Chapter 16: Moving Forward

Fall 2022 to Spring 2023

I was beat when I got home Sunday night. I’d been living out of a suitcase and eating fast food while traveling in a taxi for almost two weeks. I just wanted to decompress and get to know my wife and kids again. When I got home, Kelly waved the pink canoe at me and told me it was my turn to paddle, and that I had fallen behind and needed to catch up. I snorted out a laugh, which made Riley and Seamus curious. I dumped them on their mother, who just told them it was a private joke. When they quizzed her further, she snapped a towel at them and sent them off. I tried to stifle a smile, and she snapped it at me next.

Simon & Schuster was ecstatic about the book tour. My editor called on Monday, but I was too tired to care. I ended up talking to him Tuesday morning after the kids went to school and Kelly went to Matucket State. He was excited about the prospects for To Protect and Serve, which he described as ‘flying off the shelves!’ When I pressed for details, he admitted what I already knew, that blockbuster sales of a non-fiction book on the police was not the same thing as blockbuster sales on the latest John Grisham crime novel or Stephen King thriller. There were a lot fewer zeroes on both the book sales and the royalty checks. Still, they were showing a profit on the book and wanted me to write a ‘sequel’ of sorts. Specifically, somebody had contacted Morning Joe and Al Sharpton and had gotten him to agree to writing a foreword to a proposed new book on the slave patrols and their ultimate evolution.

My editor said, “Remember all that stuff in your dissertation we told you to take out? That’s your next book! Get to writing! We can publish it next year!” I had my marching orders. I promised to dig my research out and dust it off.

I told Kelly what the royalties, paid quarterly, seemed to be and Kelly decided I needed to spend some money. When I raised an eyebrow at that she showed me a pair of websites. One was for some extremely naughty lingerie and the second was for Sandals, the couples-only vacation chain we had vacationed at before. “Sure you don’t want to take another cruise?” I asked. “You know, for the late show?”

Kelly blushed. “I think I’d rather work on my own late show.” I laughed and nodded, and she continued, “Besides, the cabins on those boats were awfully small!”

“True enough.”

“As were the bathrooms.” I raised an eyebrow and got another blush in response. “Well, they were! And they didn’t have a bathtub. What if I wanted to take a bath?”

“Or wanted some help in the shower?” I asked.

Kelly looked around to make sure the kids weren’t around. “Maybe that, too. Would that be a problem?”

“Not to me.”

“Anyway, I’m not sure I want to be on a floating petri dish. Thanks, but no thanks.”

I just grunted an acknowledgement at that. We had discussed that topic before. I wasn’t going to argue about it with Kelly.

“So, Sandals again?”, she asked. “And you scrub my back if I ask?”

I smiled. “Just making sure I understand my job. I’m supposed to make the money...”

“You’ve already done that,” she interjected.

“ ... and you’re supposed to spend the money.”

“Precisely.”

“And I get what out of this deal?”

The answer was a detailed description of what was going to happen later that evening, and what would happen much more frequently on vacation, even during daylight hours. As expected, I caved in and agreed. We would do something in the springtime. We had already been to the Bahamas and to St Lucia, so maybe we’d try something different this time. As Kelly said at one point, the next time we’d take a trip like this we’d probably be in our forties and about to die from senility and decrepitude.

Until then, however, I needed to get back to consulting. Kelly had spent some time updating my website and LinkedIn pages to include the book and to highlight that I had been booked on various television shows as an expert and consultant. More accurately, she had some undergrads in the Digital Media department redo the pages to give me a ‘modern interactive look.’ The result was most gratifying, in that I received several calls and emails to Reaper Security Consulting. I worked on some of these while travelling, but with all the inquiries I informed them that I wouldn’t be able to completely focus on them until I got home from my road trip. Now was the time to go back to work.

I only had a couple of days to focus, though. I came home the Sunday of Thanksgiving week, and it was our turn to host the dinner. Kelly gave me a long list of groceries to pick up at the Pig and announced that since I was unemployed, I could go shopping and do the cooking. That earned her a very dry look. She just laughed and told me to get to work. By our estimate we would have our four, both sets of grandparents, my grandparents, and Jack, Bobbie Joe, both their wives, and all four of their boys. That gave us a body count of eighteen. We might also see Aunt Laurie and Uncle Dave and their boys and families, but that wasn’t definite yet. I needed to get a large turkey and be prepared to serve a few people on paper plates as needed.

Aunt Laurie and Uncle Dave did come, though my cousins only called to say hello. Otherwise, Thursday was a hectic mess, hectic and overstuffed. Mom came over in the morning to help Kelly with the turkey and Dad came over to help me with the Maker’s Mark. We were assigned chores as needed. It was a good time.

The following week I was back to consulting full time. My first job was with a small sheriff’s department in Alabama that needed a third-party review of a departmental reorganization recommended by the Alabama Peace Officers Standards and Training Commission. The job didn’t sound too difficult or controversial, so I figured to spend a few days there and then do most of the paperwork back home. After that I was scheduled for some guest lectures at the academy in Forsyth, followed by a tour schedule at all the Georgia satellite police academies. With any luck I could do those over a couple of weeks, driving from one to another.

I was planning to do a lecture based on PTSD, which I had given in the past. Now I was updating it a touch, but one of Kelly’s colleagues came to her with a suggestion. He was dating a professor in the Digital Media department of the School of Social Sciences. Her idea was to record my lecture and then incorporate the slides from the PowerPoint slideshow I used. It might even be necessary to record a lecture while standing in front of a green screen so that video or images could be shown behind me during post-production. She would use this as a project for one of her media classes. I could then use this recorded lecture as a sales item. If you wanted me to teach you something, you could pay my fee to come and visit, or you could buy my lectures for a different fee. I could even create my own line of Reaper Security Consulting training aids and books. I went along with the idea, though it wouldn’t happen until the spring semester.

Aside from the job in Alabama and the lecture series, December and January were kind of quiet. After Thanksgiving there was Christmas, and after Christmas there was New Year’s. Then we had the most important holiday of all, the Super Bowl, which was a collection of holidays celebrated every weekend in January as the playoffs proceeded. I knew of some companies that practically shut down from Thanksgiving until after the Super Bowl. It didn’t really affect when I could give lectures, but it wasn’t a great time to free up budget bucks from police departments.

In my spare time, I worked on my next book. In theory I could have rushed something out in just a couple of months. I had already done the basic research doing my dissertation and an earlier paper, and it was just a matter of reorganizing it and doing a massive edit job. That wasn’t what Simon & Schuster wanted, though. They wanted it to come out about a year after To Protect and Serve, so they could milk all possible sales from that book. Then, when the new book came out, they could tie it to the last and get a two-fer, with additional sales of the old book. That meant I could take my time and get it right before sending it to my editor. He would arrange for the reviews and Sharpton’s input. The price for that would be his name in small print on the front cover, as in ‘ With Foreword by Rev. Al Sharpton”. The working title was The Slave Patrols: An Evolution of Violence against African-Americans, but that was subject to change. All that we were sure of was that the main title, the one in large print, would include the words Slave Patrols; the subtitle, after the colon, could end up almost anything.

In February I got a very nice job down near Valdosta, helping a police department create a SWAT team. Sullivan Springs, Georgia, had managed to secure some Federal and state grants to develop what they were calling a Special Response Team. The best part? I wasn’t acting as a third-party reviewer of somebody else’s plans. I was to be the primary consultant, and I would get to design their SRT.

Unlike Matucket, the Sullivan County Sheriff’s Department provided police services in Sullivan County; there was no separate police department. Sullivan County had a higher population than Matucket County and a larger force. For years they had adopted a SWAT-SuperLite approach to special response, but now they wanted to bulk up. There had been a recent active shooter attack on a Walmart, and they wanted a full-blown SWAT team.

I drove down the second Monday afternoon in February to meet with Sheriff Ballantine directly, though it was far enough from home that my meeting was early Tuesday morning. The Sullivan County SD was larger than the MPD, but Sullivan County was a fair bit larger than Matucket County. I was shown into his office, and he rose to meet me. Ballantine was a large man, as tall as me and probably a good ten pounds heavier. “Doctor Reaper, nice to meet you. Any trouble finding us?”