Someone could crash their horse and buggy into a creek and I could jump in and save them.

Or maybe a troop of Boy Scouts could get attacked, en masse, by a horde of garter snakes.  I could whip out my handy-dandy duty knife, slice said Boy Scouts open and suck out the snake poison, thus saving their lives while nearly dying doing it.

Ah, the hero.

Sometimes those fantasies are just a weeeeeeee bit more mundane.

Maybe a DUI will happen right in front of me.  Maybe someone will toss out their McDonald’s bag right in front of me.

Or maybe a red car will come up behind me and tail me for the better part of five miles.  Maybe I’ll watch it in the rearview, wondering why his headlights are getting larger…smaller…larger…smaller.  Wondering why his headlights are dancing left…right…left…right.

I got excited ’cause both of those are the telltale signs of a DUI.  Been a while since I had one so this was going to end a fabulous day on an even more fabulous note.

(a fabulous note for me…’cause really, a DUI ain’t fabulous for the driver.  Not even close.)

(see…I have an odd job…when I’m having a good day then someone else is having, by definition, a really REALLY shitty day)

So I’m watching this red car in my rearview and talking to my rider and what the hell happens?

Yeah, he passes me.

I’m sorry, let me back up a little bit.

He passes me…while my cruise is set at 55 miles per honking hour.

In a 55 zone.

For a second, I was too stunned to even react.  Passing me while I did exactly the speed limit?  Surely no one is that stupid?

See, I’ve got no problem if I’m traveling below the limit and you want to pass.  Totally legal and totally cool with me.  But if there is no room between how fast I’m going and the top of the limit?

Well, then, that’s just stupid, int’nit?

Welcome to the world of a stupid kid.

To his credit, he did realize he was passing a cop.

Just as he got about halfway through the pass.  I’m guessing he looked up finally, and saw all the purty badges and stars and giant SHERIFF’S POLICE lettering reflected in the soft glow of his blue-white headlights.

His car’s front end dug down deep into the asphalt as he suddenly tried to stop.  As he suddenly tried to get back behind me.

Problem was, he was already out there, baby.  Already flying – going commando – in the opposite lane.

And knew I’d seen him.  Or assumed it.

Dumbass hesitated.  Cars are coming toward him and he was running next to me like we’re racing.  About 736 hours later, he finally committed and completed the pass.  Sort of like making a pass at your best friend’s girl.  Once you’ve started, the intent of the deed is already done.  Gotta keep going.  No way you can take that back

Plus, I’d already lit him up.  Soon as he’d gotten halfway through his particular version of dropping trou, I banged on my lights.

And he instantly jammed on his brakes.

Dude….  Really?  Go around a cop, get back in front of him, and brake immediately?

So we get stopped and me and my rider go up to the window.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“What?”

“What are you doing?”

“Uh…going to work.”

And he finally looked up at me and into my flashlight.

Hah!  Busted!  DUI!  Eyes glassy and bloodshot and I was dancing a little jig.  Right there on the side of the road, dancing the DUI jig.

Okay, not really ’cause that would have looked bad.  Would have looked like I was gloating over someone’s misfortune.

Turns out he worked at Wal-Mart (should have arrested him then and there for servicing Satan, but everybody’s gotta work…if you can dig it)

Also turns out he wasn’t drunk, just a dumbass kid.

“Why’d you pass me?”

“What?”

“Why did you pass me?  I was going 55.  This is a 55 zone.”

“Uh…I was going 52 behind you.”

“And how fast did you have to go to get around me?”

“Uh….”

His answers sort of petered out after that.

But his texting never did.  Phone sitting right on the passenger seat, within easy reach.

Hmmmm…texing on a dark night, maybe?  Texting while heading to work in the belly of Satan, perhaps?

Texting up until that very scary moment when you bothered to look up and realize that car next to you wasn’t just a white sedan, but the poh-poh?

So maybe, just maybe, if all that happened, and he was a decent kid, I’d let him go with a warning not to be quite so stupid in the future, though I probably wouldn’t say it quite like that.

If all that happened.

And if it did, I’d finish up, then see about that thing with the horse and buggy in the creek.

Hero indeed.

Even as it awed me.

He was a 20-year old loser, previously convicted of sex with an underage girl, in my sights for sex with more underage girls, for sexually explicit contact via text, for setting up young girls for meetings, for whatever else I could think of.

And yet as I read his 28,492 text messages from that three month period between when he was released from jail after serving his first conviction and when I picked him up for playing basketball on school grounds and began my investigation, I couldn’t help but be horrified and amazed by what he’d done.

Understand that there were so many text conversations it was impossible to keep track of them individually.  Every test was presented to me in chronological order.  So one conversation might be texts 1, 4, 15, and 53 while a second conversation was texts 2,6, 38, and 103.

I had a programmer friend, Jim Van Fleet, write me a program that separated out each conversation.  He gave me a file for each phone number and made it incredibly easy to follow each conversation.  But he also gave me a master file that he programmed to be color-coded.  The conversations were all jumbled together in chronological order, but were identifiable by color.

What rocked my socks when I looked at the color-coded file was how many conversations my offender could juggle at any given time.  Put this fucker in Ringling Bros., Barnum & Bailey, juggling burning things and he’d make a mint!  He was bouncing between four, five, seven, ten young women at once.

What stunned me was that every conversation was somewhere different.  One girl he’d just met, while another he’d known for a few months and still others he’d known for years.  His conquest had a very specific trajectory and he knew where every girl was on that trajectory.

Not once did he get confused about who was who and who was where.

I immediately understood the trajectory when I noticed the patterns in his use of language.  Crouched and hidden in the middle of all these seemingly random conversations -

(…u goin 2 skool 2day….)

(…go bowling 2night….)

(…gotta wk w/dad 2mrw….)

- were very particular phrases that I began to see repeated with every girl.  Subtle at first, then more explicit as the girls responded favorably, until he was asking them to sext him and send him pictures so that he could get off.

Long before he got to the size of his unit and the size of their breasts, he spoke of romance and roses.  Each girl was the girl of his dreams, each was the one he wanted to spend his entire life with. Every girl was the only recipient of the secret knowledge of his three month stay in jail.

They were all guinea pigs, too.  This guy would try a phrase or a question with one girl.  If she responded the way he wanted, he’d then apply that same question or phrase with all the girls.  If she didn’t respond how he wanted, the question was gone…never to be seen again.

Yet even within those repeated questions, he tweaked language.  Subtler, sleeker, with power words at the ends of the questions rather than buried in the middle and surrounded by pointless verbiage.

Those questions and phrases, though, were designed for young girls who had mental challenges, who were from broken homes with little parental support, who were victims of previous sexual abuse.  Thus his language was intended specifically to allay their fears and offer them a vision of how they believed life should be.

In one case, my guy texted an adult woman, her number given him by his enabling mother.  He used the same language with her, the same conversation trajectory, and couldn’t understand why it didn’t work.

It was because this woman saw the train wreck coming.  She’d been around the block a time or two, had probably heard these lines when she was in junior high school, and knew precisely where his texts about working out in jail and “getting bigger” were leading.

And she was right.  With the younger girls, his funny, joking texts about exercising and getting bigger invariably led (in as straight a fucking line as I’ve ever seen) to texts about his cock getting bigger while in jail.

The older woman shut him down immediately and never answered his texts again.

The younger girls, being on the harsh side of desperate for contact and for male attention, never stopped answering him.

He took the young girls from general questions to specific questions, from general statements to specific questions, used poetry along the way, and kept them on the string.

Don’t get me wrong…Shakespeare this fucker ain’t.  His use of language was a clunky, high school level use of language, but for those particular girls (girls he sought specifically, I believe, because they did have emotion and mental issues) the language was beautiful.

One of his victims, a 14-year old girl who I interviewed five times, told me repeatedly that he loved her more than anyone had ever loved her.  She got angry at me, cried at me, yelled at me, told me to fuck off constantly, stormed out of interviews (and when she did finally tell everything, it wasn’t to me).

But she could quote many of his texts verbatim.  The promise of forever, the promise of a marriage, the promise of love, the poems, the promise of a ring (which he did eventually buy her and reminded her of constantly in later texts).  She could recite so many of those texts off the top of her head it made me want to throw up.

(There is nothing so sad as interviewing a 14-year old at her school, in a counselor’s office, while the victim eats lunch, and listening to her recite bad love poetry as though it is the key to the universe.)

But in all his manipulation of language, I found the key to him.  I used his use of language to try and get him to tell me everything.  While I don’t think he ever did, I managed to get quite a bit…including his admission of having sex with the 14-year old.

So for the next five years, he’ll be using his language in the Illinois State Prison, though I don’t think it’ll go over as well as it did with those young girls.  In fact, I suspect he’ll get an entirely different reaction.

We got a call of a registered sex offender playing basketball at a local school.  I arrived and found the offender doing exactly that.  Ultimately I arrested him and it was during the jail interview that things got interesting.

From another deputy, I’d heard there was an underage girl who not only knew the 20-year old offender, but who the offender had been texting.  During the interview about playing ball, I casually asked if he knew this particular 15-year old girl.

He grinned.  ”Oh, yeah, I text her all the time.”

Quickly, I moved on.  Damn sure didn’t want him realizing that he’d just admitted violating a major part of his particular set of sex offender restrictions.

No contact, in any way, with anyone under 18-years old.

But he knew immediately.  While we talked, while he futzed with his Miranda rights form and tried to justify being on the school grounds, he got less cooperative.  Every answer, even to basic questions about his job and car, became vague and pissy.

The fact that he’d realized it annoyed me.  I’d wanted to be smooth and casual, as though it was a random question.  Sometimes, in investigations, I want the subject to know I’m hunting them.  I want them to hear my footsteps.  I want them nervous and scared and filling their head with thoughts of prison and boyfriends named Bubba and Tyrone and Hector.

But sometimes, I have to dance with more subtlety, more delicacy.  This seemed to be one of those cases.  I wouldn’t know until weeks later that everything he would go to prison for had already happened and the proof was safely locked away by a telecomm company.

So I began with that one girl.  Her interview led me to another girl, which led me to another and another.  Each of them, and the list grew exponentially in a matter of days, had been pressured for sex via text.

Eventually, I subpeonaed my offender’s texts.  They covered mid-December, when he got out of jail on his first sex offense conviction, to the day I arrested him for being on the school grounds three months later.

Twenty-eight thousand, four hundred, and ninety-two.

Scores of conversations.  Some with Mom, some with friends.

Most with women.

Nearly all underage women.

Reading those conversations was when I realized what a predator he actually was.  It wasn’t just about the girl he’d previously been convicted of molesting, who’d been four years younger than him at the time of that conviction.  It wasn’t just about having sex with a Special Olympics athlete (which was a theme I’d find again and again in this investigation).  It wasn’t just about sex (which was his ultimate excuse…that he was a sex addict).

It was about manipulation.  It was about exploitation.  It was about self-gratification, the consequences be damned.

The problem with the texts was that they were in chronological order.  In other words, if he was carrying on eight or ten different conversations at once, those texts came in the order he sent and received them.  It made following the through-lines of each conversation incredibly difficult…at least for a Luddite like me.

So I asked a programmer friend to write a program which would separate those conversations.  I figured it’d take him a few days, maybe a week.  Yeah, it was like a half hour.  Write a few lines of code, run the thing, write a few more lines to tweak, done.

His program blew me away.  It separated out a file for each individual conversation, still in time order, so I could easily follow any conversation I wanted.  But it also gave me a total file that color-coded the conversations, each recipient with a different color.  Seeing those colors piled on top of each other in a such frenzy reminded me of one of Pollock’s drip paintings.

I read those messages for weeks.  Built white board displays so I could cross reference them.  Made lists of names and numbers that appeared randomly, tried to hook those to known names and numbers.  Compared messages sent on a particular date to a  particular friend with others sent at a different time to a different friend, but referencing the same incident.

What I found, ultimately, was a man with a desperate need for sex, but one that he was unable to consummate with adult women.  Therefore, he went after girls who hadn’t the tools to put him off.  These girls were Special Olympics athletes, they were from broken homes, they were victims of previous sexual abuse.

One victim, a 14-year old, had been victimized, in fact, by her father and stepfather.  I believe she also had been by one of her mother’s boyfriends, though I could never prove it.  This girl, so fragile and yet one of the toughest people I’ve ever met, told me over and over and over again that they loved each other.

He seduced her with marriage plans and even bought her a ring.  He texted her hundreds of times a day, spinning out a fantasy world where she would never get hurt again.

Of course she responded to that. Of course it was exactly what she wanted to hear.  She’d grown up in a sordid world, one filled with depravity and darkness and painful, stolen sex masked as love and when she had a chance at love that didn’t hurt, she jumped at it.

Of course she refused to tell me.  She refused to lay out what he’d done because even though she knew it was probably wrong, it was the only love she’d ever been shown that didn’t come with pain automatically attached.

So I kept digging and interviewing and asking and talking and thinking and then…in the midst of those 28,492 texts, I found a short conversation between the 14-year old and my offender.  She mentioned stomach pain.  He asked why she hurt.  She said he knew exactly why.

And he answered that it couldn’t be his fault because he hadn’t gotten it all the way in.

Sometimes I’m not a particularly smart cop, but that is what we in the trade call a clue.  Hell, that is what we in the trade call a fucking smoking gun.

The investigation wrapped pretty quickly after that.  I interviewed him a last time (on video tape).  He denied.  I showed him the series of texts.  He rationalized, justified, obfuscated.

Then a grand jury, some negotiations back and forth, and a plea agreement that will leave him in prison for five years.

So this case that was about manipulation and exploitation was, for me, about self-control.  Because I never throttled him, nor did I put a double tap behind his ear and dump him in a ditch for the vultures to dine upon.

That would have just made him a victim of cannibalism.

It’s called failure to dim and it’s a brilliant indicator of someone who might be impaired.  If they drive around without ever dimming their headlights, they might well be three…or four…or eight sheets to the wind.

So a few nights ago, I’m bopping along, patrolling my roads, when I see a car a good mile away.  They’re coming along and I’m watching and watching.  Then my hand goes up over my eyes ’cause they ain’t making no kind’a move to dim those square heads.

Now, once upon a time, when the economy was good and I was on nights, I was one of the mini-DUI Kings.  I wasn’t the department leader, but I was certainly in the Top 2.  But that was many years ago in a galaxy populated by a good economy and more officers on the road.  It’s been probably two years since I had a night time DUI and nearly a year since I had one at all.

And since this is an incredibly perverse profession – where a good day for me is, by definition, a bad day for someone else – I started to get excited.  See, I love hammering DUIs…call it the residual baggage of people in my life getting hit and hurt by drunken assholes wielding heavy cars like weapons.

So, as the car is coming my way, I start getting my shit together: get the portable Breathalyzer ready, make sure my ticket book and tow sheets are handy, start looking for a good place to pull him over that’s safe and offers a reasonably flat surface on which he can do some sobriety tests.

He keeps coming, still doesn’t dim his headlights, and finally passes.

Going really slow.

Like Little Old Blue Haired Lady Slow.

Superslow.

Like Creepy White Van Stalking Teen-Aged Girls Slow.

That, in and of itself, is also a clue.  Sometimes, drunks are so intent on using their signal or staying in the lane that they end up driving twenty under the limit.

So now I’m really excited.  This is going to be a fun night.  But I also notice, as he passes, that he has only one taillight.

Dink.  Another reason to stop him.

I turn around, get him pulled over, and realize it’s a Pimp Daddy Caddy.  Late ’70s, gleaming white, huge tailfins, about 47.4 feet long and half as wide.

There’s a sign in the back window, behind the driver: ‘Just Married.’

And the passenger?  A chick wearing a white wedding dress.

Jack-freaking-pot.  Coming back from a wedding reception where you know – you know – they got tanked.

I get even more excited.

Get up to the car and the window doesn’t come down so the driver opens the door.

And I get blasted with the thickest, funkest stench’o'booze what’s ever assaulted me.  I’m almost instantly drunk just from the contact high!

Dude, it’s like Christmastime!  This is going to be a fabulous DUI.

Start going through my patter, ask for his license and insurance.

He’s clear as a bell.  No slurred words, no red eyes, no hesitation.  She’s the same way, but she also looks a bit angry.

“Have you been drinking?” I asked.

“Yeah, a while ago.”

“And yet…you smell like a cheap brewery.”

She was instantly steamed.  ”Son of a bitch spilled all over me.”

When I looked, I noticed her beautiful white dress, at least in the front, had quite the yellow tinge.  Could’a been piss…smelled like beer.

“This son of a bitch?” I asked, pointing at the groom.

“No, no, the other one.”

“Ah.”  I paused.  ”So where you guys headed?”

They got instantly silent.  He looked at his feet, then at her, then at his feet, then at me.  Mouth worked, but nothing’s came out.

And she was as beet red as anyone I’d ever seen.  In fact, I’m not sure I’d ever seen anyone blush this much.  It was all I could do not to laugh.

“Uh…,” he said.  Then looked at her again.  ”The hotel.”

“Ah.  Well…have fun with that.”

hehehehe…I can be a monstrous butthead.

“Why were you driving so slowly?”

Again, he looked at her and she blushed.  Hardcore cherry red this time and her hands instantly came together in her lap.  They’d been on the door and in between them on the seat.

And body language says…hands were…exploring?

“Uh…no reason.  Watching for deer?”

“Are you asking me or telling me?”

I left them with that and went to check them out.  They were fine.  Just married and no warrants!  A good way to start the wedding bliss.

Back at the car, I noticed army-issue fatigues in the back seat.  ”Military?”

He nodded.  ”I report for my first duty station Monday.”

“Married on Saturday, leaving her on Monday,” I said.

She giggled, but didn’t say anything.

“Kentucky,” he said.

“Fort Bragg,” I said.

“No, Fort Campbell,” he said.  ”Screamin’ Eagles.”

“Eighty-Second,” I said.  ”Cool.”

“No, 101st.”

I stared at him as she laughed out loud.  At me, I’m pretty sure.

“So obviously I know dick about the military,” I said.

I think she muttered ‘obviously,’ but I’m not sure.  If she did, it didn’t feel malicious so I’m good with that.

I asked him to count backward for me from some number to some other number, fairly well convinced at this point he wasn’t drunk.

And he promptly screwed it up.  Badly.

“Dude, what’s up?  You nervous?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why?”

He looked back at her.  She blushed again.

“Right,” I said.  ”First night nerves.”

I leaned in the car, handed his license back, and whispered, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

And walked back to my squad, whistling.

They were still sitting, looking stunned and embarrassed, as I drove off.

I hope he had a good night.  I hope he had a good night the next night, too, ’cause he’s military now and while everyone in Washington says they want to end the wars, no one has taken a single damned step toward actually doing that.  For all I know, that kid, embarrassed on his wedding night, could already be on his way to his own killing field.

Keep your head down, dude, and make sure you come back for that whacked out Pimp Daddy Caddy.

Under-age drinking party.

Come on…a rural county…summer time?  We get those constantly.

Sometimes we find kids drinking.  Sometimes not.  Sometimes those parties get out of control (a few years ago, two drunk teens ended up dead in a car crash), sometimes they don’t.  Sometimes they’re in houses, sometimes at the canal, sometimes in odd, random places that are difficult to get to.

But because of the toxic brew of kids and booze, we take them fairly seriously.  Thus when I got the call, I got my entire team together, had a little pow wow, and off we went, in search of drinking youths.

Which was…not quite what we found.

When we were still fifty yards away, through the fog, I saw the cars parked in a field entrance.  That surprised me because probably better than three-quarters of the time, the calls are empty.  Some old lady who’s cranked off that teenagers are having fun.  Or a concerned citizen who assumes the worst when they see teenagers together…sort of an updated version of the teenagers-as-monsters movies from the ’50s.

So as I got closer to the cars, I blasted them with my spotlight, expecting to see heads lolling back and forth in the seats, or kids splayed out over hoods, drunk off their asses.

Instead, I immediately see eight or ten pale-like-the-belly-of-a-fish bodies explode from one soybean field, past the cars, and into another soybean field.  And I mean GONE!  Like they never existed.

I know they’re not getting far because they’ve left their cars behind and they’re running into a bean field.  Tends to slow the escape down.

But I jump from my squad anyway, damn near before it stops moving.  “Whoa.  Get your asses back here!  Freeze!”

There are certain clues you look for as a cop.  One of those basic clues is: are they following my orders.  When it comes to a foot chase, the suspects never follow my commands.  They’re scared to death, thinking they’re going to jail.  They run and run and run some more.

So I yell out my commands and sure as hell they -

- Stopped!

Freaked me out so badly I almost didn’t know what to do next.

Luckily, I had my guys with me and they are absolutely professional.  They immediately jumped out of their squads, started running plates, started checking the area looking for others, etc. Top shelf professional.  Best guys on the road.

The problem was, when they started doing their thing, they left me with these eight or ten young men.

“Hey,” I said.  “You guys are naked.”

“Duh,” one of them said, with a tone that actually said, ‘Wow, cain’t get nothing past these professionally trained cops, huh?’

“Why are you naked?”

To this day, I haven’t gotten an adequate answer.

So now I have eight or ten guys in front of me, pale as the moonlight, slowly shrinking in the chill air, and trying to cover themselves.

Except one guy.  He’s very obviously not covering up.  In fact, he’s just staring at me, a satisfied grin on his face.  I half-expected him to give me a thumbs up.

What I almost said was, ‘Somebody get me a camera!  That’s impressive!’

(Which is why he was grinning so big.)

What I actually said was, “What in hell are you guys doing?”

And behind me, I heard my guys laughing.  Did I mention professionals?  Top shelf professionals, I think I wrote.  Yeah, whatever.

“Well, see…uh…,” one of them said.  “I know the guy who lives here and…well…we prank each other a lot.”

“So getting naked for him is a prank?”

He looked confused, standing there still naked.  “What?  No, no, the naked…that’s just…well, we just got naked.  No, the prank was the toilet paper.”

Inside their cars, we found probably fifty empty bags of toilet paper.  No booze, no drugs, no girlie mags.  Just toilet paper wrappers.

“So you’re TPing the house?”

Then they all smiled and I gotta tell you, there is nothing more disconcerting than seeing ten naked guys, each holding their schvantzes while they grin at you.

“Dudes, put your clothes on.”

I had thought I was torturing them by making them stand naked in the chill, but I think they were actually torturing me.  And enjoying the hell out of it.

“Uh,” I  said.  “There isn’t anyone else, is there?  Any chicks, maybe?”

And they all looked so disgusted, like they still believed girls had cooties.  What I realized was that this was a male-bonding thing, not a cross-gender bonding thing.

While they got dressed and my guys finished up their thing, I went and checked the TPing.

And was horrified.

It was terrible.  Utterly, pathetically, mind-numbingly terrible.

“Who’s responsible for this?” I fairly yelled.

Lots of mumbled ‘whats?’ and ‘uhs’ came back at me.

So I marched back to them and said, “What in the hell is all that?  First of all, there are only two or three strands of toilet paper even visible, and secondly, it’s mostly on the ground.”

“Yeah, we bought cheap.”

“One ply?” one of my guys asked.

“Hardly even half-ply,” I said.  “Look guys, don’t go cheap.  See how humid it is?  That shit fell apart before you barely got it out of the package.  So now it’s flaccid.”

“It’s what?”

You guys would be so proud of me.  I did not give him the obvious definition, which would have been more show and tell than anything.  Instead, I continued on exactly how to best TP a house.

“You’ve done this before, haven’t you?” one of them asked me.

“Yeah, but the difference is, I did it better…and dressed.”

“But we were in a hot tub and – ”

“Naked?” I asked.

“Yeah.”  Again, with the tone that implied, ‘Duh.’

“So this isn’t your first communal nude experience.”

“Uh…no?”

At some point, I realized I probably shouldn’t explain to them how to better get away with vandalism.  So I became Mr. Cop.  Furrowed brows and cocked stance and gruff voice.

“It’s three in the morning,” I said.  “You’re playing around a man’s house.  I get you’re pranking his son, but he doesn’t know that.  All he knows is that there are eight or ten guys out here fucking with his castle.”

They blanched, having not thought about where I was taking them.

“Yeah.  What if he’s got a shotgun?”

They got appropriately freaked out by that thought, which was good.  If you can’t scare them with jail, scare them with death, I always say.

I told them to leave and as my guys and I were getting ready to leave, one of the Naked Vandals said, “You want us to clean up first?”

I frowned.  What?  Never had a vandal offer to clean up his mess.  I looked around.  It was pretty clean already.  “Uh…yeah.  Uh…don’t let me find any trash in that farmer’s bean field.”  I frowned and played the hardass again, then I drove away with my guys.

Laughing my ass off and feeling sort of left out.

‘Cause it wasn’t that I’d been smart enough not to do it naked…it was that I hadn’t had the balls to do it naked.

Not even my traffic stop, actually.  A local department had been first to see a car that had been skulking around a local ag place.  Supposedly someone had seen someone in that car with a red gas can.  The thought was they were stealing gas.  The local department, being close, made the traffic stop and waited for me.

I arrived, talked to the driver and passenger, and marveled at how hinked-up they were.  Nervous and fidgety, sweaty, lying through what was left of their teeth.  I absolutely believed those two were as deep in the bullshit as was possible to be.

But I had dick.  I could prove no crime.  I talked to them as long as I legally could, went back and forth again and again over their obviously bullshit stories, but had nothing.  So eventually I let them go.

Which bugged the shit outta me.

I had a rider that night, a woman who works in our civil department but who wants to get out on the road.  So she rides and learns what she can.  The stop bugged her, too.  We both stood there, watching the car drive away, and I’d bet good money that we both had our heads cocked like a dog seeing something it didn’t understand.

As we’re standing there, it occurred to me that we were on a straight line away from the ag plant.

So I backtracked.  Not looking for anything specifically, just seeing what there was to see.

While we were looking around a communications tower location, I said to my rider, “Ninety-nine times out of 100, there’s nothing to see.”

We’d stopped there because of the sheer amount of copper at those installations.  They constantly get hit by thieves.  I just wanted to make sure.  So we checked it and, as I’d predicted, found nothing.

But less than a ten of a mile up the road, we found some items in the ditch.

My gut said, ‘Dude, this is connected.  This goes with that car you just let go.’

I gloved both of us up so we could investigate and the first thing we found was a length of bicycle inner-tube, with a piece of PVC pipe on one end.  When I picked it up, my rider wrinkled her nose and commented about the smell.  I didn’t smell anything because my sinuses absolutely suck.

But even I noticed the damn thing was soaking wet.  My sniffer may not work all that well, but my eyes are still pretty good.  This tube was dripping wet.  So I put it down and turned my attention to the coolers.

I had her stand behind me, telling her it could be dangerous, pointed the top away from me, and began unscrewing.  My plan, which I thought a good one [at the time] was to slowly open the container, get the top off, and just get a light whiff to make sure it was anhydrous.  Once I’d confirmed it, then I’d get the official machinery moving.

Look, the problem is that the official machinery is fucking expensive and time consuming.  It’s a huge use of resources.  Fire departments, health departments, cops, ambulances, possibly haz-mat crews.  It’s no small undertaking so I wanted to be sure.

(As my rider pointed out, can you imagine if we’d called everyone out first?  Everyone’s moving and getting amped up ’cause they’ve got a call and teh cooler turns out to be full of…water?  Holy balls, Batman, they’d'a taken the cost of that call-out outta my paycheck until…like…2027!)

I have limited experience with meth labs.  I don’t try to be something I’m not, to know more than I know.  I try to do things as well as I know how, as well as I’ve been trained.  But I also try to draw from experience.  And my experience is that those containers only ever contain fumes, or maybe traces of residue.

Never have I had a container that had anhydrous still in it.

And I’ve damn sure never had one that was under pressure.

So I’m turning that lid…slowly…slowly…ever so slowly.

BOOM!

Fucking exploded off and I damn near shit myself.

In all the crazy shit I’ve done and seen as a copper, real fear doesn’t come along that often.  Usually training takes over and your time is spent playing that out.  Or you’ve seen scary stuff enough that it’s just not scary anymore.  You breathe your way through it, compartmentalize, sort it out, etc.

I was scared when I fought the PCP junkie for 14 minutes in an attempt to retrieve my gun.

And I was scared to death when that lid came off that cooler.

In seconds, snot had plugged everything.  My eyes were on fire and gushing tears as though someone had hooked up a damned water hose to the back of my head, my sinuses felt like a bomb had gone off deep in my head.  The upper part of my throat was burning.  I was spitting up a nasty chemical something.

For just a few seconds, I thought I was done for.  I thought I’d ingested the chemical, rather than getting doused with fumes.  It was that strong.  There was no way, I thought, this was simple fumes.

I checked my uniform and bare arms, looking for signs, while my rider asked – I think, some of this is a bit hazy – if I was okay.  I told her to call an ambulance and she laughed.

Because that is exactly the kind of joke I would make.  See, this was one of those moments when my carefree, fun-loving, constant jokes personality got me in trouble.

But when I looked at her, my face a complete mess, my breath hitching and heavy, her eyes got as big as planets.  She ran to the squad and got the ambulance and cops and fire and everyone else moving.  In other words, she called out the official machinery that I hadn’t wanted to call until I was sure.

Uh…yeah…standing there thinking I might be dead?  That was pretty much all the confirmation I needed.

But my rider had her own moment of hilarity amidst the chaos.  She ran to the squad car, yelling at me, “I don’t even know where the fuck we are!”

So I’m trying to tell her exactly where we are even as I’m slowly dying.  Tough to form words, much less thoughts, with a head full of anhydrous ammonia.

It wasn’t long before everyone was there, scurrying all over the scene and trying to figure out exactly what had happened.  The rest of the night – that I can tell you about right now, maybe more if and when there is a conclusion to what happened after I got out of the hospital – was a blur.

I do remember sitting in the ambulance [I had actually just refused transport to the hospital.  Either I thought I was okay enough to drive myself or I really thought I was a Man of Steel] and having my partner from the Academy calmly ask for my weapon.

“Ain’t giving you my gun,” I said.

“Yeah, you are…and you’re keys, too.”

“How the hell am I supposed to drive myself to the hospital if you have my keys?”

“Yeah, about that…sit down and shut up.”

Apparently it was decided, somewhere higher up the food chain than little ol’ me, that me and my rider were going to the hospital and doing it via ambulance.

And then my rider decided to give me grief.  “So, dude, what about that 99 times out of 10 thing?”

“Well…I don’t know…call this the one, I guess.”

But it was nice, comforting, to have so many people being anxious both for and about me; medics and cops, firemen, nurses, even reporters.  However, all of them took the opportunity to yell at me for opening the thing before grudgingly admitting they were mostly glad I wasn’t dead.

Yeah, you read that right.  They yelled at me first, then said the other.

Like an afterthought.

Thanks, guys.

When I’d been at the Sheriff’s Office like twenty minutes or something, I answered the phone and got this:

“I need to report a robbery.”

“OmigoshhangonletmegetapenI’llgetallyourinformation.”

It was very exciting.  Not quite the first time I picked up the phone but close, and here was a guy reporting a robbery.

“When did it happen?”

He thought for a bit and said, “Well, I’ve been back six months.  Lived in Chicago for the better part of probably 18 years.”

I stopped writing.

Then, full of thoughtful analysis, he said, “I’m gonna say just about 19 years ago.  About twenty.”

Okay, well, first of all, turns out he wanted to report a residential burglary, not a robbery.  And second of all…well…it was twenty years ago.

That call didn’t last much longer.  To this day, though, I’m convinced it was a real call and not one of my new co-workers screwing with me…though that has happened on the odd occasion.

The point here is we get strange phone calls.

About a week ago, we get this:

“Yeah, I’ve got some dope.”

“Uh…okay,” the dispatcher said.  “And?”

“Well, you should come get it.”

A few minutes after this call, dispatch calls me.  “Uh…30?”

“Go ahead.”

“Can you respond to [blah blah blah address]?”

“Ten-four.  What’s the problem?”

“Uh…not really sure.  But apparently he’s got some dope.”

He chuckled and off I went.  I’ve gotten those calls before.  Usually, it’s someone who has partaken, along with a ‘friend,’ of said dope stash.  Then the ‘friend’ uses more than they’ve paid for and the owner of said stash calls in a huff and wants to file a complaint for theft.

And yes, there is a direct correlation between the amount of drugs you consume and whether or not you’re inclined to call the cops because someone stole your drugs.

So I get there and am quite surprised to see a local, fairly well-known mope.  Last time I saw him was last summer when I arrested him for battery.  The last time before that was when I arrested him for disorderly conduct.  Before that…battery and disorderly conduct.  Getting the picture?

“James,” I said.  “How’s it shaking?”

“I’ve got some dope.”

“Well, everybody needs something.”

Shaking his head, as though somehow I were the problem, he took me to a strip of land between his and his neighbor’s detached garages.  There was a little jungle in there, the kind of strip that always gets forgotten.  Weeds and old bags of garbage and rusty beer cans.  Sometimes an old license plate or a shirt tossed aside while painting the garage or something.

And sure as shit: dope.

Growing wild.  Illinois ditchweed.  With just a smidgen more than 0.0% THC.  Smoke up, baby!

This crap is everywhere and I say smoke as much as you freakin’ want.  You’ll spend three days puking your guts up.  But harvesting the herb will beautify drainage ditches all over the state so you’ll have done a good thing.

In James’ case, he had quite the nature preserve: eighteen or twenty plants.  The tallest was about 18″ high, while the smallest were less than 6″ tall, but the sheer amount surprised me.

“This ain’t mine.”

“You sure?”

He looked askance at me.  “Really?  You think I’m that stupid?  I’d plant a bunch of weed and then call you about it?”

I opened my mouth but chose instead not to speak.

“I got a kid now, Trey.  I can’t afford to have this shit around.”  His chest puffed a little.  “I’m grown up.”

This from a man in his late ’30s.

“A kid, huh?”

“Well, not mine biologically, but my girlfriend’s.  I call him mine.”

“Good for you, James, good for you.”

I was serious about that part.  James has always been a pain in the ass, but not particularly malicious.  His thing has always been getting drunk (with a quick spliff or two, but not much) and then picking a fight with someone.  And ten times out of ten, he chose the wrong person with whom to fight.  Ten times out of ten, he got his ass beat.  What I arrested was usually the left over, bloody mess.

So I started pulling the weed.  Who knew where it had come from.  Maybe the previous owner had planted it, though there were some plants growing out from between the concrete foundation of the garage and the driveway.  Maybe a bird ate up some seeds somewhere and crapped them out under the tree.  I took a Wal-Mart bag from James, dumped the plants in, and tossed the bag in my squad trunk.

“You know,” I said.  “I’m surprised you didn’t pull it, dry it, roll it, and smoke it.”

He nodded.  “I’m grown up.”

“Right.  I forgot.”

“Kiss my ass, Trey.”

Then he paused, winked at me, and said, “Dude, you want a beer?”

And suddenly all was right with the world.  That was my good old James, always good for a few beers and then a few arrests.

“Do you see it?  Can you tell me what color the sky is?  I promise you she will bring that brand new baby into court with her.  I guarantee she will use it to keep him out of jail.”

It was a case of aggravated domestic battery, of assault with a deadly weapon, with some misdemeanors piled on top.  It had finally come to trial, more than a year after it happened and while I stood there, a giant bag of evidence containing the gun he put against her head and the knife he sliced her up with, victim and suspect came in together.

Yeah, it went downhill from there.

http://www.treyrbarker.com/2011/05/copstories-baby-mama/

Finally, six weeks after the bullshit non-trial, sentencing happened a few days ago.

And, as I and everyone else had predicted, the victim came to court waving the new baby around.  They pleaded with the judge that the batterer was the only one working, that he had two jobs including one as a wielder that he’d had for nearly a decade (though he substantiated neither job and his statement was at odds with his telling me he’d been unemployed for a while when I arrested him), that he was the glue holding the family together.

In other words, exactly what I wrote would happen.

But there was one tiny thing I didn’t see.

Another kid.

Just after getting out of jail, he apparently when to his other baby mama and got custody of his previous young daughter.  So when he was in court, in other words, he had two kids to wave around.

Because of the presiding judge, whose track record with cases in which I’m involved is less than brilliant, I expected the batterer to get a few years probation, some anger counseling, and fines.

When the judge came back after a short recess, he started talking.  And talked.  And talked.  While he’s an incredibly well-educated man, his bench speeches always remind me of the grown-ups in the ‘Peanuts’ cartoons.  In a previous case I had in front of him, he leaned back in his chair, stared at the ceiling, clasped his hands over his stomach with forefingers up like a church steeple, and explained that he wasn’t going to issue a ruling that day.  But after 30 minutes of convoluted logic, he issued a ruling.

In this case, he constantly harkened back to the batterer having two children to support and that made me a little crazy.  I could see him working his way into no jail time.

I don’t have much of a poker face and I kept expecting either the State’s Attorney or the court security officer to box my ears and tell me to calm the hell down.

But then the judge did something surprising.

He did the right thing.

The State’s Attorney had asked for the maximum of six months in the county cross-bar hotel.  The defense attorney had asked for zero jail time because of the jobs and children.

But the judge couldn’t square the circle.  He couldn’t figure out how the batterer was unemployed for a while, according to his arrest statement, but employed for nine years according to his court statement.

And he kept coming back to the gun and knife.

It perturbed the judge that the batterer had put a gun against the victim’s head.  It concerned him that the batterer had sliced open the victim’s belly and thigh.

So after 45 minutes, the judge sentenced the batterer to four months in jail.  And because it was a violent domestic, he’ll have to serve the entire four months.  There will be no good time.  Four solid months.

Plus a few years’ worth of probation and some sort of anger counseling.  And lots of fines and court costs.

Yeah, the victim will be there when he gets out and he absolutely will beat her again, I’ve no doubt.  But for four months, anyway, he’ll be locked away.  He won’t think about what he did, he won’t discover it was the wrong thing.  He won’t make amends or even believe he has to.

But he will be locked away for 120 days.

It’s retribution rather than rehabilitation and I definitely believe in rehabilitation.

But sometimes, with some people, there is no rehab, there is only raising their cost of doing business.

“So where’d you get the gun?”

“Was fishing…over in Streator.”

“Yeah?  What kind of bait you use for pistol-fishing?”

“Dude asked me for a cigarette.”

“In exchange for the gun?”

“No, man, don’t be like that.  I was fishing.  Dude came to me, asked for a cigarette.  I gave him one.”

“Smoking’s bad for you health.”

“So’s getting arrested.”

“Fair enough.  So you give him a cigarette.”

“Yeah.  Then he asks to borrow $150.”

“And?”

“I gave it.  Said he’d pay me back later.”

“Wow, generous.  What was his name?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you got a number so we can call him.”

“Uh…no.”

“Then you must have given him your phone number.”

“Uh…yeah?”

“Are you asking me or telling me?”

“Man, why you being a dick?  I ain’t done nothing wrong.”

“You sliced up your girlfriend.”

“Aw, I didn’t do that.  She musta done it herself.”

“How’d she do that?”

“Uh…we was fighting over the phone.  She musta done it, accidental-like, with that pointy thing.  Comes with the phone…for the screen.”

“The stylus?”

“Yeah, the stylin.’”

“So you gave this guy, who’s name and phone number you didn’t know, 150 bucks.”

“And a cigarette.”

“And a cigarette.”

“Yeah.  So then he gave me the gun.  Said I could hold it until he paid me back.”

“So you gave it to your friends.”

“Huh?”

“That’s what you told me yesterday.”

The previous evening, before I arrested him for domestic battery on his girlfriend, I’d asked him about the gun, which he’d allegedly put to her head.  He’d told me it wasn’t in the house because his friends might have picked it up.

“Have you ever been to Virginia?”

“What?”

“Come on, you weren’t fishing.  You stole that gun.”

“Didn’t steal it.”

“You stole it from a shop in Virginia.”

“Damn sure didn’t steal it from Virginia.”

“I was on the phone with the ATF just this morning.”

“ATF’s wrong.”

In fact, there had been a theft at a gun shop in Virginia two years earlier, and it was the abuser’s type of gun, but they were cheap Czechoslovakian things with no serial numbers so who knew for sure.

“Man, fuck you.  I’m done.”

Arms across his chest and that was that.

I charged him with a pile of felonies and went home to dinner feeling fine.  Justice for the victim, plus she got her stuff out of the house and moved in with her sister.  Justice for the state with a serial abuser off the streets.  Justice for everyone else in that a gang-banger’s gun – with who knows how many bodies attached – was also off the street.

Me and my two partners had a good day.

Now it’s a year-plus later and the trial is scheduled to start…fifteen minutes ago.  I’m near the courtroom with the victim’s advocate, bag of evidence in my hand (gun, knife, various other things) and abuser is late.

Curiously, so is the victim.

I’m starting to fume.  I’ve seen this before.  I know the color of the sky.

Then abuser and abused arrive…together.  In fact, she drove him because he’s revoked.  But they did enter the building separately, just to preserve appearances.

My fuming got worse.

See, I’m not much of a poker player sometimes.  On crap like that, it’s incredibly hard for me to be professional.  I want to get in the victim’s face and demand an answer.  He had beaten her senseless.  He had kept her locked up in the house for hours on end.  He had stolen her car keys so she couldn’t leave, even taking them to work with him.

He had put a loaded gun to her head.

He had sliced her across the belly (which becomes important later so remember it).  He had sliced her thigh.

His brother had threatened to kill her.

So by all means, fucking move back in with him.  ‘Cause nothing says love like massive, regular beatings.

I did not get in her face.  Restrained both by disgust at myself and by the victim’s advocate, who knows me only too well.

So we’re going to trial, then we’re not going to trial.  Then we are going, then we’re not going.  Then we are, then we’re not.

Then the State’s Attorney asks me what I think of the deal he’s floating.

Again with that damned poker face.

It’s a bullshit deal.  It dismisses all the felonies for two piss-ass misdemeanors.  Domestic battery and possession of a firearm with a FOID card (an Illinois registration thing).

They agree to that deal and we’re going to do sentencing right then.  Everybody wants to get it done.

But the victim is crying to the victim’s advocate that the abuser is the only one with a job.  She can’t work because she’s pregnant and what is she going to do if he goes to jail?

So suddenly the sentencing is put off.  Suddenly, it’s not a problem to wait a month.

Her baby – his baby – is due in two weeks.

Do you see it?  Can you tell me what color the sky is?  I promise you she will bring that brand new baby into court with her.  I guarantee she will use it to keep him out of jail.

It’ll work and soon after, he’ll beat her again.  We will go through all of this again.  Or the cops next door will.  Or the cops in Chicago or where ever else they end up.

Remember where he cut her?  That’s right, across the belly.

Come on…that wasn’t a random cut in the middle of a fight.  That was a message.  Maybe she was pregnant at the time and miscarried before getting pregnant again.  Maybe she was talking about wanting to be pregnant.  Maybe he wanted her to get pregnant.

Whatever the case, it was not a random cut.

And it won’t be next time, either.

Now it’s just getting boring.

And more illogical.

“Good afternoon.  Deputy Barker with the Sheriff’s Office.  The reason I stopped you today is because you were moving a little quick coming out of Princeton.”

“Was I?”

“Yes, you were, ma’am.”

“Oh.  Well, I was trying to set my cruise control.”

“Really?  Where were you setting it?”

[loooooooong hesitation]

“Uh…56.”

[Okay, a quick aside, this is complete bullshit.  No one sets their cruise at 56.  If they're setting it that slow, it's 55 because one mile over doesn't make any sense at all.  What she was trying to say with this was, 'I'll admit I was speeding so you'll think I'm a truthful person, but I refuse to tell you how fast I was actually going...don't want to get myself in trouble, you see.']

“Fifty-six, huh?”

“Yes.”

“Then I wonder how I clocked you at 72.”

[silence]

“Hang tight, ma’am, and I’ll be right back with you.”