Trigger Warnings: F Bombs, vulgarity, derisive language toward our (wonderful and courageous) LGBTQ+ community, hate, violence.
Crime Scene 1.0
He and Amy Lightgood, two first graders in the woods, were exploring a shared interest: Frogs and such on the outskirts of a hidden pond.
This was a place where shadows formed by refuse-soaked sections of a forest preserve adjoining the working-class suburbs south of Chicago instructed Amy’s mother to remind the young girl that creeps who imagined unspeakable things transformed quiet groves into parlous haunts.
He had just taken Amy to what he proclaimed was the “tadpole” reservoir, a small, quiet part of the pond fed by just enough water for a tiny ecosystem to thrive. The placid inlet acted as a silent respite from the buzzing, busy creatures of the surrounding colony, a glorious place filled with work only nature can understand.
“Sometimes they die in the summer,” he said, “Like, just overnight, when it all dries up. And when that happens, there’s this big pile of them here, right here where the water is now.”
“Ick,” she said.
He led Amy to a congested thicket that covered a small cage. “Check it out,” he said excitedly, bending down and dragging the cage from under an assemblage of branches and twigs.
Amy peered in. “Is it a rabbit?”
“Uh, huh,” he beamed. He had a crush on Amy, but he didn’t know much about what that meant, other than that she was pretty, he wanted to be with her all the time, and he was always nervous around her.
“But don’t it wanna be free? Rabbits like to run around.”
He shrugged. Now that it was out in the open, the rabbit’s container looked more like a DIY contraption than a cage. The contraption did a lot of things he wanted to brag about. “Let me show you something else,” he said proudly, operating the device like a rudimentary machine. The cage clacked and clanged and rattled and shook.
“Ewwww! Why did you do that??!!!” Amy’s scream could have curdled tungsten as it rocketed into the heavy canopy with a reverberant shriek. She ran to the nearby deer trail, jumped over a blackened tree trunk, seared by lightning, that rested across a widening path, then disappeared beyond a copse of trees that led to their nearby street.
Amy never spoke to him again.
Crime Scene 2.0
“Vanamos!” Officer Riley screamed as he glared from his front step.
Amused, the gardener looked up from his work. He snickered, his lip curling slightly upwards. This further creased a dimple on his scarred cheek, which had been ravaged by a childhood pox. He aimed his garden shears with such purity and threw with such surety that they impaled the siding of Officer Riley’s house, not more than a few feet from the home’s front door. Officer Riley gazed at the new addition to his house next to him and nearly admired the work, as if he were staring at a freshly formed sculpture.
The gardener imagined himself a Quechua warrior with a majestic spear, protecting a language he had no business protecting, another colonial language, but a beautiful one, he thought, one that shouldn’t be butchered by the ignorance of an unaccomplished man wearing a blue security officer’s uniform, a mall cop, maybe, or one of those guys who sits in an office building late at night watching the occasional weary, well-dressed woman stroll by after a long day at the office, her heels resounding across an empty, dimly lit foyer.
But he missed his target, and that was that. Off to prison he went. Then, a few years later, back to the Andean village of Choquecancha, led there by the silver bracelets of a nation that never wanted him.
Crime Scene 3.0
When Officer Riley spotted the older model white Mercedes, his body seized with anger. He was in a section of Tallahassee that was quiet this time of night. A Mercedes. What’s a guy like that doing driving a Mercedes? He seethed. It was only his third night on patrol without a trainer after graduating from the academy. He was nervous about how this might go down, but he turned on his lights and pulled the man over anyway.
The man acted surprised. Even more so when Officer Riley directed the man to step out of the vehicle after viewing the license and registration. “Have you been drinking, Mr. Dawkins?” They all drank. They all did drugs. Easy answer.
Officer Riley examined Dawkins, hating the salt and pepper afro, the haughty look, the ribbed, shoulderless navy t-shirt barely containing a tattooed collection of muscles that only prison could manifest. Was he a professor or something at the nearest liberal institution for higher learning, one with, obviously, low standards and some absurd community outreach program? He wanted to ruffle up the fro and check for white powder.
“No,” said Dawkins, sounding annoyed. Not, “No, sir.” Not, “No, officer.” Just a flat “No,” as if the question was unwarranted, unheard of, unnecessary.
“Marijuana?”
“What?” Dawkins sounded even more dismissive.
“You smell like marijuana,” he said.
“You’re a liar,” Dawkins responded angrily.
Officer Riley looked the driver’s license over. Clarence Dawkins. 55 years old, suspicious white Mercedes, bad attitude. This wasn’t going to end well for Mr. Dawkins. No doubt about that, Riley thought, as another police vehicle pulled up behind his. Janice Stallings, another recent recruit, joined him.
Stallings went back to her vehicle with the driver’s license and ran the plates and the license, then returned to a growing confrontation.
“Get out of my face,” Dawkins was yelling. Stallings pulled Officer Riley gently by the elbow, and they walked to the side of the road behind Dawkins’ Mercedes.
“He’s driving on a suspended license,” said Stallings quietly.
Officer Riley felt his heart grow. “First offense?”
“First offense,” she replied. “Lost it just two weeks ago.”
“Let’s take him down,” he said.
She nodded. “You wanna try a sobriety test?”
“Nah, he refused.”
“Okay.”
It wasn’t easy, but they got Dawkins into Stallings’ squad car without a tussle. “Stay with him, I’ll search his vehicle,” Officer Riley said.
When he looked inside the Mercedes, he found a steel cup inside a cupholder in the center console. The cup seemed to have iced tea in it. A paper bag that looked like a wrapper for a skid row bottle rested on the passenger seat. Officer Riley joyously slowly opened the bag, revealing an unopened bottle of cognac.
Next, he poured most of the tea onto the side of the road and deftly opened the bottle by holding the top of the bag and the center of the bag, then twisting the top. He splashed some of the contents around the passenger seat and made sure some of it found its way into the steel cup.
He wondered what cognac and sweet tea tasted like when mixed.
Crime Scene 4.0
“Mr. Riley,” said the young public defender. “The problem…”
“Officer Riley,” he corrected.
“Sure. The problem, officer, is that there are witnesses.”
“Of course there are. Women like to destroy men.” When he stared into her, she shivered. “It’s what they do.” He snatched her smartphone from the metal table and brandished it like a weapon. “It’s like they do this flashmob thing. ‘Hey, there’s a target! Let’s get him! Oh, look, even better! He’s a cop!’ ”
Sandra Wilkins leafed through the pile of papers. “Two years of this, Mr. Riley.”
“Officer?”
“Two. I see something like twenty different witnesses in this evidence kit. I’m sorry, we need to plead this out. I can help with that, but it will require you to…”
“Nope.”
Sandra sighed. This wasn’t her first case like this. This was no way to make a living. “No direct violence. I can probably get you down to six months and maybe three years probation.”
“I’ll lose my badge.”
“Mr. Riley, you lost your badge last year.”
Crime Scene 5.0
Riley maintained a standard routine every morning. He drank a voluminous amount of coffee, sometimes with a spill of sour mash to take the edge off, then lumbered outside to check the grill of his black Escalade, his pride and joy. It was a trick he learned in a smoky church basement during an AA meeting from a woman who, in telling her story, said she did it as a sanity check from her blackouts.
Crime Scene 6.0
“So you tellin’ me that you get to tell me where to live?” A nearby jackhammer made it difficult for Officer Riley to hear the question. “That ain’t happened with any other PO, my man. All I gots to do is report my new address when I move.”
With his holstered gun as his best friend, not many of these guys intimidated him, but this one did. He was just about as loud as the jackhammer and looked fit enough to win a heavyweight boxing match. The ex-con reminded him of the drunk doper he had arrested in Tallahassee a few years ago.
“Not only that, but I need to visit your workplace and make sure they’re cool with an ex-con having employment with them,” Officer Riley said, feeling emboldened by his new threat.
“Bullshit,” said the ex-con. “All I had was a DUI. I’m doing all the court asked. And I’m on non-report, mutha fucka. You ain’t even supposed to be here.” This was true, Officer Riley knew. He was visiting this con from the list passed on to him by a previous probation officer, but this con’s name was marked as no-report.
Officer Riley didn’t care. Every opportunity to take people like this down a notch was sacred.
“I oughta just wail on your white ass and send you home in bandages,” said the ex-con.
So he did.
Crime Scene 7.0
“This is incredible!” Officer Riley tried to scream above the raucousness. It was as if the painted signs and banners had come to life to make their feelings known. “And that?” he pointed to the tall wooden structure. “Is that what I think it is?” he asked his new friend.
His friend nodded and leaned into Riley’s ear. “A gallows,” he smiled through two chipped front teeth.
“Hang Pence! Hang Pence!” the voices chanted. Could it happen? Riley wondered, hoping for history. The crowd surged toward the Capitol steps. He saw through squinting eyes people climbing into windows, breaking glass, confronting police. History. The deep state was being dismantled before his eyes. As a Capitol police officer approached Officer Riley and his new friend, Riley blasted him with pepper spray, then kicked him hard in the gut after the deep state cop covered his eyes and fell to the ground.
Soon, the Capitol police officer was overwhelmed by a mob. The officer muttered something like, “Holy Jesus,” as some from the mob began to pummel him. A large man from the middle of the group broke free and eventually pulled the officer to safety.
This made Officer Riley proud. We protect our own, he thought.
Crime Scene 8.0
A cacophony of whistles filled the frozen streets, their shrieks making it almost impossible for Officer Riley to speak loudly enough to be heard. The tree-lined neighborhood, landscaped by old Victorian and Edwardian homes, was chaos. Domestic terrorists pelted his car with snowballs and water balloons full of piss. He hid behind the front of his blackened SUV, waiting for an opportunity.
His partner, a recruit named Mason, was crouching next to him, waiting for Officer Riley to fulfill a promise. “Today,” Officer Riley had said earlier, “We play Roll-a-Kid.”
Mason asked how that worked.
“These assholes are always bringing their fucking kids somewhere,” Officer Riley answered. “School, back from school, whatever, soccer, fuck knows where else. They think if they hold their hand, the kid isn’t gonna get grabbed and sent home. So Roll-a-Kid is where we show them otherwise. You just gotta watch me once, and you’ll get it. It’s easy, then the kid goes home.”
“Home?”
“You know. Back to where they came from. Their shithole. Or maybe even a different shithole. All the same to me.”
Officer Riley felt a little drool against his lower lip and wondered if it would freeze in the outdoors. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve. The tumult of the crowd, especially the whistles, aggravated him, made him want to shoot someone in the head. Someone with one of the damn whistles. There must have been a thousand of them filling the air with their shrill rampage.
Instead, he spotted someone leading their kid to a house. He guessed the kid to be five or six. Perfect age to start a new life and forget about his irresponsible, illegal immigrant father.
“Okay,” said Officer Riley. “Your job is to watch me, watch my technique, and then hand Dad one of the cards from the deck. Doesn’t matter which one, they’re all the Ace of Spades. Got it?”
“Got it. Watch your technique,” replied the recruit.
“And hand him the card. That’s important.”
The recruit pulled the deck of cards from the glove compartment. “They’re all Aces of Spades?”
“Yep.” Officer Riley swung the big black Suburban tail-first towards the father and his kid as the kid bounded through a crosswalk at a stoplight. The Suburban skidded to a stop in the middle of the crosswalk in front of the two. Officer Riley could hear a woman repeatedly yelling, “What the fuck are you doing?” as he jumped out of his vehicle and lumbered towards the child, feeling every molecule of gout in his swollen feet.
The recruit followed closely behind and watched with admiration as Officer Riley jumped at the kid from behind, placing his arm around his chest, then throwing him to the ground. The recruit wondered, Now? Do I hand the card to the Brownie now?
“Card!” yelled Officer Riley as he struggled to contain the squirming child. “Now!”
The recruit tried to hand the card to the father, but the father punched him in the eye. An angry crowd of communists and leftists advanced, but so did fellow Patriots, some of whom were already splashing pepper spray into the eyes of the criminals who wanted to help the kid.
Even during the struggle, Officer Riley felt a surge of pride knowing there would soon be one less Brownie on the street, one less invader in America’s schools.
Crime Scene 9.0
“If you have to shoot a protester, don’t shoot a white one,” Officer Riley said to his trainee while they were driving along Pulaski Road. “It gets on the news.”
Officer Riley slowed the vehicle down as another vehicle approached. He pointed. “Brownies,” he said. Mason nodded. “Hand me the pepper spray, the one with that streamer nozzle on it.” Mason reached into the back seat and handed some pepper spray to Officer Riley.
Officer Riley’s car pulled up to a red stoplight. He pointed to a small red SUV full of kids stopped on the side of the intersection. When the light turned green, the other vehicle, a Toyota Rav4, slowly approached. Officer Riley smiled at his trainee when he noticed the driver’s side window was down on the approaching vehicle.
Officer Riley rolled his window down. He thought he heard the kids singing a song in Spanish. Cursing, he blasted the driver with pepper spray as the two cars passed.
Crime Scene 10.0
The whistles were worse than any he’d heard. It sounded like a football stadium’s boisterous crowd trying to prevent the quarterback from calling a play. The whistles even overwhelmed the sound of the agency’s big, round tear gas guns that popped pepper balls all around, filling the air with acrid blue and orange smoke. He could hear hundreds of whistles through the thick windows of their new darkened SUV as he and Mason, his former recruit, now a seasoned veteran, patrolled the streets of this South Minneapolis residential neighborhood.
“Do you really think these windows are bulletproof like they said?” asked Mason.
“Don’t know. Don’t wanna find out,” answered Officer Riley.
“Hey, check it out,” said Mason, looking ahead to his right. “That construction crew on the top of the house.” A small, two-story house was covered in Tyvek weatherization housewrap. Three silhouettes of men were crouching, trying to hide.
“Brownies,” smiled Officer Riley. “At least three of them.”
“Fucking gold,” said Mason.
“Pure fucking gold. I’d like to escort them to the C-130 myself to Uganda or wherever the fuck they’re sending the worst of ‘em,” said Officer Riley.
“Yeah,” said Mason, “Where the fuck is Uganda? That a city in Mexico? Hey, or just pick them off from here.”
“Right here, dude. That’ll shut up these whistling gay fucks.”
“Boom, splat, mother fuckers,” said Mason. “Fucking Brownie points for Mason!”
That brought forth a thunderous chuckle from Officer Riley, the first he’d felt in a few months, it seemed, what with all the hatred he had been facing during the last half year. Just yesterday, a teenage, pimple-faced white kid with long, greasy hair spat on his face in a supermarket and ran out of the store before Riley could react. The one brief moment I pull my mask off, thought Riley as he edged the vehicle near the construction site.
“You’ve been pilin’ up them Brownie points, dude. Pretty soon you’ll be trainin’ me,” he said to Mason.
“I’m a pretty good shot, bro,” said Mason. “I wanna try out the new M K in the back so bad it’s nearly making me wet my pants.”
New funding had allowed the agency to issue Mk 22 Modular Sniper Rifles to every officer. Everyone Officer Riley knew was eager to try the new weapon now that spring had descended upon the city.
The two stepped out of their vehicle. Other ICE vehicles were rounding up protesters into an armored vehicle.
“Call this shit in,” said Officer Riley. When Mason scanned the area with his phone camera, he immediately received two hits that pinged so loudly he thought his phone's glass would crack.
“A gay couple owns that vehicle that way,” Mason said, pointing to an idling Toyota Camry. “To our right, the only threat is standard protest turds and some guy who got busted for throwing vinegar balloons at a county deputy in Illinois.”
Officer Riley laughed. “Deputy probably had it coming. Take your position.” Officer Riley walked to the back of the SUV and pulled out one Mk 22 and a megaphone. He threw the Mk 22 to Mason, who was crouching behind the side of the SUV, then used his broken Spanish to order the men down from the top of the house.
The men refused and threw a few Spanish expletives his way to further lodge their objections.
“Why are they even still in this country?” asked Mason. “Haven’t these people learned anything in the last few months?”
Mason took aim and shot one of the men in the forehead, sending the man tumbling from the roof. He pulled an Ace of Spades out of his back pocket and laid it on the road carefully under a piece of broken asphalt. Officer Riley gave him a thumbs up and a broad smile as Mason aimed at another invader.
Notes
Thanks for reading. I didn’t spend much time editing this. But I doubt Bruce spent much time editing this awesome song, either. We’re all in a hurry these days.
I’ve written this kind of stuff before. Iterations of the story below are almost ten years old now. It’s changed a bit with the times, but the essence remains. With Don Lemon’s arrest, no matter how ludicrous the charges, none of us are safe. This story is about a man’s missing wife, who is a journalist:
You might also be interested in my September 2024 warning (nonfiction) about Stephen Miller:
Regarding the pond exploration, it captured the childs wonder, like finding a great new book.
As Clint Eastwood once said “Too many idiots. Not enough bullets!” Sometimes I wish I had my own gun. Okay, a water gun, but still.