by Frank Zafiro
“Leslie?”
No answer.
“Leslie? Don’t make me come out there.”
“What?” she replied sullenly.
“Are you cool? Can you drive?”
“I can drive.”
Mace opened the bottom drawer of his dresser and withdrew a long black wig and a .38 revolver. Wordlessly, Andrea watched him, a dull stare in her eyes. Mace suddenly felt a stab of pity for her. He sat down beside her on the bed, the gun and wig in his lip.
“Be back soon, baby.” He caressed her shoulder and tried to smile. “Be back with some medicine for what ails ya.”
Andrea smiled back, small and child-like.
God, she’d been such a beautiful woman. His baby. And now...just a shell. A junkie shell.
Mace called for Leslie and they left.
Tuesday, August 16th
2118 hours
Television. Thomas Chisolm sighed. The world’s most worthless invention.
Fifty-seven cable channels, including movie channels, and yet he sat staring at the guide channel because he liked the music they were playing. Always a classic rock fan, before it was considered classic, Chisolm had slowly drifted towards country music over the past several years.
He drank a cold bottle of Coors. On his workdays, he rarely touched a drop of alcohol, but his night off, he sometimes had a few. Tonight, he’d made a considerable dent in the beer left over from the last shift party three weeks ago. He managed to achieve a steady buzz over the last couple of hours and now he’d hit his stride. The proper rate of consumption would keep him at this level of intoxication without advancing or retreating for several more hours.
Goddamn Hart, Chisolm grated inwardly. He raised his bottle in mock tribute. “Here’s to you, Lieutenant Alan Hart. Screw you, you pencil-necked prick.” He took a hearty swig of the cold-filtered brew. Good stuff.
Hell, Hart wouldn’t have lasted a week in Vietnam. Never would’ve made it through Special Forces training, the pansy. Probably’d gone crying home to his mommy inside of three days. Even if by some miracle, he’d made it through the training, once in the bush, a prick like that would have gotten fragged by his own men inside of a week.
Vietnam. Chisolm sipped his Coors and shook his head. How alive he’d been then. And how dead.
“The police department has some unrealistic expectations on how to deal with crime,” he lectured the television. “We are too nice. Criminals don’t respect that. They view it as weakness.”
Chisolm twirled the bottle, watching it turn and wobble on the coffee table. “As police officers, we’re expected to clean up crime. But our hands are tied.” He shook his head. “In ‘Nam, our company had free rein to do whatever it took to flush the Viet Cong out of their sector. My commanding officer took the hard line. If we even suspected someone of so much as lighting a cigarette for the VC, it was lights out for that poor sonofabitch.”
He grinned.
Captain Mack Greene. Now that had been a commanding officer. Hart looked like a little boy sucking his thumb next to Captain Greene. About the only River City officer that came close to Greene on the department was Lieutenant Robert Saylor, Chisolm’s lieutenant on graveyard.
He wondered briefly if he should talk to Saylor about Hart, then dismissed the idea. Hart oversaw the FTO program. No use going to Saylor. Besides, Chisolm wasn’t about to whine to his superiors about something as inconsequential as Alan Hart.
“Fuck,” Chisolm whispered for no specific reason, repeating his father’s favorite curse phrase. “Fuck a duck and make it cluck.”
He glanced at the letter on his kitchen counter, where it had sat for a month. The ragged edges where he’d torn open the envelope stared back at him.
The letter came from his sister in Portland. She’d written to tell him that Sylvia had gotten married. She wondered if he had known.
He hadn’t.
Chisolm sighed heavily. He often wished he hadn’t blown things with Sylvia, but it wasn’t until that letter arrived that he realized how deeply those wishes went.
Well, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. He smiled bitterly. And if worms had .45’s, birds wouldn’t fuck with them.
After receiving the letter, he’d promptly gone to Duke’s, picked up a twenty-five-year-old cop groupie, brought her home and nailed her. Afterward, he found himself wondering if his pulse had even quickened during the entire affair.
Sylvia had dignity, and with his reaction to her recent marriage, he’d proven he had none.
Chisolm finished the bottle and strode to the fridge to get another. The bottle hissed slightly as he twisted the top off. She got married. So what? She left River City two years ago. What did he want her to do? Brood forever, like him?
Besides, she wasn’t the only ghost threatening to visit him tonight.
The television guide channel suddenly annoyed him. He grabbed the remote and flicked the off button.
“You know,” he said to the small pinpoint of light on the TV screen, “the thing that bothers me the most about losing the FTO gig is that I am good for those kids. They come out of the Academy and can barely tell the difference between a bad guy and a magpie. I teach them what they need to survive.”
He took a hard swig of the beer, his eyes fixed on the fading light on the screen. “Other FTO’s teach them other things,” he conceded, jabbing his index finger at the TV to stress each word. “But I concentrate on showing them how to stay alive. How to be a warrior in peace-time.”
Just like in ‘Nam, he realized. Try to jam in enough knowledge into in the short training time so that they learn how to stay alive. That way, their deaths aren’t on your conscience.
But Thomas Chisolm housed a vast cemetery in his conscience and all the beer in the fridge wasn’t going to wash it away.
Wednesday, August 16th
Graveyard Shift
0126 hours
The River City Police Department had a successful Reserve Officer program. Reserve Officers were subjected to the same hiring process as commissioned officers and then attended a condensed version of the Police Academy. They always rode with a commissioned officer, except for a handful that graduated to a higher rank and rode in two-man reserve cars. All of them were volunteers.
Some officers resented the reserves, claiming their presence took the place of hiring another commissioned officer. Stefan Kopriva disagreed. He saw the reserves as a supplement, not a replacement.
Besides, Kopriva knew that the same people who complained about the reserves taking away jobs would grouse even louder if they had to field some of the calls reserves often took. Reserves fielded a steady diet of cold burglary reports, bicycle thefts, and found property calls, all things most cops considered boring.
The reserve officer in Kopriva’s car was a green one, just three rides out of the Academy. Kopriva didn’t mind. The kid seemed bright and eager to learn. Kopriva had discovered in his sensei’s karate dojo that it gave him satisfaction to show someone a skill and then see that person ‘get it.’ Police work, sometimes a very play-it-by-ear profession with a lot of gray area, was tricky to actually teach someone and thus, even more gratifying when someone caught on.
Kopriva let the reserve, Ken Travis, drive for the first half of the shift until oh-one-hundred. Then they switched. Not surprisingly, none of the officers in his previous three rides had allowed him to drive.
“Were they from the sit down and shut up school of thought?” he asked.
Travis nodded. “Pretty much. But you learn a lot from watching.”
“Not as much as from doing,” Kopriva said.
Ten minutes later, Kopriva spotted a car sneaking down Regal, a side street with a lot of offsetting intersections. This allowed drivers to treat it like an arterial. The street was frequented by drivers without a valid license, a practice so common that Kopriva and his sector-mates had dubbed any car on Regal after midnight in violation of the “felony Regal law” and therefore fair game.
Kopriva whipped the cruiser around with a u-turn and swooped in behind the car, a ‘71 or ’72 Monte Carlo. “Find the stop,” he instructed Travis. He’d already noticed the driver’s side headlight was burned out, an Easter Egg of a stop. The vehicle sped along thirty miles per hour, five over the limit. And to make things even easier, the passenger-side taillight was broken and showing white light to the rear.
Travis peered closely at the car for a block. In that time, the vehicle slowed to twenty-three miles per hour.
“How fast is he going?” Travis asked him.
“Twenty-three, twenty-four now.”
He stared at the car for another long moment, then saw it. “Broken tail-light?”
“Are you asking me or telling me?” Kopriva asked good-naturedly.
“Telling.”
“Do we stop them?”
Travis didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”
Kopriva picked up the microphone. Before notifying radio, he told Travis, “There’s two of them. If one runs, stay with the car. If both run, you take the passenger. Okay?”
Travis nodded, his eyes dancing with excitement.
Kopriva recited the license plate and their location to radio and activated his overhead lights. The car immediately pulled to the side while Kopriva put his spotlight and takedown lights on the vehicle. He slammed the car into park and still managed to beat Travis out of the car.
Both occupants remained seated, neither one seat-belted. Kopriva approached cautiously, lighting up the back seat with his heavy maglight and then searching for the driver’s hands. They were on the wheel. The passenger’s hands rested on his lap.
The driver was a white male in his mid-twenties with long, greasy hair and a scraggly growth of beard. “Is there a problem, officer?” asked with careful politeness.
This is going to be a good stop.
“You have several equipment defects, sir,” Kopriva told him. “Your headlight is out and one tail-light is broken.”
“They are?” The driver acted surprised.
Kopriva nodded. “You were also traveling at thirty miles per hour. The speed limit here is twenty-five.”
“I thought it was thirty.”
“It’s twenty-five. May I see your driver’s license, registration and proof of insurance?”
“Yes, sir.” The driver began to dig through a pile of papers above the visor.
Kopriva motioned over the top of the car to Travis, who stood beside the passenger window. “Get his I.D.”
Travis nodded and spoke to the passenger.
The driver nervously handed Kopriva an insurance card that had expired four months ago, along with the registration. The registered owner was Pete Maxwell.
“Are you Pete?”
The driver shook his head. “No. Pete’s my friend. He loaned me the car.” He handed Kopriva his license.
Kopriva looked at it. Right away, he noticed it was a state identification card, not a driver’s license. While a perfectly legal form of identification, even issued by Department of Licensing, it was not a license. And it usually meant that the driver’s status was suspended.
“Well, Mr...” Kopriva glanced down at the card. “Mr. Rousse. This isn’t a license. Do you have a license?”
Rousse shook his head. “It’s suspended,” he said ruefully.
“And Mr. Maxwell’s insurance has lapsed.”
Rousse nodded glumly.
“Okay, wait here. I’ll be back in a minute.” Kopriva glanced at Travis. “Got his I.D.?”
Travis shook his head. “He won’t give it to me.”
Oh really? Kopriva peered at the passenger through the driver’s window. “What’s your name?”
The thin passenger had jet-black hair, shaved on the sides and long in the back. His beard stubble was thick. He stared straight ahead and didn’t respond to Kopriva’s question.
“I said, what’s your name, passenger!” Kopriva put an edge in his voice.
The man turned. “Why do I have to tell you?”
He has a warrant.
“Are you wearing a seat-belt?” Kopriva asked.
“No. Well, I was. I took it off when we stopped.”
Kopriva shook his head. “No, you didn’t. You weren’t wearing one. That’s a traffic infraction. You are now required to identify yourself. If you don’t, I’ll arrest you for Refusal To Cooperate. Now what’s your name?”
The passenger considered briefly, then said, “I’m Dennis Maxwell.”
Travis wrote it in his pocket notebook.
“Middle initial?” Kopriva asked.
“G.”
“Date of birth?”
“Uh, ten…seventeen, sixty-three. I mean, sixty-two.” He gave a nervous grin. “Listen, I’m not trying to be a jerk. I’ve just been hassled by cops in the past.”
“I’m not hassling you,” Kopriva stated coldly. “I’m doing my job.”
Dennis nodded. “Yeah, all right. Sorry.”
“No problem,” Kopriva said. As he walked back to the car, he muttered, “You lying, lying, lying bag of crap.”
Back in the car, Kopriva switched to the data channel so Travis could run both names. “Get the listed physical description on Maxwell. And have them run the registered owner, too.”
The data channel was busy and the dispatcher took forever to respond with their requested information. Kopriva wondered when they would ever get the computers in the patrol car. Los Angeles cops had been using them for the better part of a decade.
While they waited for the dispatcher, he quizzed Travis on all the infractions they could write Rousse for. The reserve did well on his answers.
“What about the passenger?” Kopriva asked him.
“Kind of a jerk,” Travis said.
“You think he’s telling the truth?”
Travis shrugged. “I suppose. He just doesn’t like the police.”
Kopriva suppressed a smile. Three years ago, he would have thought the same thing. Now he knew better.
Travis had almost finished writing the infractions before radio called out for Baker-123. Kopriva ignored it, giving Travis a chance to answer. The reserve didn’t notice. On the second call, he picked up the mike himself.
“Baker-123, go ahead.”
“Rousse is in locally, extensive record, but no current wants. DOL is suspended for refusing the breath test. Also.”
“Go ahead.”
“Bravo-123.”
Kopriva felt a tickle of frustration. The code was designed to inform the police officer that one of the subjects being checked had a warrant. Calling the unit by the military alphanumeric ensured that if the suspect were in earshot, he would not inadvertently overhear traffic.
“Go ahead, I’m clear for traffic,” he told radio, keeping his tone neutral. The dispatcher should have told him about the warrant first, not in the order he gave the names. But his anger quickly washed away with the satisfaction of having been right.
“It’s for Maxwell, Pete, your registered owner. A misdemeanor drug charge with a $2,030 bond. Pete Maxwell is five-ten, one-fifty, black hair, brown eyes. Also.”
“Have records confirm the warrant. Go ahead your also.”
“Maxwell, Dennis G. in locally, no wants. He’s six-two, two-hundred thirty, blond and blue.”
“Copy, thanks.” Kopriva replaced the mike and turned to Travis, who sat open-mouthed throughout the exchange. “Now, what do we have?”
Travis thought for a moment. “Well, the driver’s suspended, so we write him for that.”
Kopriva nodded. “What else?”
“The registered owner has a warrant.”
Kopriva waited for a long minute, giving Travis a chance to think some more. Travis furrowed his brow, but said nothing.
“Did the passenger have hard I.D.?” Kopriva finally asked.
“No.”
“Is he six-two?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” Travis started to squirm.
Kopriva shrugged. “Maybe,
” he said easily. “Hard to tell when someone is sitting down. Did he look like he weighed two-thirty? Did he have blonde hair?”
“No.” Realization flooded Ken Travis’ face. “He’s not Dennis. He’s Pete.”
Kopriva nodded. “Exactly. He’s probably Pete, the registered owner. He has a warrant, so he decided to play the name game. Only he’s not very good at it. He picked Dennis, probably a brother or a cousin, whose physicals don’t even come close.”
“Not too smart,” Travis observed.
“Hey, these people aren’t rocket scientists. Thank God.”
Travis chuckled.
Kopriva continued, “So now what do we do?”
“Arrest him.”
Kopriva gave a slow half-nod. “Well, yes. But first we get confirmation from records through radio. A records clerk will pull the actual warrant and confirm that it exists and is currently valid. While we’re waiting for that, let’s cut a ticket for Rousse on his suspended driving. Do we know for sure that this passenger is Pete?”
“Not for sure, no.”
“So we play the name game back and we get confirmation. Leave that to me. Then we arrest him. After the arrest, then what?”
“We give Rousse his tickets?”
Kopriva smiled. “We’ll do that first. Travis, don’t be afraid to be wrong. Tell me, don’t ask. It’s okay to make a mistake.”
Travis nodded several times. “Okay. After the arrest, we take him to jail.”
“True, but first we get to do something. What?”
Travis paused, thinking. Then he smiled. “We get to search the car.”
“Why?”
“Search incident to an arrest.” His smile broadened. “If the arrest is made out of a vehicle, officers may search the vehicle.”
“Excellent. Now finish those tickets. I’ll keep an eye on our little misdemeanant.”
Travis wrote quickly, obviously enthused. Kopriva felt the same way. His job was like a puzzle sometimes. Fit in who was who, figure out the truth, the partial truth and the lies. Then make the call.
“Baker-123, warrant is confirmed.”
“Copy. Have records hold it.”
Travis finished the tickets and they stepped out of the patrol car. Kopriva called Rousse back to the car, directing him to stand at the push-bar in the center of the front bumper. He kept the front corner of the vehicle between himself and Rousse.