So last night, Christmas Eve, I’m out doing my thing.

Making traffic stops and laughing with people who are either 1) anxious to get home to see family, or 2) already hellaciously ready to get away from family because…you know…holidays.

So I make a stop and, like always, ask where the lady is heading and why’s she driving so fast.

“Going to church.”  She pointed.  “Right over there.”

“Ah.”

“Yes, I’m running late.  I need to get there.  It’s Christmas Eve.  I play the organ.”

She wasn’t quite laughing but close.  Her companion was laughing his ass off.  I got the impression that she defined the concept of straight arrow and getting stopped was probably in the top five horrific things she could imagine.

“Ah,” I said.  “Gotcha.  Well, let me ask you: you have any warrants?”

Her companion, I thought, was well about to pee his pants.

“Warrants?  For Heaven’s sake no.”

“No murder?  Pillaging?  Maybe snatching one of the pipes from the church organ.”

“Pssshaw.”

Yeah, she actually said it.  Made me laugh.

So I do my thing, warn her to be careful, and send her on her way.  I probably only had her stopped for four or five minutes so she was going to be fine.  They both chuckled as they drove away.

So twenty minutes later, I’m heading back on the same state highway,the other direction, and I stop a biiiiiiig old Cadillac that reminded me of my Mom’s Buick Electra 225 circa mid ’70s.

I walk up to the lady and ask where they’re going, do they know they have a headlight out, etc.

“Going to church.”

“Really?”  I mean, I know it’s Christmas Eve, but two in a row?

“Yeah, just right over there.”  She pointed to a church.

I stared.  “Right there?”

“Yes.”

“I mean that one…right there?”

“Yeah, why?”

I laughed.  “When you get there, tell C**** D*** hello from Sergeant Barker.”

The lady looked confused. I winked at her and said, “Tell her to slow down.”

I laughed, she laughed, her companion laughed, and I sent her on her way.

So later I’m eating dinner and, I swear to whatever you hold holy, I heard a church organ.  And it didn’t creep up on me, it exploded! And not just any church music, but this one

Toccata and Fugue

So…just keep in mind that if anything happens to me over the next few weeks, somebody go back through my traffic stops and talk to her…’cause I’m just about sure that it’s probably not good form to get after the church organ lady.

It wasn’t even my case.

I mean…it was…but it wasn’t.

Part of what I do is catch on-line child predators.

I see the absolute worst of what people can do to children and hunt those who want to see what was done. But I also see victims get help. I see bad guys arrested. I see them tried and convicted and sent to prison.

This case was the first I had generated that fell outside my jurisdiction. I had never worked with these particular officers before and had no idea how they did their work.

I showed up for the briefing and got introduced as “…the guy who dumped this on us.” Strained chuckles all around! Cops aren’t stupid, they know child pornography exists, but few want to work a case that could take a year to get to trial. They simply don’t want to swim in the filth that long.

The briefing was…uh…SHORT. Mine tend to go at least an hour but the detective in charge had us in and out in less than five minutes.

“Uh…what about his job?  Will he even be home?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe,” the detective said.

“Anybody else at the house?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Kids?”

“Maybe.”

“Dogs? Like vicious Trey-eating dogs?”

“Maybe.”

I’m a high information detective. I want to know everything about a suspect and location. Who lives there? Children? Weapons? Criminal history? What kind of cars? Where do they work and what hours? Animals? Hell, even what kind of music they like (which can be good to know when I’ve got their computer cracked open searching for files).

This less-is-just-how-we-do-business approach did not make me happy.

When we arrived at the target’s house, we knocked. And knocked. And knocked.

Eventually, a woman answered. We told her who we were looking for, she said he was still asleep, and promptly tried to close the door.

Uh…wrong answer.

There were four of us. We shoved the door open and went inside, two to the right and me and another guy to the left.

It was then I heard the most ferocious banging I’ve heard since I was marching quads in Drum Corps International in 1982.

My first assumption was that the suspect was throwing crap around looking for a weapon.

My own weapon out, I headed for the bedroom. As I went down the short, narrow hallway, I passed a bathroom and threw an eye in to make sure he wasn’t there.

He was.

With his laptop computer.

And a 15-inch crescent wrench.

He was smashing the wrench against the laptop, having broken both corners of the bathroom vanity off while banging the computer against them.

I don’t remember exactly what I said, I’m sure it was pithy and authoritative, but actually probably something like, “What the fuck?”

I grabbed him by the collar and yanked him out of the bathroom.

Note to self: tangled together in a tight hallway, gun in right hand, bad guy in left hand…c-wrench in bad guy’s right hand, still swinging through the air?  Bad tactical arrangement.

The detective I was with, thankfully, blasted into the hallway and we snatched both computer and wrench before anybody got hurt.

“What the hell are you doing?” I asked.

And he said?  Come on, you can guess this one.

“Nothing.”

‘Cause I always do nothing with a giant wrench, a laptop bent in the middle, and two broken vanity corners.

He told me later that he had tried to destroy the computer because of anger issues. He was upset his wife had answered the door. It didn’t have anything at all to do with the copious amounts of child pornography we found on the machine.

Or what about the guy we arrested a couple weeks ago, who blamed his child pornography on arousal problems with his wife? (As though looking at a five-year old could get the machinery working.) Or the guy I had two years ago who, after being convicted as a sex offender and serving his time, sent nearly 30,000 text messages in three months to underage girls? Or the guy who said his brother-in-law had downloaded all that kiddie porn…except for the thousands of images I found on his computer downloaded after his brother-in-law was arrested?

I was thinking about all this today after reading some articles about an editor I once knew who pleaded guilty last December to three child molestation charges. At one time, he had been a well-respected editor in the science fiction/fantasy/horror worlds, but in 2000, he was charged with the three counts.

Yeah, you read that right. Charged in 2000…pleaded guilty in December, 2013.

He did everything he could to delay the trial that he said would clear him of any wrong doing (that’s a clue, people). He found religion, he tried to emigrate to Israel, and he filed more than 370 motions and complaints about how he was being treated. He ended up getting incredibly lenient bond conditions and house arrest (don’t travel out of state, don’t have any direct or indirect contact with minors, and call the authorities once a week to let them know he was still in Atlanta).

But he couldn’t even follow those simple rules. In 2011, he was caught in Connecticut (which, last I checked was not in Georgia), in a hotel room with a 14-year old boy, who answered the door for the police wearing nothing but a towel.

He fought extradition back to Georgia for two years. Two damned years! When he finally arrived back in the Peach State, he pleaded and took 36 months of house arrest (no prison because of massive health issues) and was told, again, no direct or indirect contact with any minors.

Which he allegedly violated again in the last couple of days…hence the new articles.

I look back, from the viewpoint of more than 250 hours of training and two+ years of chasing these guys down, and see all the warning signs. Things that meant nothing to me in 2000 that are red flags and shrill whistles now. Behavior, repeated behavior, excuses and lies, that I’ve seen constantly from all of them.  

Every. Single. One.

It’s a tough job, dealing with child pornography and those who travel to have sex with children, but one that I love dearly. Listening to the clickety-click-click of the cuffs being slapped on? Not even Rush live in concert is better than that. I love arresting these guys.

Why? Because, yeah, children need to be protected.

But also? I love the hunt. I love the paperwork and analysis, tracking bits and pieces here to there and back again, figuring out how and where they’re hiding and where they’ll go next.

What did Kilgore say? “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” Well, I love the smell of the hunt, earthy and dirty, adrenaline-filled. And I love watching their eyes early in the morning when they open the front door and see me and my team. I always see the wheels start turning as they invent the reasons why they did what they did (which they usually blame on the children).

I love hunting those who are hunters. They are predators and chances are extremely high that those who are merely looking at child pornography now will eventually molest children. They hunt for children and I, in turn, hunt for them. Are they smarter than me? Can they slip past me? Yeah, probably some can, but thus far, I’ve done pretty well.

And I’m only getting better.

“Fucking bullshit.”

That’s my first memory of him.  I think it was during one of our long runs and we were both done with running.  He expressed himself while running so what actually came out was more along the lines of “Fu..u..cki..ng…bull…sh…it.”

My most vivid memory of him?  We’d sussed out a local barbeque joint, something we did about every other week or so, and had ordered like pigs: brisket, beer, sausage, beer, beans, beer, coleslaw and cornbread, beer…beer.  Yeah, yeah, I can remember him drinking but what I really remember is sauce, deep red and flecked with all manner of black spices, slathered over his chin.  Watching his little pink tongue slither out and lick away the sauce was one of the funniest things I’d ever seen.

But my last memory of him?

The casket.

Draped with an American flag, surrounded by endless bouquets of flowers, his Air Force helmet in the coffin with him, his face much more stern in death than I had ever seen it in life.

Casey was my friend.  For twelve weeks at the academy, Casey was my work colleague.  For many of those weeks, Casey was my barbeque compadre.

Casey was also a police officer…a canine handler to be more precise.

And now Casey is dead.

Hit by a drunk driver; killed on a rain-soaked stretch of I-55 in north-central Illinois on October 30, 2013.

I’ve not had that many good friends dance with death.  I remember when writer Sean A. Moore died in 1998 and how numb I was about that and for how long.  I didn’t know Casey as well as Sean, but I can feel that same numbness in my head and heart now.

At the police academy, Casey had first struck me as world weary, unsurprised by anything.  But as I got to know him better, I realized he was excitable but when he was dealing with victims and bad guys, with issues and concerns, he affected an outer calm that did an amazing job of calming down both the scenario role players and the other police recruits.

What I didn’t know, until his funeral, was that Casey had decided early on in life he was going to be a police officer.  He rode with the local department constantly and then joined the Air Force and tested for the Pontiac Police Department almost the moment he got home.

So yeah, he was a good cop, even as a recruit.  And yeah, he was a great cop on the road.  A k-9 officer, a member of a multi-jurisdictional task force, had detective’s training.  He was a monster and I’m sure he did great things for people that I’ll never have any idea he did.

But all his good cop-ing aside, what I remember most, next to the barbeque sauce, was how his calm helped me get through something new and alien to me.  He’d decided young to be a police officer but I’d decided young to be a writer.  I had no experience in law enforcement at all when I hired on at the Sheriff’s Office.  After three years in the jail, which was small and rarely had any problems at all, they put me on the road.

The situations those instructors talked about – barricaded subjects, hostages, shoot-outs, domestic violence with knives and guns, murders, sexual assaults – were completely new to me.  I was absolutely out of my element.

Casey helped me get through many of those scenarios.  He, a 22-year old kid, taught this 40-year old almost every time we went out together.

And we ate a crap load of barbeque.

Can’t ask for much more, right?

I have no idea what the count was at his funeral.  I heard from a couple of people that 1,000 police officers attended, that there were more than 600 squad cars in the mile-long processional.  Do I believe that?  Maybe…maybe not.  But regardless of the number, it was an impressive turnout.

During the procession to the cemetery, we snaked back and forth through town.  Every intersection was closed, nearly every business with a temporarily closed sign hanging in the door.  There were, no hyperbole, thousands of civilians along the route.  Many saluted, many waved American flags, most filmed the procession.  Some just stood, looking stunned at their hometown hero, had been snatched out of their collective hands so senseless and quickly.

Casey was imbued with the terrible ferocity of duty and the horrific beauty of service.  He wanted to serve his town and his family and friends and even people he didn’t know.  He knew that serving, and that duty, carried a terrible price.  Not always death, but in what he saw, in what he learned about the human condition and both the amount of suffering, and amount of love, humans bestow on each other as every second ticks past.

From the first moments I knew him, Casey wanted to serve and to help, as much as a cliche as that sounds like.  Yeah, he wanted the adrenaline calls and the excitement of being a police officer.  But mostly he wanted to help those around him.

Which is why it hurts so badly to know that when he needed help, when his SUV had been crushed by a man who’d spent better than five hours, according to the video footage, drinking at a bar, I wasn’t able to help.  I wasn’t able to warn him off of that particular stretch of road, or have him pull just a little further into the turn-around where the drunk hit him.

He probably wouldn’t have listened to this old man, anyway.  Out on that highway, with his canine partner, being a police officer and serving his city, was the only place he wanted to be.

Godspeed, Casey, we’ll all miss you dearly.

Okay, well, what you have to understand first is that I am car-stoopid.

Seriously.

No joke.

I don’t even know how to spell ahtow-mowbill –

…ahtoe-moebile –

Damnit…carr.

What I know about cars can be summed up in the following passage:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

See what I mean?

So, understanding that, here’s the story.

It was late on a Saturday night and I was patrolling, doing my thing, catching bad guys.  Had some music going, probably a Dr Pepper or two.  A standard night.

Then, out of nowhere, my car got smarter than me (yeah, yeah, supply your own joke).  The dashboard panel gave an ominous message: “0% oil life remaining.”

I knew I was getting close to time for an oil change and when I saw that, I freaked out.  Again, knowing exactly nothing about cars, what I saw was something closer to: “0% oil remaining…and if you don’t get some oil in that crankcase…NOW…your car will explode and that would probably be bad for your career.”

So I hot-footed it to the local Wal-Mart, parked in the lot, and immediately checked the dipstick.

Now, I hadn’t let the motor settle down at all because, again, I know squat-all about motors.  So I checked the stick and couldn’t really tell how much was in, but hey, the computer had told me there was nothing left so get some oil in that puppy, right?

I dug out the book and it said 6 quarts.  I snatched up 6 quarts, got it all put in, and felt much, much better.  Oil in the motor, no chance of exploding the motor, and my career is still good.

Yeah…except…that pesky dashboard message remained.

“0% oil life remaining.”

Something about that pesky message ate at me but I couldn’t quite figure out why.  I mean, I was good, right?  I’d replaced the missing oil so there was nothing to worry about.

I cranked my crime cruiser up, banged the stereo and my music and headed down the road.  Except…it was odd.  The crime cruiser, I mean.  Out of sorts.  Off-kilter.  It shook in a way it never had before.  Not a ginormous shake, just a little tremor that the car had never had before.  Knowing that I knew nothing and that the shake probably meant someting – maybe even something important – I headed back to the jail.  I told one of the jailers, who knows a bit about cars, the story, and….

…I’ve never seen anyone laugh so hard.

“Wha’choo laughing at?” I said.

“Dude, think about that message.  0% oil life remaining.”

Son of a bitch.  0% oil life remaining…not 0% oil remaining.

“So….”

He kept laughing.  “Yeah, you added 6 quarts?  Then I’m guessing you have about 12 quarts of oil in your little crime cruiser.”  Another laugh. “Ain’t cruising much tonight.”

“Because the problem is….”

“Well, you could blow the motor up.  Seals and gaskets.  Too much pressure.”

I think of it like this: if my head were full of entirely too much brains, my eyeballs would be the seals and gaskets (sort of) that sealed it all up inside my skull.  So all that massive brain power, and the sheer pressure it caused, would eventually sploosh my eyeballs right outta the sockets into some old lady’s lap on the bus or something and that, obviously, would be a problem.

The drawback to that scenario being…a lack of massive brain power.

Obviously.

Car stoopid or not, I felt like the world’s biggest fool.  Really I did.  In trying to keep the motor from blowing up because of no oil, I’d put myself in a situation where I could blow the motor up for having too much oil.

There’s an odd sort of Penzoil-lian karma in that, I think.

Except now I was a bit freaked because of course we didn’t have the tools to drain some oil and it was 10 at night, which meant no one was open.  I called a few friends, none of whom were able to help because they either didn’t have the equipment or didn’t have it empty and available.

And then, for some unknown reason, I called Princeton FD.  Got the one guy on the phone who’s a firefighter but who, in another life, had basically been a car mechanic.  Tried to explain it to him and while you’d think that was an easy explanation, I completely lost him in the weeds of covering my own assininity.  He didn’t have clue one what was going on except the motor was about to explode and we both agreed that would be bad.

So he told me to come to the fire house and it was absolute car motor nirvana.  Turns out Princeton FD does many of their own small engine repairs.  I’m guessing because they’ve got small engines galore, engines that run brush trucks and generators and jaw of life and chain saws and crap knows what else.

That small engine repair includes oil changes.  So they had everything needed.  This particular fireman cranked my crime cruiser up on some jacks, shoved an empty oil pan underneath, slipped the drain plug off and boom! was off and running.

Now, here’s a physics lesson for you.  When you stuff 12 quarts into something designed to hold 6, and then want to drain it…you should probably stand clear.

It was like a freaking oil tanker exploded in San Francisco Bay or something.  That crap came shooting out of the motor faster than BP’s oil spewed out of the hole in the bottom of the Gulf.  The fireman had expected it to drain – down – from the oil pan.  Uh…no.  It shot out in damn near a straight line toward the back of the car.

The stream was probably five feet long and lemme tell ya, if you’re Peter North that’s impressive, but if you’re staring at $40,000 of county property that’s in your name, it’s a bit unnerving.

And, sadly for the fireman, I’m fairly certain he drank down a gallon or two while he was laughing.

Mmmmmm…a warm oil toddy.  Just the thing on a cold winter night.

The upshot is we – and when I say we, I mean he – got the car put back together and all was right in my world again.

But here’s my problem, aside from yeah, not knowing to let the motor settle a bit before checking the stick and knowing exactly what “0% oil life remaining” actually means: if putting 12 quarts of oil in the car will cause all sorts of havoc, then why in hell can 12 quarts of oil fit in the crankcase?

It never once overflowed.  It wasn’t like putting in too much gas where you get a stream of it down the side of the car and puddling on the ground.  It all went in, slick and slippery as…well…you get what I’m saying.  Seems to me the crankcase shouldn’t be big enough to get double the oil in the thing.

‘Cause after all, I’m pretty sure I’m not the only person in the world who doesn’t quite get the modern-day phraseology.

0% oil life remaining…indeed.