Chapter 54: Learning the Trade

Wednesday was my first full day on patrol, and pretty much went like Tuesday afternoon. Since the shift started at 0800, the graveyard shift patrolled the school zones in the morning. Otherwise, I was routed back over towards East Matucket, with Jerry pointing out various places to keep an eye out for. Some of it was amusing, such as when he pointed out a couple of popular places where high school students were likely to take their dates Friday and Saturday nights. “How hard do we come down on them for that?” I asked, remembering my own dating days.

He made a waffling motion with his hand. “Eh. Technically, it’s against the law, a violation of public morals and decency or something like that. Normally you just want them to move it along and go home. It’s not so much that anybody has a big whoop-tee-do about high school kids doing what high school kids do. What you want to be sure of is that the young lady in question is there voluntarily. Sometimes they’re angrier than their boyfriend about the interruption, but sometimes you’ll find a girl who thinks he’s going too far. That’s different.”

“Ever come across that?”

He nodded. “It happens. When I am making that patrol, I just drive through the area slowly, with the lights on. If I see a girl trying to get my attention, then I get involved.”

“And?”

“Well, most of the time it’s just a misunderstanding. You know, Romeo thinks Juliette is coming across and Juliette has either changed her mind or Romeo made a mistake. I might chew them out for being stupid. Still, you have to be careful. There was one time where Juliette was screaming, and Romeo was in the middle of raping her, I mean, real punch-her-in-the-face-and tear-her-clothes-off rape. He ended up in jail over that one. Turned out he had a history of that sort of thing.”

It sounded almost like Candy Pants Holden to me, but I knew his family would have gotten him out of anything. I mentioned to Jerry I once knew a guy just like that. He just nodded.

Thursday morning, I made my first felony arrest. Jerry and I were sitting there at the corner of Clemson and East Matucket when a brown Taurus blew through a red light right in front of us. I glanced over at Jerry and commented, “You’re kidding me, right?”

“Go get him, Tackleberry!”

I hit both the lights and the siren before heading out into the intersection. I didn’t need to get hit by somebody as oblivious as the guy in front of us was. Surprisingly, the guy in front didn’t pull over. He also didn’t speed up to try and escape (good luck with that!) He just plodded along at a bit over forty miles-per-hour, and then pulled into the parking lot of a McDonalds. I followed him in, turning off the siren but keeping the lights going. That didn’t faze him, though, since he pulled right into the drive-thru lane.

I pulled in behind him and radioed in the details and didn’t get back any wants or warrants on the vehicle, which was a blue 2005 Ford Taurus. I walked up to the driver side window slowly because something seemed a bit off about this. For one thing, the driver’s window was still rolled up, and most people roll the window down when they get pulled over, because they know what is about to happen. Instead, this guy was just staring out the windshield, straight ahead. I rapped on the window and said, loudly, “Sir, please roll down your window!”

He ignored this, and as soon as the car in front of him pulled forward in the line, he inched forward. Jerry looked at me from his position, and then ran around to the front of the car and took a position on the front side once it stopped moving. He pounded on the hood and yelled, “STOP!”

It took a second rap on the window before the driver turned his head and smiled at me. “ROLL DOWN YOUR WINDOW!”

That got him moving, and he fumbled around and then lowered the window. “Hello.”

“Sir, please turn off your engine,” I said. I already knew what was going on. This guy was stewed to the gills! The vapors wafting out of the car were enough to give you a contact buzz!

It took another few seconds to get through to the guy that he needed to turn off the engine, then it took several minutes more to get him to give me his license, most of which was involved in getting the license out of his wallet, which he dropped twice. (He first tried to hand me his wallet, but you never took somebody’s wallet. They always claimed you stole from them!) Then after handing me his license, he turned back and tried to drive forward, even though he had turned off the engine. I just glanced at Jerry and rolled my eyes, and he smiled at me.

“Sir, have you been drinking?” I asked. He turned back and focused on me again, and I repeated the question.

“No, officer.”

“Sir, please step out of the car.”

“What’s wrong, officer?”

“Let’s just step out of the car and talk for a moment.”

“Okay.” He fumbled around trying to open the door, so I helped him by opening it from the outside. Then he tried to twist around and exit the car without undoing his seat belt. In theory I was going to get him to stand up and perform a Field Sobriety Test, you know, touch your nose, walk in a straight line, that sort of thing. Forget it. Once he got the seat belt off, he fell out of the car. I barely caught him and kept him from smacking his head on the curb.

By now half the people in the McDonalds were staring at us, and a couple of them were pointing cell phones at us. Meanwhile the drive-thru lane was shut down. This was getting ridiculous. “Hey, Jerry, want to give me a hand here?”

“Yeah.” He came over and we got the guy up and onto a bench. “Who is he?”

I reached into the pocket I had placed his license. “Joseph Wilcox.” I looked at Wolinski. “I know I’m just a rookie, but my deep cop instincts tell me that this guy is loaded.”

“Yeah. Listen, I’ll keep Mister Wilcox from trying to drive the bench home while you radio this in and bring back the Breathalyzer.”

The MDT reported that Mister Joseph Wilcox, 22 Sutton Place, Matucket, was driving around on a suspended license and had a long history of drunk driving. I grabbed the Breathalyzer and brought it back over. Fortunately, Joe Wilcox was a happy drunk. He smiled and then blew a .22 on the test, almost three times the legal limit. Jerry commented, “It’s a good thing he’s drunk. If he had gotten into an accident, he’d never have felt it.”

“Where has he been that he is just now trying to drive home? It’s ten in the morning! Nothing’s even open yet!”

“No idea.”

“What do we do with his car? He’s not going anywhere.”

“You take Mister Wilcox here over to the station. I’ll follow you in his car. From there we can take it to the impound yard. It’s either that or we have to leave it here and call for a tow truck, and block Mickey D for the morning.” He stood up and helped Wilcox to his feet. “We’re going to take a little ride, Mister Wilcox. You’ve done this before.” I looked at Jerry for a second. “Well, Tackleberry? Get out your cuffs. You’ve got your first felony arrest!”

I just shook my head and smiled. I cuffed Wilcox and we loaded him in the back of the patrol car. “If he pukes in there, I am taking him down to the range and shooting him!”

“Let’s get him back to the station before he does that. I’ll follow you.”

With that, I led the way, my lights on but the siren off, and Jerry followed in Mister Wilcox’s car, with his flashers going, too. Wilcox thankfully delayed throwing up until we got to the station, though he did puke all over the hood of his car when we got there. We decided to leave it there as a badge of honor while we took him inside. At that point, we stuck him in a holding cell to sleep it off, and then went to work on the paperwork. Jerry had to do a report himself, since he had assisted me. It turned out there is almost as much paperwork with a drunk driving incident as there is in a bank robbery. At one point, I told Jerry, “We are living the dream, Jerry, living the dream!”

“At least he only puked on his car and not yours, or God forbid, on you. Very unpleasant!”

In any case, that was the most exciting thing to happen to us that day. We did get a ‘see the woman’ call in the afternoon and drove over to the Happy Trails Trailer Park to take the statement of a woman whose front door had been kicked in, and her brand new forty-two-inch flat screen television had been stolen. That wasn’t too surprising, considering that it was probably worth more than the rest of the trailer combined. She said it was done by her ‘sack of shit boyfriend’ who she had just broken up with. She wanted us to go over to his new bimbo’s place and bring it back and wasn’t too happy when we said we couldn’t do that.

Luckily, she still had the paperwork from when she bought it, so we got the serial number and put it in our report. We would get it to the detectives who would investigate it. Jerry commented that one of two things was likely to have happened. Assuming the ex-boyfriend did steal it, which was a workable theory, either he had fenced it for ten cents on the dollar to buy drugs or he and his new girlfriend were screwing while watching porn on it. We dumped it on the detectives back at the station. They could go question the ex-boyfriend.

That was it for my first week as a peace officer. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting but considering that up until I went to work for the MPD all I knew about police work was what I saw on television, I didn’t know what to expect. I went home and had dinner with Grandma and Grandpa, and then drove over and saw my parents for a few minutes. After that, I drove to Athens to spend a long weekend with Kelly. I didn’t need to return to the MPD until 0800 Tuesday morning.

For the next few weeks, it was more of the same. I was learning the business and Jerry didn’t seem too critical of the job I was doing. He did comment on the different shifts, saying that day shift got the most and weirdest calls, and lots of minor accidents. Minor accidents were those where everybody walked away. Even if the cars collided at ninety miles an hour, if you walked away, we considered it minor. Evening shift had a lot of fights, disturbances, and drunk driving. Graveyard shift had a lot of major accidents and fatalities and drunk driving, because that was when the bars were closing and throwing the drunks out.

Some of the calls were pretty strange. One day we were called to ‘see the woman’ at an address not far from Kelly’s parents’ place on Lake Matucket. “Dispatch to One-Six-Three, see the woman at 957 Lakeside Drive. She is reporting a deer in her kitchen.”

I just turned my head to Jerry, who was staring right back at me, his eyes wide open. “One-Six-Three to Dispatch. Repeat that please.”

“Dispatch to One-Six-Three, you heard me right. She reports a deer is in her kitchen.”

“One-Six-Three to Dispatch. On the way.” I looked over at Jerry. “Okay, Field Training Officer Wolinski, what is the official and approved MPD method to remove a deer from a kitchen?”

“Holy Christ! I have no idea. It’s out of season, so we shouldn’t just shoot it, you know.”

“Let’s try to avoid bloodshed. That would probably freak her right the hell out,” I countered.

“Yeah.” I kept rolling towards the address. “I’ve never had a deer in a house before. I did have a bat once. Some woman went up to her bedroom and found one had managed to fly down her chimney and was flying around the house. She ran out in her nightgown and went to the neighbors’ place, called it in from there. That spooked me, too! I kept worrying about rabies, you know,” he admitted.

“Or becoming a vampire. Remind me not to ride around with you during a full moon.”

We got there in a few minutes and found a woman standing on the front lawn looking very distraught. “There’s a deer in the house!” she told us.

“A deer?” I asked. “How did he get there?”

“I don’t know! Just get him out!”

I scratched my head but went over to the front door and looked through the window. I didn’t see anything, so I continued around the side, trying to look in windows. Jerry was following me, and the woman was following Jerry. “You’re not going to shoot him, are you?”

“No ma’am, it’s not deer season yet,” he answered.

“That’s not very funny!”

Well, when we got to the back door, it was pretty apparent that there was a deer in the house, because he was looking out at us through the screen door. It was an eight-point buck, too. “Did you leave the door open, ma’am?”

She had the decency to look sheepish. “It was stuffy, and I left the door open with the screen door closed.”

I took another look, and saw the deer was now eating a large pile of something that looked like sweet corn, even though it was too early in the season. “I think he smelled your groceries and decided to sample them.”

“Well, get him out of there!”

I scratched my head for a second, and then opened the screen door and propped it open with a planter from the back stoop. Then I said, “If we go in through the front door and make a lot of noise, maybe he’ll leave.”

Jerry replied, “It’s as good an idea as any I’ve got.” The three of us headed around to the front door, where the homeowner let us in. By now we had learned her name was Louise Hammerley and she had left the house for a few minutes to go back to the market. We all made a lot of noise, with Jerry moving through the living room to the dining room as I headed towards the kitchen. When we got into the kitchen, the deer was gone, though there was a considerable amount of deer poop and deer piss on the floor. I looked out the back door and I would have sworn I saw that buck in the woods with a bunch of his friends, and they were all laughing at us. I closed the screen door.