Hero To Zero 2nd edition

by Fortier, Zach

  Roy’s trial took some time, and he was in jail for about sixteen months before he was actually convicted and sent to prison for the rapes. Most sexual offenders find jail not a lot of fun. The other inmates don’t like sexual offenders, and neither do the correctional officers. But Roy had a different experience from most.

  One night Randi was assigned to work the POD that housed the high-risk inmates. She relished the position she had over these men. They were dangerous because of the crimes they had committed, and yet here she was, a woman, in charge of them, watching over them and making them toe the line and do exactly as she demanded.

  When Ray Calhoon arrived on the POD, he refused to show her any respect. He had had issues with women before the rapes, and he wasn’t about to be told what to do by a female correctional officer. The two had a battle of wills, making a very public display of their instant dislike and hatred of each other.

  Randi would task Ray with shitty chores that he hated to do, and force him to do each of the tasks to her exact requirements. The other inmates stayed out of the way; none of them wanted to experience her wrath. They all had the idea it was better to keep on her good side than piss her off.

  Frequently Randi would come to the floor late at night and get Ray up, handcuffing and putting leg irons on him. She would grab him by the hair and talk shit, taunting him about what a big man he was for raping those women. Did he feel so big now? Probably not. Then Randi would walk him out to do some chore. Ray would return about an hour or so later, silent and humiliated. The other inmates didn’t want to be in his shoes.

  Randi would brag to Chad about how she would bully the inmates, specifically Ray, detailing the menial tasks he would have to perform and how she purposely humiliated him every chance she got. Chad was a little frightened by how aggressive she was in her descriptions, but never voiced his fear to her. Always, after each story she told him, after a long night at work, she would handcuff him to their bed, force him to go down on her, and then they would have intercourse.

  It was always the same, very physical and very aggressive. Chad was in heaven. He would detail each morning tryst to us every night at work.

  One night, Chad’s world came falling down. He came home from work, and there was Randi. She had been relieved of duty at the jail pending an investigation. Chad felt sure that she had finally gone too far while intimidating one of the inmates. He was proud of how scrappy she was, and while she might be punished or reprimanded, he felt sure that she wouldn’t lose her job.

  Randi was not so sure. She started to detail the events that had happened that night. Randi had been removing Roy Calhoon from the POD of high-risk offenders on a regular basis, and she would usually describe to Chad most of what would happen—but not all of it. What she had not described she now went into in great detail, while she glared into his eyes defiantly.

  Unashamed, she told Chad how she would force Ray to do some tasks, and then take him to a large utility closet. There, she would strip off his pants and force him to have sex with her. She would lock the closet and strip off her uniform, forcing Ray to fuck her. She said she wanted him to know what it felt like to be powerless and to be forced into sex by a stronger, more physically dominant person—in this case, a female.

  Chad was sick to his stomach. He knew that Randi was aggressive sexually, but he never imagined she would fuck someone else while they were together, much less a violent rapist and an inmate. He was devastated. Then she dropped the real bomb on him.

  Still glaring at him, she started to recall each morning after work. Smiling, she said, “You had to know this was going on. Each morning I would come home and tell you about how I humiliated him. You would laugh and think it was funny, remember? Then I would handcuff you to our bed with your own handcuffs and force you to clean his cum off of me.”

  Chad lost his mind. He went into the bathroom of their apartment and threw up. All those instances he had bragged about to the guys at work suddenly now became a nightmare. He had had no idea what had been going on while they had been living together. Randi had secretly been humiliating both him and the inmate.

  Chad’s world came crashing down. He moved out of the apartment that day and hoped that no one would find out what Randi had done to him. Unfortunately for Chad, we all knew what had happened, and why, within 24 hours of Randi being told to go home from work. Apparently, Roy was one of several inmates she was forcing to have sex with her. One of the other guys became jealous of her and Roy Calhoon, and turned her in to the other correctional officers.

  Randi lost her job in the jail, and the two deputies ended their relationship instantly. Randi was never criminally charged, and quietly disappeared. We never mentioned Randi’s name to Chad again, each of us hoping when we went home that nothing like this would ever happen to us.

  Chad eventually dated again and reclaimed his shattered life. He never ever bragged again about his girlfriend and their sexual exploits, however.

  The reality is that you never really know who you are working with, or sleeping with.

  JOHNNY HEYWOOD WAS A SENIOR in college a year before the terrorist attacks occurred on 9/11/2001. Heywood had already decided to become an officer in the military and had already completed the necessary paperwork well before the incident occurred. When the planes came crashing into the twin towers, Heywood had already decided to become an officer and was headed into a special operations unit.

  Heywood was a gifted athlete, and as mentally tough as any officer in special operations. Heywood was distinguished in several different and classified operations, and when the time came, Heywood elected to get out of the military and become a cop. Heywood landed in our department, and to be honest, at first I wasn’t impressed. Heywood seemed a little too friendly to be a cop, and I was frankly suspicious of the whole call-to-duty-in-Afghanistan story we’d all heard.

  Heywood made friends quickly with the new bunch of cops the chief had recently hired, and quickly fell in with the group, accepted as one of their own. In some ways, I was envious. Social settings and work relationships were never easy for me. To see a new officer be accepted so easily was a wake-up call regarding how alienated I really was.

  The department had a golf team, and Heywood quickly became the star. Heywood attended college on a golf scholarship and had excelled at it. Not only had Heywood been a 4.0 GPA student, but apparently a gifted athlete as well. Could life be that perfect for anyone? Apparently it could for some people.

  Heywood and I rarely worked the same shift, but when we did, I remained as scarce as possible. I would arrive as a backup and keep quiet. Listening to Heywood turn on the charm, working the magic on the people in the inner city, was alarming. We had totally different styles of communication.

  One day we finally ended up on a call that totally went to shit. It was a large brawl of drunken Cinco de Mayo celebrators, none of whom had any family even remotely connected to Mexico. That never mattered, however; any reason to drink was a good reason for most people in the inner city.

  When we arrived, the fight was in full swing. Nothing we could do but wade in and start removing people from the mix. I found a new respect for Heywood that day, Heywood might have been smaller than the rest of us, and on a golf scholarship in college, but damn, Heywood could fight. Jesus, it was amazing. Some people just have a gift for scrapping. I don’t know why or where they develop it, but it seems to come naturally to them, and fighting definitely came naturally to Heywood. The normally smiling and polite Heywood displayed an incredible gift at taking much larger and apparently stronger opponents apart in no time. I admit I was impressed.

  A few months later, Heywood was transferred to narcotics. Undercover work came as naturally to Heywood as golf and fighting. Again, I was envious. I never did understand narcotics. In the gang world, I was almost frighteningly comfortable; in narcotics, I was lost. Heywood took to it immediately. It was another gift.

  Heywood got married a short time after entering the narcotics strike fo
rce. I wasn’t invited to the wedding, but I heard that she had picked a real loser as a husband. I guess even the women in our field have issues, and end up with mates for whom they are the worst possible match. Heywood was no exception to that rule. Regardless, Heywood was joyfully married, and moved into a new home with her tanned and attractive man.

  She had a hard time making ends meet with the new high-maintenance husband, however. He was not exactly a hard worker, and he rarely had a job. He demanded a lot of attention and expected her to buy him expensive gifts, and often. I would guess he was a male version of a trophy wife—but while he may have been pleasing to her eye, he seemed a real loser to everyone else.

  Eventually the trophy husband spent Heywood into so much debt she had to take a leave of absence from the police department. She had to go back to Afghanistan, this time as a civilian contractor.

  Heywood had survived a lot of intense situations in the military in Afghanistan and did not really want to return. However, as a contractor, she could make four times the salary she made at the department. She talked it over with her trophy husband, and he agreed it would be a good idea.

  Heywood filled out the paperwork and took a leave of absence from the department for a year. She set up a bank account in both her and her trophy husband’s names. She had her paychecks deposited directly into the joint account, and her trophy man was supposed to pay off the bills and handle the finances while she was gone.

  A couple of months later, Heywood was back in “the sandbox,” as desert theatres of operation are called. She was conducting opium-interdiction operations for a private security company. She rode in convoys, battling drug lords and destroying large fields of poppies. She lived in B huts, plywood shacks housing six people each. She showered in community showers, wearing sandals to avoid the rampant disease they contained, and never touching the light switches, as many of her fellow contactors had been electrocuted by the faulty wiring in the temporary buildings. Danger was everywhere, and it was not uncommon that she would have to run for cover in the springtime when the Taliban shelled the air base at which she was housed.

  This went on for a little over a year—Heywood working in war-torn Afghanistan and her husband paying off the bills back home. Leaving the trophy husband in charge of the money was the second real mistake that Heywood made in her life. The first was marrying the loser. While Heywood was in the sandbox working her ass off, getting shot at in firefights and gambling with her life against the Russian roulette of IEDs, her trophy husband was hitting the strip clubs, and eventually ended up with his own “trophy” mate.

  She was a beauty with a black hole for a soul. They were made for each other. Heywood’s husband told his soulless mate his situation, and they decided to take Heywood for every penny she could make.

  The day finally arrived for Heywood to come home, and she was stoked. She had survived some really hairy situations: IEDs, firefights, convoy attacks—you name it, it happened. Yet somehow she had survived.

  She told her trophy man when she was going to arrive, the flight, and time. She had missed him terribly; for some reason, she’d never seen him like the rest of us saw him. I guess the old saying that love is blind really must be true. She got off the plane really excited to see him.

  He had told her that he had managed the money well, paid off the debt, and also paid off the mortgage on the house. He also told her that he loved her and missed her desperately. She imagined that in a week or two she would be back on the streets as a cop, debt-free, doing the job she loved, and sleeping with the man she loved.

  After Heywood’s plane landed, she walked up the enclosed tunnel and into the airport. Daydreaming, in her mind she saw her man running toward her and picking her up, happy to see her. Instead, there was a guy holding a sign with her name on it. Smiling, she imagined that a long black limousine would be waiting outside the terminal and that the man holding the sign would escort her to it, taking her to her trophy man, tanned and sexy, who would be waiting inside the car.

  Still smiling, she walked up to the man and said, “Hi! I’m Johnny Heywood.”

  “Hello!” he responded. Then he said, “Sorry about this,” and handed her a summons to appear in court.

  Her trophy husband was divorcing her. This was her welcome home.

  Heywood was shattered. She called some old friends from the police department, and they came to the airport to pick her up. When she arrived home, the house was empty. There was nothing there—no furniture, no dishes; even the appliances were gone.

  It was only going to get worse for Heywood. She immediately went to the bank to close the joint account she’d held with her trophy man. When she arrived, she found the account was empty—it literally had a ZERO balance.

  Not only was Heywood broke and her house empty, her trophy man had not paid the mortgage for several months, and their home was in foreclosure.

  She went back to work at the police department. Everyone welcomed her back with smiles and hugs, but the welcome was short-lived. Heywood was incredibly tough, but this was just too much. The reality hit her hard, and she started to drink heavily, trying to cope. Her drinking quickly got out of control, and she was picked up for DUI just one month after she returned to work. A DUI is a career-ending charge for a cop.

  Heywood not only lost her home and trophy husband, she lost her job—quickly traveling the bumpy road from hero to zero.

  ALAN PREVOST WAS A COUPLE of years older than I was, and was hired at the city about a year before I was, as well. In the department, Prevost was known as a workaholic. He made it clear to every sergeant and shift supervisor that he was available for overtime shifts, at any time, day or night—it didn’t matter.

  Prevost lived for the almighty dollar. He was a great example of a cop who was addicted to the job and its salary. He chased overtime with such a vengeance that it became questionable whether it was safe for sergeants to use him to fill their shift openings. For example, in one 72-hour period, he worked 68 hours. Eventually they had to rein him in, because the city had an issue with the number of hours that he was on the job.

  Perhaps I should really say that he was on the clock 68 hours. That would be more accurate. Prevost had a habit of cat-napping and working in areas that would allow him the opportunity to catch a few zzz’s, as he put it, when the calls slowed down. The brass loved his supposed work ethic. The rest of us knew that he might be on the clock, but he wasn’t working. He was slow to respond to calls, and did the bare minimum necessary to complete the call. There was no checking of details, no talking to suspects, and no looking into clues. He would arrive, record the facts and write the report, catch a nap, and then clear off to the next call. He saw no problem with this at all.

  Alan was as committed to working part-time jobs as he was to working hours at the department. He would work security at rare coin and gem shows, movie set security, retail security, concerts. Any job you can imagine that would require a cop to be present, he would be working.

  He was a force in motion when it came to “working.” No one in the department worked more hours on the clock and accomplished less. He made an amazing amount of money sleeping in closets, corners, and dark parking lots, almost never going home except to shower and say hi to his kids, and then set back out in the quest for the almighty dollar.

  He was able to “work” his way into a variety of units. He worked bike patrol, domestic violence crimes, gang task force, and even made it into the Community-Oriented Policing (COPs) unit. He never seemed to close any calls in any of the units by arrest, unless they fell into his lap and an arrest was impossible to avoid. The department didn’t track actual convictions, so I have no idea what his conviction rate was, but I can imagine it was less-than-stellar.

  Here is an example of his amazing work ethic: One night while working his usual overtime shifts, Prevost was called to a report of two men fighting on the west side of the city. He normally didn’t work that area. The calmer, southeast side was his favorite
area to work—fewer calls there, more naps. Tonight, though, he had to venture out and actually hit the west side. It was not exactly lily-white on the west side, and people often broke into fistfights and gang fights. Homicides weren’t that infrequent there. A report came in that the two men were fighting, and had really been going at it for some time.

  People on the west side didn’t call police for a fight that amounted to a couple of punches; they only called to prevent someone from being killed, and even that was not a sure thing. Often we would get no reports from anyone that a fight had even occurred. The only way we knew that anything had happened at all was when people started showing up in the local emergency rooms with knife wounds or gunshot wounds. A car would pull up, drop off the bodies and drive away. Seriously, that was the way it was done. Dump the injured bodies and go.

  Anyway, Prevost arrived on the west side and located the two combatants. They were on the verge of being homeless, and life had become brutally serious for each of them in the last couple of months. Each was poor, hungry, and literally fighting for survival. No one ever found out what they had been fighting about. They were both bloodied, and had beaten the hell out of each other.

  Prevost did the usual bare minimum, asking them if they were okay. Did they need medical attention? Did anyone want to press charges? Because if they did, he would have to take them both to jail.

  That was his standard approach: find a way to make the incident go away as quickly as possible. The less paperwork, the better—and back to the power nap.

  The two men could not afford medical care, and neither wanted to be arrested. Each quickly agreed to leave the area immediately and go his own separate ways—no harm, no foul.

  Prevost was happy with that solution, and minimized the seriousness of the fight. He claimed on the radio that neither combatant was seriously injured and that their disagreements had all been worked out. He was clear from the call.