I figured that headline would get your attention. Hey, if I can’t hold you with the dazzling dexterity of my writing, then I’ll do it with cheap headlines. I have no problem with that.

Two short bits today.

A few weeks ago, deep into a quiet night, I’m sitting at the intersection of a state highway and a county road. My squad car was getting rattled pretty good with Verdi’s ‘Requiem’ blasting outta the speakers, and I’m bashing my fist against the dash on the massive bass drum part and I sort of vaguely notice a car coming toward me on the highway.

As I’m in no hurry to do anything in particular, I let it pass and then turn in behind it. This is not one of those cop moments where I realize I’ve got something good in front of me. In fact, I hardly notice this car at all. It’s just another car in the middle of the night.

But it starts to slow down. The brake lights come on and then it starts moving toward the shoulder. This I notice. Hey, I’m not completely blind. When a car stops RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME, my razor-sharp observational skills definitely kick in.

This kind of random stopping happens sometimes. People see a squad and flag me down for questions about court or arrestees or child custody or whatever.

I get to the driver’s side window and slowly it comes down. A woman stares at me, vague embarrassment on her face. She immediately tries to hand me her insurance and driver’s license, which she already has gathered.

“You okay?” I ask.

“Yeah, I know, I know. I wasn’t paying attention.”

“Huh?”

She shakes her head and again tries to hand me her information.

I don’t take it. Instead, I watch her and try to figure out what the hell’s going on. Remember, I didn’t stop her. She stopped herself.

“What’d you pull over for?” I ask.

She looks really confused at that point. She glances at my car, I assume looking for the flashing red and blue lights…that weren’t flashing…and then back at me. “Uh…I…uh…I thought you were pulling me over.”

“No, ma’am.”

“But I was speeding.”

“Probably.”

A long silence. Again, her confused look. If I am more of a sadist, I might chuckle at the simple, inelegant confusion ripe on her face.

“You’re not pulling me over.”

“No, ma’am.”

“You’re not gonna write me a ticket?”

“Hadn’t planned on it. But the night’s still young. Plans can change, I guess.”

“Uh…no, no. No. That’s fine.” A sheepish grin. “So I can go?”

“Unless you want to talk about something else.”

Now she grins. “Well, that was stupid of me, wasn’t it?”

Now I laugh. “Have a good night, ma’am.”

And she drives off. Easy as you please. But very slow. I guess she thinks that now that she’s put the thought in my head, I might watch her to see about writing her a ticket.

So I climb back in the crime cruiser, crank up Verdi, and off I go, back into a dark, quiet night.

***

A few nights ago, again a dark, quiet night, I find myself behind a car that’s swerving and driving a little erratically; both hallmarks of a drunk driver. So I pull it over and go through all my traffic stop stuff: radioing where I am, getting the license plate, letting dispatch know how many people are in the car, make/model/color of the car, etc., etc.

Then I head up to the car, the video tape running behind me, as it always is (yes, I’m one of those cops who has his videotape going ALL the time rather than NONE of the time, but that’s a different rant). I get about halfway between the cars and I hear?

Someone pissing.

Yeah. That instantly recognizable liquidy yet staccato sound of a stream of water hitting the ground.

So now I’m thinking not just a possible DUI, but public exposure, too. Wow, a morals charge, that could be fun.

Driver? Nothing. She’s just sitting there, waiting for me, not moving a muscle.

Passenger?

He’s good. Sly. Surreptitious. Staring ahead as though there is nothing going on at all. Except for his right hand. Barely out the window, slowly turning his plastic cup over and pouring out his beer.

Hence the pissing sound.

Then I hear the cup hit the ground. Tinktinktink.

So I change course and go to the passenger’s side window first. I snatch the cup from the ground, give it a sniff to make sure, then cock my head at the passenger.

He looks at me and says, “Damn.” But he doesn’t look angry, just amusedly annoyed it didn’t work.

“Nice try,” I said. “Come on out for me.”

“Yep.”

He gets out and I cuff him and sit him down on the shoulder, still keeping an eye on the driver.

“You’re not under arrest, but you are being detained, okay?”

He laughed. “No problem, Officer, I ain’t going anywhere.”

He was cooperative and pleasant and had no problem with me citing him. In fact, between him and the driver, it was one of the more pleasant DUI investigations I’ve had in a while.

***

That’s it. Nothing earth shattering. No fights. No cows. No foot chases. Just a couple of amusing anecdotes. But it is getting warmer…summer’s a’coming…and that’s usually when the idiots come out.

I love this job.

There were three of them.

And I’ll be honest: they scared me.

It takes more to scare me than it once did. Call it the results of dealing with drunks and crack whores and general idiots. Used to be, the thought of a physical confrontation would leave me sick to my stomach. But now, jaded veteran that I am, mostly I just get annoyed.

Except for this. This scared me.

Because there were three of them, and they were big. REAL big.

They’d been hanging out on the road for who knew how long, scaring motorists, causing all sorts of problems, and if this went bad, I was a long way from back up.

So I stopped my squad, lights flashing so that hopefully whatever traffic might run this lonely road would see us before they splattered us into road kill, and climbed out like I was the Lord of All I Surveyed.

“You guys are going back in,” I said. I kept one hand loose and free, like I wasn’t scared of anything. The other kind of floated free near my weapon. I figured if it went bad, it would go bad in a damned hurry. “Going back in. Ain’t no shit about that.”

At first they said nothing, and that dead silence unnerved me. It also left enough silence for my imagination to kick up a little. Deep in my head, I heard them, “Yeah, copper? Then let’s tee it up and see some blood.”

Finally, staring me dead in the eye, jaws moving slowly, the leader said: “Moo.”

“Don’t give me your bullshit. I’m’a Poh-leece.”

“Moo. Moo.”

“Maybe so, but that doesn’t cut any slack with me, mofo, so get your hairy asses back inside that fence.”

“Moo?”

Except it sounded like: “Or?”

“Or we’re gonna have a problem, you over-sized slab of pre-cooked barbeque.”

Evidently, from the fact that they actually ambled toward me – as well as a trio of heifers can amble – my threats cut no ice with them.

Surprised by their lunging at me – okay, less lunging than waddle – I backed up and let my hand hover a little more near my gun.

Okay, now, I don’t know much about cows, I’m a city boy, but as I suddenly wondered if that itty, bitty little .45 I had strapped to my hip would stop one of those sons a bitches if they did actually charge me. I’m guessing, when you compare the relational aspect of a 180 grain slug of lead to a 1,200 pound moving cow, the answer would probably be…uh…no.

I gave my squad horn a little blast and that stopped their forward movement, though it didn’t get them headed back the other direction.

So I glanced around, making sure there were no other cars coming, then looked back at them and –

Grunted.

Hah! I am a top notch cow herder. That’s right, bitches, I grunted and waved my arms and maybe – just maybe – threatened them again with Famous Dave’s best sauce.

For whatever reason, it worked. They turned around, though they did it slowly and contemptuously, and slowly headed back to the prison farm from which they’d desperately bolted only minutes earlier. Once they were moving, though, I realized I was now on the far side of them and the gate and if they went past the gate, I was royally screwed.

But the planets lined up, the Cow Gods made an appearance, and those giant hamburgers wandered right back inside the open gate.

Wow, I thought. How the heck’d I do that? See, ‘cause I’ve dealt with cows two or three or twenty times before and I never had any luck at all. So I’m not sure what happened, but I’ll gladly take credit.

Once they were safely inside – and they never stopped walking, just kept going further and further and further back in the field – I spent fifteen minutes ankle deep in mud and cowshit working the barbed wire gate closed.

When that was done, I gave them a quick salute, another threat about T-bone steaks – to which they answered with a “Moo” that sounded suspiciously like “Bugger off, white boy,” – and went back to work.

But it was a joyous rest of the shift because I realized that if this whole law enforcement thing didn’t work out, I was now able to go straight to Craig Johnson’s ranch in Wyoming with all my cow knowledge and get it done.

(this is essentially what happened…although names have been deleted to protect those who should, by all rights, be publicly embarrassed…if you can dig it)

“Dispatch, show me security check this village.”

“10-4.”

And so I’m whistling along, blasting my squad stereo with the soundtrack to ‘Cowboy Bebop.’ It’s an anime TV show I have no clue about, but a friend loaned me the music and it’s brilliant.  So I’ve got this stuff making my ears bleed and I’m checking this tiny hamlet at 2:30 this morning, and all is right with my tiny little world.

As I’m headed out of town, I notice some smoke plumes.  I turn around to get closer.

It’s actually three smoke plumes and they’re pretty damned big.

“Dispatch, we’ve got some kind of fire.  I can’t tell so I’ll be outta the car, taking a look.”

It’s way back in a cornfield that seems just about impossible to get to, so I climb out and start traipsing through the mud.  And I mean muddy.  Like monster truck muddy.  Sinking down damn near to my ankles and having to walk the better part of an acre or two to get to the damned fire and oh, by the way, I had put on my ballistic vest so tight it was like a fucking corset so I couldn’t breath, plus I’ve got some adrenaline going ’cause it’s a HUGE fire and there might be a structure somewhere inside it.

When I finally get back to the car, I radio in and have my dispatcher contact fire dispatch.

“911 fire from police dispatch.”

Nothing.

“911 fire from police dispatch.”

Nothing.

Eventually, my dispatcher had to call the 911 dispatcher on the phone (yeah, that’s a rant for another time, I guess.  911 is too busy to answer the radio?), and 911 calls the fire department.

Three times.

Three fucking times.

While I’m waiting, watching a twenty mile an hour wind blow this fire all hither and yon, a guy who owns some of the land comes along – having heard me on the scanner – to see if it’s his land.

“Yeah, ain’t mine.”

“Well, that’s good, I guess,” I say.

“Yeah.”  A pause.  “Mine’s all peat.”

“Well, that’d burn for a while.”

“Yeah.”  Another pause.  “I guess 911 called the fire chief.”

“Really.”  I’m getting a little amped up because I still don’t hear any sirens or see any flashing lights and this village is small enough you know it when a dog on the other side of town takes a crap.

“Yeah.  They ain’t coming out,” he says.

“‘They’ being – ”

“The fire department.”

And this is where, suddenly, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 burns into my head.  In that book, a dystopian look at where critical thought was headed in America in the 1950’s (how’s that for a little afternoon ‘lite’ reading?), there were firemen.  But those firemen actually set fire to books, rather than putting the fires out.

“Not coming, huh?” I say.

“Yeah.”  Another pause.  “Guess it’s been burning since about 4 this afternoon.”

“Twelve hours.”

“Yeah.”

“I see.  Why?”

“It’s on an island, see.”

I frown.  “What is?”

“The fire.  See, it’s a triangular patch of land and you got’chore railroad tracks on the one side.  Then there’s this little waterway on another side and another little waterway on the third side.  So that fire ain’t going anywhere.”

“Yeah, huh?  Good thing there’s no wind,” I say as the wind blows my long, brunette locks.

(Okay, I made that last part up.  But if I’d had hair, the twenty mile an hour wind would have been blowing it.)

He looks at me askance and drives away.  So I tell dispatch no one’s coming out.  Hell, if the people who live in the town don’t give a shit, I don’t either.  That’s how I roll, baby.

But of course I stop at the fire department, and even though they aren’t going anywhere, all these fucking hillbilly volunteer firemen are standing around in their building…with their turnout gear on.

They’re not going anywhere, they’ve said, but they thought they’d dress up anyway!

So I’m standing there, shaking my head in wonder and wondering if, between the twelve of them they have a full set of fucking teeth, and one says to me, “Yeah, so I guess that means you gotta buy breakfast.”

I wanted to say, “No thanks, I’ll pass on your traditional breakfast of raw pig followed by Gramma’s moonshine followed by a healthy session of cow-tipping.”  Instead, I climbed in my car, turned my ‘Cowboy Bebop’ back on, and drove to the middle of nowhere so I could do some primal scream therapy in private.

Freakin’ hillbilly firemen.  God help me.

This is my thumb…and this is my butt…see how well they fit together….

“Oh…Trey…man, I was just walking home.”

See, I poured out his weed.

I know, there are those who’d think that was a bigger crime than anything I could have arrested him for, but hear me out…I was actually trying to help society.

I’m heading back into town following a car that might be a drunk driver. The car had swerved just enough for me to notice it so I follow long enough to decide the driver isn’t drunk and then I’m planning on getting some gas and maybe a soda or two and a bags of chips and some beef jerky…and maybe a donut along with some cheese crackers and –

“Whoa! What the fuck?”

Yeah, I talk to myself in the car. Usually, it’s a soliloquy on the day’s events – politics, my moronic professor in my Master’s Program (more on that soon), what a waste local city politics is, etcetera. Lately my self-involved diatribes have been about the ravages being visited upon the publishing industry. Anyway, I’m fairly deep into a solo conversation – sort of a verbal onanism – when there is suddenly a man in front of me.

Understand, I’m in the squad car…on the roadway? And he…well, wasn’t. Standing in the roadway, sans car, and even from inside my squad, I can smell the drunkenness. Damn, I think, a drunk wants to interrupt my jerky and cheese crackers and whatnot? That’s bullshit. So maybe I’ll just drive around him and ignore him, he’ll get home okay.

Don’t make it a half-block before I have visions of him getting hit and splattered and killed. So I turn around and get back to him just as dispatch calls the local city coppers about a drunk on the street.

“Yeah, I got him,” I say. “He’s not on Main, he’s here at Crockett and Bowie.”

“Maybe he lives right there,” one of the city officers says.

The city guys are talking about a different local drunk who once said he wanted to kill himself and was going to jump. Problem was, he was about six feet up in a tree. Not much of a death jump.

“Not him,” I say, as I realize I know the guy. “Ricky. What’s happening?”

He grins. “I been drinking.”

“I see that.”

“I’m walking home.”

“I see that.”

“What’choo arresting me for?”

“No cuffs, buddy, I’m just gonna take you home so you don’t get hit. Call it Trey’s Taxi Service.”

He kind of stares at me, bleary eyed, and then nods. “Cool. Ain’t never ridden in the front of a police car before.”

So he staggers and climbs in and immediately, his eu de cologne gets all over my car. It’s gonna take me a week to get his funk outta there.

Per procedure, I tell dispatch who I’ve got and where I’m going and what’s going on. Dispatch gets cranky when they don’t know those things…worried about me getting shot blah blah blah.

Then I get this from dispatch: “Deputy, are you clear for traffic?”

Crap on a shingle.  Nothing good comes from radio traffic like that. It’s like realizing there’s a squad car in front of your house at 2 in the morning. Bad bad voodoo, baby.  What it means, in coded dispatch language, is: ‘Did you know the drunk in your car has a warrant?’

Damnit. “Ricky, you gotta warrant?”

“Fuck, no!”

“Are you sure?”

“Fuck. No.”

“If you had a warrant, whose would it be?”

A loooooonnnnnggg pause. “Fuck, Trey, I was just walking home.”

“Well…walk’s gonna be a little longer now.”

So he puts his hands out and I go to cuff him up. Then he snatches his hands back and I tense up.  I have no idea what’s coming, what he’s doing, or why he’s hesitating, but that kind of twitchy shit makes me nervous.

“You gonna charge me?”

“With?” I ask, though I have a decent idea.

He stares at me.

“Tell you what, let’s see how much we’re talking about and then we’ll decide. But I’ll give you some rhythm ‘cause you were honest with me.”

It’s my standard thing, giving people a break on marijuana when it’s not much. See, this is where I’m helping society. I think the jails are waaaaaaay overcrowded with personal use marijuana arrests. I think they clog the system like a backed up toilet and there ain’t no way in fucking hell a couple of joints does any more damage than the six packs and fifths of whiskey which we, as a society, happily drown ourselves.

Making marijuana illegal was a bogus argument created on a need to build empires within a bureaucracy. Now, 80 years later, it’s still bogus. Alcohol kills tons more people than dope, causes tons more roadway accidents, and exacts a higher cost to society.

Yeah, call me Peter Tosh…. “Leeegaliiiiiize iiiiit.” boom-chicka-boom-chicka. Imagine me singing with a Jamaican accent.

Meanwhile, back at our story line, Ricky pulls out a dented and cracked pipe which is just sad in a ‘I’m so poor I can’t even afford a decent hitter pipe’ kind of way, and a tiny little bit of weed.  He’s been through the system and he knows it’s much better to cough up the ganja to the road officer than it is to be found with it inside the jail. That’s a whole other steaming pile of crap with which he’d have to deal.

I put the pipe in my pocket and dumped the weed in the road.

“Oh…Trey…man, I was just walking home.”

“Yeah…well…next time you better walk faster.”

And off we go, Peter Tosh’s reggae bouncing around in my head. “Leeegaliiiiiize iiiiit.”

boom-chicka-boom-chicka

“He was gonna kill me!”

The barfly said it with absolute earnest certainty.

So I turned to the homeless guy – who I’d seen two days earlier riding through town on his bike with two Yuppie kid carts tied with a bit of rope – and asked him, “You gonna kill this guy?”

The homeless man sort of shrugged; a non-verbal, “Unless I get a better offer.”

All right, I can deal with that.

See, the homeless guy, who told me he was going to Montana “to die,” had stopped on that death trip in town.  And during his death trip stop in town, he stopped at a bar.

At said stop on said death trip, he got into a…hmmm…what to call it…disagreement, shall we say, with just about everyone in the bar.

Apparently, he said he’d take care of all 35+ people and then flashed what everyone said was a knife.  It was a blade but not really a knife.  And I’m pretty sure he would have hurt himself more than anyone else.

But hey, it’s aggravated assault, right?  Wear the badge, deal with the bullshit.  Arrest, prosecute, jail.  Except this is the real world.  Prosecuting attorney would have dropped the charges because he’s homeless and broke.  And if the attorney hadn’t, the judge would…because the guy’s homeless and broke.  If we arrested him, then he becomes a longer term problem for the city and the jail and besides, it would have interrupted his death trip to Montana.

So we worked out a deal with the bar patrons and the homeless man that I’d take him on down the road, get him closer to Montana.  Yeah, it’s a horrible way to deal with problems, but what other real option did we have?  The last place this guy needs to be is jail.  And what about his twelve tons of crap?  Where would we have held that?  We have no place so what happens to that?  And what if we did arrest him and he was released pending trial?  Does he stay in town and if so, where?  And how does he pay for it?

“I wanna get you closer to Montana,” I said.

“Get me the fuck outta Dodge and you and me are good,” was his response.  (Not exactly; it’s the sentiment if not the verbiage)

So we head west on the highway.  And on the way…he sings to me.

Terrible voice; a cracked tenor with nary a relationship with intervals between notes.  You’ve not heard bad until you’ve heard hymns in a monotone.  Between every verse, a joke or a bizarre question, including one about which position I preferred when it came to sex.  Unsure of where that was headed, I said something along the lines of, “Well, the position matters less than the genitalia.”

He laughed.  “Yeah, tha’ss pro’ly true, ain’t it?”

Uh…did he just call me a homophobe?  Whatever.

About halfway there, he asks me, quite seriously, “Are you some sort of backwoods Christian?”

Now, I’ve been called a lot of things in my life, but never a Christian and certainly never backwoods.

When we get to the next county up the line, I started getting his stuff outta the truck I wrangled into helping us, and I noticed that down the street, at a convenience store, there was a local city police department car.  Guy was probably getting some coffee or donuts or something.

But while I’m getting my guy’s stuff from the truck, the fucker’s talking and talking and going through my duty coat pockets.

“Hey.  Watch the wandering hands.”

“Yes, sir…yes, sir.”

Then he got outta my squad with my jacket.  Fucker’s trying to put it on.

“Hey, that’s my coat.”

He frowned, looked at it.  “Oh, I thought it was mine.”

“Yeah, I can see how the sheriff’s office patch and the badge would throw you off.”

“I used to have one just like it.”

“When was that?”

“Ten or twelve years ago.”

“So you thought it just miraculously made an appearance?”

“Just made a mistake, dude, chill out.”

“Chill out, huh?”

“Yeah.”  He nodded intently, as though I’d made a monumental mistake.   “Yeah, take a pill.  And can I have five bucks?”

“Payment for the jacket?  You get the coat and the money?  Helluva deal.  How about this?  How about you keep on keeping on for Montana and I won’t charge you with aggravated assault and throw you in jail?  How’s that sound?”

He thought hard for a long minute, rubbing his chin and letting his eyes dart side to side.  “Well, I like my deal better, but I recognize when I’m holding the weaker hand.”

I laughed, clapped him on the back, and told him good luck.

“I’m dying,” he said.  “How much luck do you need with that?”

“Depends on the death, I guess.”

“True enough.”

So then I left.

And within ten minutes, my Sheriff’s Office got a call from the local PD.  They wanted to know why we’d dumped that guy on them.  I told dispatch to tell them we hadn’t dumped anyone, that we had merely assisted in a nationwide travel program and that they should do the same.

“Have them call the next county down and have that county call the next and so on and so on.”

Not the best solution, but the only one I could come up with.  Sometimes, as a police officer, my choices are limited to bad or shitty.

But remember this: fucker got away with two of my bottles of water.

Hah.  Distracted me with the coat and then slipped away with something of more immediate value.  And got a free ride of thirty miles.

So who had the weaker hand?

I’m not a brilliant fighter.  I don’t understand so well the physics of this punch or that counterpunch or leverage on the ground or whatever else.  But I do know this: if you wanna fight with the poh-poh, you shouldn’t be so drunk you’re falling over.

In other words, if you wanna throw down, you should be able to stand up.

Initially, the call was a domestic in progress.

Those are always scary.  There is more potential for danger at domestics than anything else other than traffic stops.   So there is always a bit of adrenaline.  But this call – involving a couple with whom my department has dealt endlessly – amped up pretty damned quick.

“He’s got a gun,” she screamed.  “He’s gonna shoot me.  And my dog.”

I was first on the scene and parked about 50 or 60 yards away from their long, isolated driveway, killed the car and lights, and listened.

No gunshots, no screams.  That’s either a good sign (things aren’t as bad as they could be) or a really bad sign (everyone is already dead).

Carefully, hand on my gun, I walked to the driveway and peered around some brush.  She was in the yard, obviously drunk, chasing the black Lab.  He stood in gray sweats in the yard with no shoes, socks, coat, or hat.

And with a gun behind his back.

After seeing me, she ran toward me.  I ordered him to put the gun down or be shot.  He eyed me, from about 75 yards away, and calmly walked into the house, without making an aggressive move toward me or her.

Taking the drunk wife with me, I backed away and waited for assistance.  While waiting, I interviewed her.  She admitted there had been no hitting.  No pushing.  No shoving.  No scratching or spitting.  In short, there had been no domestic.  Just the threats of death.

Backed up, she said, by a handgun.

So we got all Rambo’ed up.  The state troopers put on their special hats and gloves, their special vests with hundreds of extra rounds of ammo.  They pulled out their AR-15s and walked like they were in-country circa 1968 Vietnam.  Hand signals and whispers and don’t leave tracks in the snow and the rest.

Let’s understand: it was comforting, all that firepower.  To know that, if he started shooting, he’d be answered back overwhelmingly…sort of a low-scale version of mutually-assured destruction.  But it was also bizarre and surreal.  I felt, honestly, like some Hollywood director was going to yell ‘Cut!’ at any second because this was nothing more than some B grade action flick, some straight to video badly written film meant to appeal to 14-year old boys.

While we approached, dispatch got the husband on the phone, which I liked.  If he’s on the phone, at least one hand can’t be full of weapons.  Plus his attention is on something other than me and my approach.

“He wants to know if you’re coming to the front door,” dispatch said.

“Uh…maybe DON’T tell him where we are?” I said to dispatch.  “Seeing as how he’s in a house full of weapons?”

A deputy checked a window, saw him at the kitchen table, phone in hand and other hand empty on the table and so I made entry.

That’s it.  After all the weapons and tactics and calls for assistance and grilling of the wife.  After all the adrenaline and information gathering and agreed-upon approaches.  After all the swallowing down of fear and the self-questioning (“Is this the day I kill someone?”).

After all that, it was as easy as opening the door.

I opened the door at an odd angle while another deputy watched him through a far window.  I looked through the crack and saw both his hands.  And so I went in.

We questioned him, searched the house, found a case worth of empty beer cans and all his long guns, lovingly laid out on a table.  But no handguns, which he swore he didn’t have.  And he agreed with her that there had been no domestic.  He also denied the gun-threats.

So after all that, the 9,472 cops who showed up for a gun call left with no arrestees and no charges.

Except that everyone involved knew he had threatened her with the handgun we never found and that she had threatened him with us and that both were drunk and both were hitting each other.  And trust me, every single cop there knew – and continues to know – we will be back again, probably this weekend.

And at some point, as inevitably as the sun will rise, one of them will be blinded enough by booze that they use one of those guns.  At some point, it won’t be a domestic call, it’ll be a shots fired call.

Or a murder call.

And there’s nothing I can do about it.

Part I – Wherein he receives a wound…(got some blood in the game)

“He’ll run. He’s done it before about a thousand times. He’ll run.”

I shrugged. “Okey dokey. I’ll be around back.”

Getting more and more amped up, I stood near the backdoor. My plan was to wait until this kid (early 20’s, strong and fast and running from a fail to appear warrant that wasn’t even felony level) was about halfway down the stairs, then rush him, crash us both into the wall, and put him on the ground. Hard to run, I figured, when you’re on your ass.

There’s a chair near the stairs and I told myself, three times, not to trip over it. Remember it, gentle reader, that chair gets important later in our adventure.

After a few seconds, I heard them. It was like a thundering herd. Banging through the house. The local city cop screamed, “He’s running! He’s running!” Furniture slammed over. Other people yelled. Bang and crash and biff and boffo and now I’m REALLY amped.

They blasted out the back door and he got about halfway down. I leapt at him. Full-tilt boogie, baby, as fast and hard as I could.

And he stopped. Just above the bottom of the stairs.

I, of course, kept going and just about met the wall by myself. With a quick recovery, I faced the kid. “Where you going?”

The “Oh, shit,” look on that kid’s face was worth the price of admission. He’d been running for months from an older, overweight cop and seeing a second officer waiting for him was not part of his plan.

I grabbed him and put him against the wall. I got his left arm, the other officer got his right and this is going to be easy peasy. Except the kid didn’t cooperate. He tightened up and refused to put his hands behind his back. We struggled and tussled and danced a little and I realized he was holding a bag of dope and either a weapon or a cell phone.

So the local city officer decided to take him to the ground. Except….

Remember the chair? Yeah, that one. That one right in the way of the officer and the mope? They crashed over it and hit the ground extremely hard.

Then the mope was gone. Jumped up and took the hell off. Whooooosh, just like that.

I don’t remember deciding to chase him, I just ran. Jumped over the chair. Jumped over the officer and we were gone. My legs felt good and and my lungs and chest felt good. Damn, I thought, it’s good I’ve exercised since the cancer, right? I mean, I ain’t gonna catch this dork, but I won’t lose him, either. Hell, I’ll probably be able to pace him all the way to Cleveland! And I’ve got a radio so we’re good.

Except I think I was catching him. Closer and closer and he was scared to death because no one’s ever chased him. And I reached out, he’s just…right…there….

And I fell. Hard.

There were two voices in my head at that point (which is fewer than usual so that’s good, I guess). One said, “Get up, dumbass, he’s RIGHT there! You can still get him! GET UP!” The other, much louder, said, “Ooooooowwwwwwwwww!!!!!!!!!”

That’s the one I chose to listen to.

I limped to standing and the other office was by my side and our quarry was but a speck on the dirty horizon. So, of course, we started yelling. “Keep running, we’ll get your ass next time!” and “It’s prison now, baby, welcome to the bigs!” and “You son of a bitch!” and lots of other colorful expressions and for a split second, I was the old man down the street, “And stay off my lawn, goddamnit!”

A few minutes later, in the midst of lots of officers and a dog, the officer shouted and grabbed my arm. It was covered in blood and I ain’t talking a little. There was a gash the size of the fucking Grand Canyon near my elbow and then it REALLY hurt and I just wanted to cry like a baby.

“Wow,” the cop said as he cleaned it. “You might need a stitch.”

I paused. “A stitch? That’s not very manly.”

He shrugged. The bad guy got away and I went to the hospital.

Part II – Wherein he receives a Tootsie Pop…(yummm, the day ends well)

The nurse jammed me hard when she was cleaning it. Grinding and grinding and grinding and with just a smidgen of sadistic grin on her face whilst she did it.

“You have to do it so hard?”

“Don’t be a puss.”

She got it cleaned and stared at it, frown upon her features.

“Pretty bad? I thought so. How many stitches?”

And she started laughing. And laughed and laughed. Then she put a Band-Aid on it. Yeah, it was high-tech with shaped edges and very hip gauzes and all kinds of expensive medical linaments, but it was still a Band-Aid.

“What about the stitches?” I asked.

Still laughing, she handed me an orange Tootsie Pop and walked out. I could hear her laugh all the way down the hall.

Part III – Wherein He’s the Hero…(but still they laugh….)

The guys at the office love to hear that story. See, they never truly believed I’d jump in when things got hairy. They know I’m not comfortable with the physical part of things, and so hearing how the mope and I were gone in a puff of dust even before the other officer got up sends them into a paroxysm of gale force cop whooping.

I try to end the story before the whole ‘ain’t getting no stitches’ part.

‘Cuz that would just make them laugh harder…and not with me, but at me.

Again.

First of all, you gotta understand, it wasn’t my fault.

If it was anyone’s it was probably the hillbilly.  Or maybe the nameless, bitter, worn down by life, jaded, bureaucratic, pencil pushing mope who’d been given a sliver of power and didn’t give one shit for anyone except his ownself.

Okay, I’m on duty and I get the call to go to Chicago to pick up a prisoner.  Guy’s sitting in the Cook County Jail, one of the largest jails in the country (with better than 13,000 prisoners) and the single largest mental facility in the country.  I kinda dig doing transports, so I pony up and head out.

I drive pretty fast so I’m there quick.  Navigate some hellacious highway construction, drive around this huge concrete nightmare that is the jail, get to the back gate, pull up in my MARKED squad car, wearing my UNIFORM, and head into the gate.

“‘S up?” the guy asks.  He’s probably early 60s, obviously sliding into retirement.  He’s at the end of his shift.  He’s ready to go home.

“Here to pick one up.”

“Cool.  Lemme see your ID and we’ll get going.”

Okay, like I said, it wasn’t my fault.  A few weeks ago, the hillbilly dog ate my wallet.  I got home and there were all kinds of little pieces of shredded black leather everywhere.  Looked like snow…other than being coal black.  Death snow, maybe.

Well, she didn’t eat my Sheriff’s Office ID nor my driver’s license, but she did eat the wallet and I just hadn’t gotten around to replacing it yet.  So, consequently….

“You ain’t got no ID?”

“Uh…no.”

“Well, you got no license?”

And I wasn’t sure, given the grammatic obscurity, what the correct answer was.  So I said, “Uh…no license.  But I have a credit card.  Has my name on it.  Name matches my namebadge on my UNIFORM.”  And then, helpfully, I pointed to the MARKED squad car.

“Don’t care about none’a that,” he said.  “We got policy.”

“I drove two hours.”

“And we got policy.  You cain’t have him.”

“Seriously?”

“I look like I’m fucking with you?”

“Okay.  Well, let’s try this.  Is there a supervisor I can talk to?  I mean, I’ve got a marked squad car and I’m in uniform.  It’s pretty far for someone to go if they’re trying to break someone out of the jail, isn’t it?  I mean, I have business cards and everything.”

“And we got policy.”  But he dialed his captain.  “He gonna say no.”

In fact, the captain said no.  He didn’t even bother talking to me.

“What about the lieutenant?”

“He gonna say no.”

In fact, the lieutenant said no.  He didn’t even bother talking to me.

“Sergeant?”

Ditto.  Ditto.  Ditto.

That guy goes through his shift change and I go home…sans prisoner.  On the heels of my attempt, my sergeant sends another deputy.  He heads up, ID in hand, and comes back with the prisoner.

Here’s the rub: they never asked.

ID in hand, ready to show to anyone who might ask and they never did.  Didn’t ask at the guard gate where I’d been, didn’t ask at the desk that sits as the penultimate point of control before stepping into the cell blocks, which is the ultimate point of control.  No one EVER asked him for his damned ID.

It was a different shift, you see.  And apparently, there is only so much common sense at the Cook County Jail, and it’s all on the overnight shift.

And I realize none of this would have happened if I’d had my ID.  But like I said, that was my hillbilly dog’s fault.  You can’t blame that on me…can you?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I bought a wallet.

I had a DUI last night.

The call was an accident. When I arrived, there was a Grand Prix wrapped around a tree. In fact, the passenger door was smashed into the cab nearly to the midline of the car. There was blood all over the passenger door, dotted by the shimmer of broken glass and smashed plastic.

The occupants were gone. Usually, that means one of a couple of things. Possibly the driver had no license, either suspended or revoked. The driver was on the run from a warrant. Or the driver was driving under the influence. This accident scene – which ran probably the better part of a football field length from beginning to end – felt like a DUI.

As I’m working it, I get a call that the driver and passenger are at a local hospital. I go and the passenger, with a massive head wound, is out cold with the doctors. But the driver is hysterical, on the phone with her mother, and knocking me over with beer breath from probably twenty feet away.

So I got the DUI handled and no one died and everything was fine. Yes, she decided to tussle when she realized she was going to jail (fights are so much easier when your opponent is drunk and having a hard time standing). Yes, she was as profane toward me as anyone I’ve ever dealt with. Yes, she told me that the Constitution said I couldn’t talk to her until she talked to her parents (she’s 18-years old). And yes, she told me that the Constitution said “you gotta let me use my cell phone, bitch,” (I was so tempted to find the Constitution on-line and have her find the phrase ‘cell phone, bitch’)

The point is not that she was drunk, not that she was an idiot who, at 18, had already had a couple of DUIs and who, at 18, immediately mentioned lawyers when I asked her name.

The point is I was excited. When I got called for the accident, I got excited. When I realized it was probably a DUI, I got excited. When she decided she wanted to throw down with me, I got excited.

It occurred to me, as I’m wrenching her arms behind her back and trying to haul her outta the hospital beforeI lost control of the situation entirely, that I am in a fairly perverse profession.

When I have a good day, then by definition someone else is having a shitty day. I loved the high speed chase I was involved in last year. It ended only when the guy who raped his girlfriend and stole her car crashed headfirst into my car. I love going into domestic situations. I love walking into an underage drinking party with 50 or 60 kids all staring at me like I’m…well…the cops. I love it when I’m called to a burglary or a theft and I have to figure out not only whodunit, but wha’happened.

I love all that stuff and that bothers me a little. I should hate all those things. Those are terrible things that happen to real people, not stick figures on COPS or cardboard cutouts on CSI. This is real blood and real teeth on the floor and real contact visits between inmates and their families mere hours before said inmate goes to prison for ten or twenty years.

So isn’t it a little perverse that I love those situations so much? I like to think I have sympathy and empathy and all the rest and that’s what makes me a good officer (and no, I’m not one of those guys who arrests everyone for everything..arrests aren’t the definition of a good copper, I believe), but I also understand that I dig the chaos and madness and that concerns me a little.

Not a lot, not to the point of paralysis, just a little…in the back of my head.

And I’m sure it’ll be in the back of my head tonight when I get called to an accident or a domestic battery or a knifing.

And I’m sure I’ll be breathing fast and heavy as I think: this rocks.