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“No! The manager buys from me! I’m staying here for a while!”
“Where is he?”
“Extended vacation! Okay? Extended vacation!”
Dead.
“Get the fuck offa me cocksucker—”
His face goes back in the toilet. A full two cigarettes after he stops struggling I let go.
I get up, walk out of the shitter. The mess in the living room. I put Benny’s gun in his dead hand and aim at the unconscious Cyclops thug.
In this complex a gunshot goes unnoticed.
20
Graham Clevenger: born in Wyoming.
I forget where. North end of the state. I remember that much. He said his childhood was spent on a cattle ranch doing the kind of thing real cowboys do. Herd cattle, cook chili, drink and fight. When he was eighteen he enlisted into the Navy. Being a former Marine that is something I never let him live down.
The service took him here. He said he was glad for it; he’s got family here. After his tour he decided to stay for a while because his girlfriend at the time, a gal by the name of Molly, lived here. He joined the Saint Ansgar PD after he watched me in action. No joke.
I was actively engaged in a pursuit with a guy by the name of Denton Philips. They called him “Hulk” on the street. He was a huge man who abused his size and used it as the because I can reason when it came to bullying folks and beating up women. He had some gang affiliations, a rap sheet for things like assault, battery, domestic violence, resisting, armed this and that and drug charges.
Hulk was wanted for beating a man severely in a bar fight. Hulk pounded him into the tabletop and left, throwing over chairs and smashing beer bottles on his way out. Man-child in a temper tantrum. Apparently once Hulk was spun up everyone had to suffer through his bullshit fits.
The guy Hulk beat died later on in the hospital. Brain bleed. I hear the surgeon opened the guy’s skull and drained it, went the whole nine yards but the thing was hosed before he got there. Hulk was looking at some real time for this.
Hulk disapproved.
A few nights after the guy died, some unnamed beat cop did a traffic stop on Hulk. Seven miles away Clevenger was sitting down to dinner on an outside patio with Molly. He was going to be discharged from the Navy in another month.
The beat cop, a veteran guy who was never getting out of patrol, made two mistakes. His first was he called out the plate to Dispatch and then approached the car before he received the return. Sign of complacency. You want to get up on that car before they can stash their dope or pull a gun, but hear your return first.
If he’d waited he would have heard the warning that the registered owner had a homicide warrant. But he didn’t. The beat cop approached Hulk’s car. Did the whole spiel. Evening. My name is so-and-so, I work for the Saint Ansgar PD and the reason I stopped you...Hulk had his license ready and was offering it before the cop asked. A set up. Just a worm on a line.
The second mistake: Hulk held the license inside the window enough to where he’d have leverage over the cop. What the guy should have done is told Hulk to reach out the window.
In a quick flash Hulk dropped the license, grabbed the cop by the wrist and gunned the engine.
Just like that we have what we call in the biz an oh shit moment.
He held onto the beat cop just long enough to be trouble. The beat cop was wearing steel-toed shoes and got his left foot run over by the vehicle as it took off. Hulk let go and the beat cop collapsed into the street. The steel toe is actually just a dome of metal over the toe in the boot, which, when the weight of a car is applied to it, fails miserably. The steel toe dome smashed down, severing all five toes on the cop’s foot. Later the beat cop said he missed the return because he was speaking with the driver and turned his radio down so he wouldn’t have to shout over it.
I heard the return on the radio. A moment later I heard a cop scream officer down. Every available unit started speeding that way.
I was close by. Homicide warrant and officer down is a good way to get me focused. My coffee and sandwich dropped to the ground as I bolted for my car.
I went hunting and in no time I found my prey.
Hulk saw another cop car in his rearview and he went apeshit. Some perps decide that if they’re going down, they’re going down in a ball of fire. Forget stoplights, other traffic, pedestrians. He was going to escape or he was going to wreck the city on his way out. I really thought about shooting him. Just drawing my iron and firing right through my windshield into the back of his head. I was already under a microscope for pistol-whipping a john who had brutally raped a whore a few months back so I decided to let this one play out in traffic. If Hulk killed someone in that neighborhood it would probably be a drug dealer anyways.
The car chase went as chases do. Hulk drove the wrong way in traffic for a spell until a semi-truck came nose-to-nose with him. He ran every red light. Doubled the speed limit. Went over curbs. This went on for a few minutes and then one of the SAPD guys ahead of us deployed some variation of a spike strip. Hulk hit it with all four tires. Effective. Hulk gunned the engine even harder as the car was struggling more. We were three blocks away from Clevenger.
The precinct captain got on the air and told us to end this thing quick. We were leaving the rough neighborhoods and getting into the classier ones. I guess he just wanted us to wave our magic wands and safely bring all vehicles to a complete stop.
Hulk fought his steering wheel to maintain some semblance of control while traveling fast enough to lose the devil. He couldn’t shake me, though. He was heading for the Mannsmith Memorial Bridge.
