Hero To Zero 2nd edition

by Fortier, Zach

  He sat and listened till she was done; relieved and exhausted, she thanked him for listening. He gave her his cell phone number and told her to call anytime, day or night, if she needed to talk. They parted ways that day and the hook was set.

  To this day I am really glad she talked to him and not me.

  Reggie took more and more of the beautiful nurse’s burdens on his shoulders. He was going through his own painful divorce, and was busy keeping his kids’ lives together in the daytime. Meanwhile, he helped the emergency room nurse out as much as he could. Eventually she was caught stealing from the emergency room pharmacy, and was put on a probation for addiction. She was exceptional as a nurse, and the hospital administration hoped that she would be able to be salvaged.

  They decided to give her one chance at proving herself worthy of their trust. She had to complete a drug rehab program, and an extended probation period. She had to submit to random drug tests, and couldn’t work as a nurse until she had completed the probation, rehab program, and drug tests. The administration made it painfully clear that one slip, and she was done in the profession. Period.

  She took a considerable cut in pay, her failing marriage ended, and she had to sell her home and car. She had nowhere to go, and in steps Reggie. Like I said, the hook was set; he had no idea of the shit storm he was stepping into.

  The beautiful nurse was playing him like she owned him, which she pretty much did. She did get an apartment in the central city, living next to drug dealers and gang members, calling Reggie every time a gunshot went off in the streets. Reggie eventually moved her into his house after the brief show of her “independence.” Over a period of about a year and a half, they went from separate bedrooms to the same bed, and later they were married.

  Reggie kept her toeing the line, and she eventually did get her job back. She was back in the emergency room, working with her peers and feeling good about herself again. Reggie, too, was proud of the change in her, and the strength she had shown. He felt that he finally had a woman who had enough life experience to understand his life and the things he saw. When he saw that she truly did understand what he was experiencing, it made him feel less isolated and alone when he talked about things that happened at work. Life was good for both of them, and they both felt like they were finally on the right track.

  One day Reggie came home from work, and a few minutes later his new wife also came home. She was talking to him about her day when the warning bells started to chime in the back of his head. As he listened, he picked up on very subtle changes in her pronunciation of more complex words as she spoke.

  He realized she was high as hell. He watched and listened silently as she gradually became worse. The changes were minor, and could have been due to fatigue, but Reggie knew the difference. Once you have been a cop for a while you don’t miss much.

  Sometimes you really do wish you could suppress the “cop radar” and just live in ignorance like the rest of the world. There is nothing like listening to someone you care about lie through her fucking teeth and tell you, “Oh no, honey, I was with my girlfriends,” or “No, I was held over late at work,” when you can see in her eyes that she’s just left her latest man-on-the-side. In Reggie’s case, what his wife’s lies were covering was the fact that she was back to being an addict.

  Reggie had a few faults himself; we all do. Perhaps being too loyal was one. He couldn’t walk away from the beautiful nurse. He had watched over and over on the street as addicts destroyed the lives of the people who loved them. He thought, or perhaps he just hoped, that he could make this be the exception.

  He tried to work with his wife and be there for her. Eventually, though, she convinced him that she couldn’t get through the day without at least some of the pain pills.

  He knew that she would lose her job when she was caught. It was just a matter of time before the emergency room found the discrepancies in the nightly count of each pain pill they issued.

  Reggie decided that if he could buy his wife some time, maybe he could get her sober through intervention. I know that, in hindsight, it seems stupid, but honestly, I cannot fault him for trying.

  Reggie started to buy pain pills on line from Mexico and had them shipped to the U.S. to a post office box he had purchased. He hoped to wean his wife off of the pills slowly and maybe return to the previously happy life that they had made for themselves.

  It did work for a while—until one day the DEA showed up at the police department.

  To give Reggie credit, he didn’t lie about the incident, and did his best to explain his situation. But it didn’t matter. The DEA saw him as a dealer providing an addict with a controlled substance. His career as a cop was over.

  That wouldn’t have been so bad, really. He loved his wife, and he had his kids. A new job and a new beginning can sometimes be good things. His wife, however, was nowhere near as committed to their marriage as he was. She made a deal with prosecutors to testify against him in exchange for lesser charges. She looked out for number one as she always had, and left him speechless in the hallways of the courthouse. Alone, unemployed and now a convicted felon.

  ROY GREY WAS AN OLD-SCHOOL cop. He started on the force in the early 70s and made his way to detective earlier than most cops. He was the epitome of that old saying in the cop world, “You have to have been there to know how to get there.” The big difference in Roy’s case was that he never really left “there.”

  He could be professional in public when he needed to be, wearing a suit and tie, wing tips, and cufflinks. This was a ruse, however. Roy came from the old school, the school that believed confessions needed to be beaten out of a suspect, and that the more difficult the confession was to get, the more brutal the beating needed to be.

  He arrived in the detectives’ unit a few months before a brutal crime occurred in the city. It was the 70s, and LSD was rampant on the streets. A couple of members of the military got a hold of some LSD and got really high. They then went into a local business, and proceeded to torture and rape the employees. They locked the doors and pretty much went to town on the employees and a couple of people who were unlucky enough to have been in the place. After they were done, they left what was remaining of the maimed and tortured people there for the cops to find. The case received national attention. The murders were horrific, and the few survivors were permanently injured.

  I was a child at the time, and I remember that the entire city walked in fear until the suspects were identified and caught. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Roy had a hand in their capture and then their conviction. Years later, when I joined that same police department, the case was still whispered about in the hallways.

  Some cases are like that. They seem to have a life of their own and never die. Every cop has a case that haunts him or her, whether they are closed with an arrest and conviction or not. This case haunted the entire city for years, it was that horrific.

  Fast forward several years, and Roy was out at night. He was not officially on duty but, like most cops, he was never really off duty. He always had his badge and gun, and carried them with him.

  Roy had a habit of picking fights with anyone who caught his eye. He liked to find guys who were a little bit cocky, maybe a bit streetwise—wannabe thugs. He hoped they would mistake his age and professional dress as signs of weakness. He would confront them in an aggressive and condescending tone. When they finally had enough of his abuse and called him on it, he would beat the hell out of them. Then, after he had beaten them into submission, he would let them know that he was a cop, flashing his badge and making sure they knew not to report the incident. He would give the victim a break this time and not arrest him. Lucky break for the guy that he was in a generous mood.

  This went on frequently, and he never was caught. This is what he did for entertainment. Rumors floated around the department, and as people in the city talked to the cops they knew about the “rogue cop” who would deliver beatings and then disappear. For all I know, he could
have been the cop who beat the hell out of Scott Preston when Scott was at the ripe old age of six or seven.

  One night Roy was out prowling, looking for the next cocky thug who needed one of his famous reality checks. He ran into a couple of guys, nineteen or twenty years old, who were in a dark parking lot—“long hairs,” as Roy called the young men at that time. I can see him thinking of them as hippies, which was his frame of reference for a time period that had already passed him by.

  Roy pulled up and confronted the “hippies.” He started a practiced and well-worn speech that always got things warmed up quickly. The sooner the fight began, the better, from Roy’s perspective.

  Tonight would be different, however. Roy started the fight as usual, and things were going along as planned. He was delivering a pretty substantial beating to the guy he had selected when things took a turn for the worse.

  I know this because the guy whom Roy chose to beat up that night was my next-door neighbor’s boyfriend. He was normally a quiet guy. Yes, he definitely had long hair, but unknown to Roy, he was an awesome fighter.

  This guy beat the hell out of Roy. To emphasize the point that he had beat Roy’s ass soundly, he slammed Roy’s head onto the concrete a couple of times. This ended up causing some permanent brain damage to the now-veteran cop. The number one rule on the street is that there is always someone who can beat your ass, no matter how bad you think you are. Roy learned that lesson the hard way after delivering many unwarranted and unnecessary beatings himself.

  Roy could not believe that he had been beaten, and, perhaps to save face, he saw to it that charges were filed against the “long hair.” The courts saw through Roy’s bullshit claims, and even a “long hair” has a right to be heard in court. The courts sided with the “long hair”, and Roy’s complaint was dismissed.

  Roy had a couple of kids whom he parented as brutally and as mercilessly as he patrolled. His children grew up personally experiencing the old saying, “spare the rod, spoil the child.” Roy was determined that his children would not be spoiled, and he never “spared the rod,” to the point of excess. They grew up tough and hard, fighting as often as their angry father.

  I first arrested Roy’s eldest son after I had been with the department for about two years. He was involved in an aggravated assault. He was clearly in the wrong, and when I put him in my car, the first thing out of his mouth was, “Do you know who my dad is? You will severely regret this.” He then he spewed out a train of insults, and spit on my face. It was a pleasure to book him into jail, screaming and obviously terrified. As I left the jail, I watched him screaming into a telephone, “Dad, I’m in jail! Get me the FUCK out of here now!”

  Roy did get him out of jail that night, and from then on, we were enemies. He never said a word to me. He would not go to lunch if I were present, and if I showed up to eat with the other cops and he was there, he would leave. Interesting thing happened, though: several of the veterans patted me on the back and praised me for the arrest.

  They said that Roy had bullied his way around the department long enough, and it was about time someone arrested his fucked-up kids. They said that Roy had protected them from the cops for years. My case was solid, and Roy’s kid was convicted. Roy was livid.

  I watched Roy for a few more years before he finally retired. His brain damage from the fight with my neighbor’s boyfriend was obvious. He had a difficult time writing reports, and a small group of senior patrolmen would always double-check his paperwork, looking for errors before he turned them in.

  I kept an eye out for his kid, as I could tell that he would be a continuing problem in the city. We crossed paths a few times, and it was always memorable. He no longer mentioned his cop father when he was arrested. He would always spit, however. Nice guy.

  Several years later, I saw that Roy’s son had been arrested for murdering his wife. He had learned the lessons of his brutal childhood well. He beat his wife to death in an argument, and the neighbors had called the cops. There would be no calling Roy to get out of jail this time. A few weeks after the arrest, Roy’s son killed himself in jail. He did not want to spend the rest of his life in prison as the son of a cop. His life would have been unpleasant at best.

  To me, Roy is perhaps one of the saddest stories in this book. He was a hero in the 70s, following the arrest and conviction of two nationally known murderers. His brutal life took its toll on his family. I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes for anything.

  “SKIDMARK” WAS THE COP’S NICKNAME; his real name was Skidlaski. Skidmark was what we called him when we thought about him—which wasn’t often. It wasn’t because he smelled bad (which he did); we just had to consider him because he made our jobs more difficult.

  He had zero common sense, and no feel for the street. He was one of those guys who thought he knew more than everyone else, and wouldn’t listen to anyone. My first memory of him is him pulling over a vehicle in a grocery store parking lot so that lots of people could see him. He’d been assigned to my area, so I had to take some calls with him.

  It was Christmas Eve, and it’s an unwritten rule among us cops that Christmas is hands-off: no bullshit tickets, no arrests unless it’s absolutely necessary and only when there’s no other choice. We’d talk about it in briefing, with no objections from the sergeants.

  So Skidmark pulled over this vehicle and started running the occupants. The son of a bitch was digging for warrants—and he’d already violated the rules just by stopping them.

  I drove past to see that he had pulled over this station wagon full of wrapped presents with three scared little kids in the back; as I drove off, Skidmark waved at me as I passed like he was thanking me for checking on him. I left this bullshit scene and listened for the outcome of the stop on the radio: the plates on the station wagon had expired, and the mother was driving on an expired license.

  Skidmark called for a wrecker and impounded the car with the gifts inside; he actually put the kids and the mom on the street on Christmas Eve. He did at least call someone to come pick them up after giving her a ticket. A regular St. Dick he was.

  From that point on, I was done with him. I cancelled him on every call; I wouldn’t work with him. He had a really fucked-up way of seeing the world, which I couldn’t understand and didn’t want to.

  I became one of his most outspoken opponents in the department and on the street. I started to hear from people in the area where we worked about how poorly he treated everyone, and how they really didn’t like him and couldn’t talk to him, which was pretty much unraveling everything the rest of us had worked so damned hard to establish; it was blowing relationships and eroding all the trust that we were trying to build. He was constantly making our jobs harder by being such a horse’s ass. He was a real cheese dick.

  One night, Skidmark had arrested a guy for drinking beer in one of the city parks. He felt like he was cleaning up the area by arresting everyone for anything he could think of, anytime they moved; like I said, he had no feel for the street.

  We overlooked a lot of smaller crimes because we needed the cooperation of the residents of the city to land the bigger fish. Maybe you just mentioned the statute of limitations that would allow us to file the charges any time in the next two to four years, whatever it was; maybe you didn’t mention it at all if you didn’t need to. Inner-city dwellers knew about how the criminal justice system worked as well as we did.

  Skidmark couldn’t grasp this concept, though, and he arrested everyone for even the slightest of violations in order to pump up his stats. In some misguided attempt to break up cliques in the department, management had come up with a shift-bid system in which the highest performers on each squad could pick their shifts for the following year. They called it the golden squad; we called it the golden shower squad. It didn’t work, but it lasted for a long, long time.

  New guys like Skidmark saw this as a way to get better shifts without having to pay their dues on the street like all the rest of us had. He wanted to get off
the graveyard shift as soon as possible; I, on the other hand, loved “graves,” particularly since my latest marriage was coming undone. It allowed me to avoid the wife and spend time with my kids.

  On this particular day, Skidmark had arrested this guy for drinking in the park; he had done so under an obscure ordinance meant to help us keep the parks clear of drunks, not common citizens sharing a few beers while barbecuing.

  The guy Skidmark arrested was pissed off, and Skidmark was talking shit to him as he was taking him to his car, telling the guy what a waste of a human being he was. He handcuffed him, put him in the car, seat-belted him in, and locked the door. He then left to go back to the park to arrest a couple more guys he saw drinking there.

  This was really stupid, not to mention a safety problem, creating real potential for a violent cluster; any cop who’s worked the streets will tell you that. You don’t load up your car with drunks to take to jail just so you can get stats.

  Skidmark arrested another guy and brought him back to his car—only to find it empty, with the passenger door wide open; the first guy had unlocked the car and run off with his handcuffs. The cuffs were your personal property back then. We had to buy them, and of course Skidmark always carried a lot of them.

  He jumped on the radio, screaming for backup because he had an escaped prisoner. I didn’t move; I just listened to the shit storm unfold, and shook my head. Several units looked for the guy for hours, but couldn’t find him. How impressive is that: shaking people down for details on the guy who stole an officer’s cuffs?

  I just stayed out of it. I didn’t want anyone on the street to see me with this dickhead, or associate me with helping him. He finally gave up and took the rest of his catch to jail, then bitched for days about “that piece of shit who stole my cuffs” and how he’d get even. Gave his pitiful little life direction, I guess.

  About a week went by, and I got a call to meet a woman I knew at her home. When I showed up, she was sitting on the front porch with her son and daughter. She said that she wanted me to hear what her son had to say.