers giving up their guns, but the people who wrote the policies weren’t here—I was. I didn’t see any other way to handle the situation, so I took my .38 service revolver out and threw it into the house. It clunked on the floor and stopped at the gunman’s feet. He yelled at me to come in the house and I did as I was told. Once inside, I looked the room over and surveyed the situation, looking for an opening to make a move on the gunman.

  The gunman bent and picked up my revolver and then laid the rifle on another chair. He turned and pointed my gun at me and gestured with it toward the front door.

  “Back to your car,” he said. “Now. Move it.”

  I led the way back down the porch and to my cruiser. We stopped just short of it and the gunman pointed at me again with the revolver.

  “You drive,” he said, making sure I was behind the wheel before he slid in behind me on the driver’s side.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Just shut up and drive,” he said. “I’ll tell you where to turn.”

  I pulled away from the curb, driving as carefully as I could. This guy, obviously drunk, had my .38 and I don’t mind telling you that I was scared. I was a very good target shooter and had had my sears filed down so that the revolver had a hair-trigger pull. It didn’t take much pressure at all to fire it and this guy had the gun stuck right in the back of my head.

  I was trying to drive the car without jerking and I was very careful when applying the brakes. This guy had cocked the weapon and I knew it wouldn’t take much to decorate the windshield with my brains.

  “Turn left here,” the gunman said. “Pull up in front.”

  I recognized the bar. It was Freddie’s, the same place Ronnie had been shot while on motorcycle patrol. I slowed to a smooth, even stop and killed the engine.

  “Get out,” the man said. “Nice and easy. No sudden moves. I’m right behind you.”

  Once inside he spotted Freddie behind the bar and ordered him over to where we stood.

  “Get me a six-pack of beer,” he demanded, pointing at Freddie with my gun.

  Freddie, whom I had known for years, was a former Marine. He went to the cooler and got a six-pack of beer and he came up to the man with the gun and held the six-pack out to him. When the gunman reached for it, Freddie jumped him. The six-pack dropped to the hard wooden floor and two cans separated themselves from the six-pack. They were punctured in the fall, spraying beer in a circular pattern as the cans spun around.

  Freddie grabbed the man’s arm and wrestled the gun out of it. It fell to the floor and discharged into the baseboard near our feet. It had just missed us both. Freddie got him down on the floor and beat the piss out of him. I was in no hurry to stop him and looked away for a few seconds. When I figured the gunman had had enough lumps, I turned around again and tapped Freddie on the shoulder.

  “That should do it, Freddie,” I said, patting him on his shoulder. “He won’t be getting up again.”

  Word of our encounter with the drunken gunman reached the station and f
rom that day on, Freddie stayed in good standing with all of the officers. Freddie’s minor infractions were ignored from that day on.

  At one point we were plagued with a lot of hold ups in town, mainly gas stations. In practically all of the cases, the hold up man walked into the place and had a green bath towel wrapped around his head and face as a mask. The newspapers nicknamed him the “Green Towel Bandit.”

  He had pulled quite a few jobs and we weren’t able to apprehend him or get a lead on him. But one night, one of the local gas stations was robbed and the next day when it came out on the news, a citizen called and stated that they had come by that station shortly before the time it was held up and they noticed that a car that kept driving around the block and past the station. They said it drove slowly and it appeared that the driver was looking at the man behind the counter. The caller said that they wrote down the license number of the vehicle.

  My new partner, Eddie Corbin and I were assigned to check this out. We got a DMV check on the plate and found out it was owned by a local body shop dealer. Once at the body shop, we inquired about the car. The owner said it was a loaner that he had loaned out to one of his customers. The driver had brought his car in for extensive repairs so we were able to get his name and address. The guy we were looking for was one Ivan Dorsey, who lived in the neighborhood.

  We went to Dorsey’s address and knocked on the door. The door opened and a young man appeared.

  “Are you the man who’s driving the loaner vehicle from the body shop?” I asked.

  The man looked puzzled. “No, sir.”

  I looked up at the house number over the door, then down at my notes and then back at the man. I waited.

  “Oh, I see,” the man said. “You must be looking for Ivan.”

  “Ivan?” I said. “Who’s Ivan?”

  “Ivan Dorsey, the man said. “He lives here too, but he’s not here right now.”

  “Can I see some identification?” I said.

  The man pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and opened it, showing me his license.

  “Would you take it out of the wallet, please,” I said.

  He took it out of the cellophane window and handed it to me. “You’re Gilbert Crane?”

  “Yes, sir,” he said.

  I checked the address on his license and it matched the house number. I handed him back his license, thanked him and started to leave. We didn’t want to tell him what this was about or to alert him in any way. We were just going to leave and keep the place under surveillance, but before we were even off the porch he called out to us.

  “Excuse me,” he said, looking both ways up and down the street. “Would you come in, I’d like to talk to you.”

  Once inside the man felt a little more comfortable about opening up to us.

  “I want to tell you something about Dorsey, the guy you’re looking for,” he said. “He’s strange and he’s dangerous.”

  “What makes you say that,” I asked, reaching for my notebook.

  “Well, I’ve had some personal items stolen,” Crane said.

  “Personal items?” Eddie said.

  “Yeah,” Crane said. “Like my wallet, for one. When I asked him about it, he said he didn’t have it.”

  “So what makes you think it was Dorsey who took it?” Eddie said.

  “Well,” Crane said, “when he was gone, I checked his bedroom and found my wallet in his drawer. When I confronted him about it, I’ll tell ya, he threatened me. I was afraid of him. I thought he was going to kill me. Isn’t there anything you guys could do about getting my stuff back?”

  Eddie and I glanced at each other with a knowing look. This was an opportunity to be able to search Dorsey’s room, although we didn’t have a search warrant. But since the man asking for our help also lived at this residence, we knew it couldn’t hurt to check the room, but we didn’t want to take any chances with Sergeant Hollister.

  I told Crane, “Look, we’ll go in and look for your things if you can keep this just between us. It can’t go any further, understood?”

  Crane agreed and we went into Dorsey’s bedroom and started poking around. We searched the room and went through the drawers and every place else we could think of. We did find some of Crane’s possessions in the drawers and we found the wallet he talked about. We took these things and returned them to Crane.

  Eddie went into the closet and checked the shelf. On the shelf there was a small, thin, rolled up cot mattress. He reached into the end of the mattress and pulled out a large glass jar that was stuffed full with paper money.

  Eddie reached up behind the mattress and pulled down a rifle that was in a case. He pulled it out and noted that it was similar to the one that was described as having been used by the holdup man. Eddie put the rifle back where it was and returned the money to the inside of the cot mattress. We didn’t say anything about those objects to Crane.

  We returned to the living room and found Crane still standing where we’d left him. He was looking out the front window nervously.

  “What time does Dorsey usually get home?” I said.

  Crane checked his watch. “Any time now. I’d thought he’d have been here by this time. He usually pulls in the back yard and comes in the back door.”

  Eddie and I instructed Crane to sit quietly in the living room while we waited in the kitchen for Dorsey to get home.

  Within three minutes we heard the sound of a car pulling to a stop behind the house. When Dorsey came into the kitchen, we were waiting for him. Eddie drew his service revolver and pointed it at Dorsey.

  “Just freeze right there, Dorsey,” Eddie told him.

  Dorsey didn’t move a muscle. I grabbed him and turned him up against the wall and put his handcuffs on behind him.

  “What is this,” Dorsey said indignantly. “You got no right to come into my house and…”

  “Can it,” I said. “You’re under arrest.”

  “For what?” Dorsey said.

  “How’s robbery for starters?” I said.

  He was a pretty cocky guy, and when we got him out to the squad car, he didn’t want to get in, so I forcibly put him in and was a little rough in handling him. I did this on purpose because Eddie and I had nearly perfected the good cop/bad cop method. This was where one officer treats the suspect a little rough, talks a little rough to him and then after awhile the other officer will talk very nice to him and soft soap him and win him over. It didn’t take much for the so-called good cop to get the suspect talking to him and to eventually get a confession.

  That’s what happened in this instance. We got him down to the detective bureau and he wouldn’t talk to us at all. I was still talking pretty rough to him when Eddie entered the room and told me to leave, that he was going to handle it.

  “Ah, he’s just a tough guy, don’t pay any attention to him,” Eddie told Dorsey. “It’s just you and me now.” Eddie reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He shook the pack until one cigarette popped up. He held the pack out toward Dorsey. “Smoke?”

  Dorsey raised both of his handcuffed hands and took the cigarette.

  “Here,” Eddie said, reaching for his handcuff key. “Let me get those off.”

  Eddie sat across from Dorsey and relaxed. Dorsey seemed to relax a bit as well. Eddie gestured at Dorsey with his chin. “So what was the reason for all those holdups?”

  Dorsey sat there, defiant and silent.

  Eddie tried another approach. “Look Ivan, we’ve got you cold for at least three of those gas station robberies. We don’t need your confession to put you away. You are going away for the robberies. If you co-operate I’ll mark it down that way and you might be able to get a lesser sentence. Whatever you tell me can only help your situation. Come on.”

  Dorsey sighed. “You saw my car at the body shop.”

  Eddie nodded. “Quite a mess you made there,” he said.

  “Yeah, well that kind of body work don’t come cheap,” Dorsey said. “Five h
undred and some change. Now just where am I gonna come up with that kind of money?”

  “All right,” Eddie said. “So you ran up a bill. Other people manage to pay their bills without resorting to robbery.”

  “I ain’t got no job right now,” Dorsey said. “I’ve been outta work for six months now and my options were running out.”

  “Okay, so you ran into hard times,” Eddie said. “It happens. But tell me, I spoke to the kid who works at the station over on Fullerton and he said that you came in with the towel over your face and had the rifle aimed at him. He said you made him go into the workshop bay area and lie down on the floor. According to the kid, you told him something like, ‘I’m going to leave, but I’m going to check on you and if you get up off the floor, I’ll kill ya,’ and then you’d leave.”

  “Well,” Dorsey said, “ya just can’t run out of the place and leave him laying there. He’d call the cops for sure.”

  Eddie jotted a few notes down in his notebook and then looked back over at Dorsey, who was casually blowing smoke rings into the air.

  “The kid said that he was laying there and that he had seen you leave out of the front door of the station and head south and disappear around the corner,” Eddie said.

  “He’s right, you know,” Dorsey said, still blowing smoke.

  Eddie continued with his summary. “So he laid there for awhile and then he raised his head up and turned around to look at the front of the station to see if he could see anything.”

  “Yep, he did,” Dorsey said.

  “And he saw you on the north end of the station looking in at him through the overhead glass doors in the bay area,” Eddie said. “The kid said that you had actually walked all the way around the building and had come back to the station and looked in to see if he was still laying there.”