Chapter 24: Boxie

2024

Sunday, I helped Jack get home. He had chartered a plane to fly from California to Matucket (“ Can you imagine flying commercial through Atlanta with a wheelchair?”) so I simply drove over to their house Sunday morning and helped him out of the house and down to his rental. None of our homes had ramps and I asked whether we should build some for their next visit.

“Grim, I’m not sure you should bother. I don’t think I’ll be coming back here any time soon.”

“Jack...”

“Grim, I just don’t see it happening. This thing is moving fast, faster than average,” he said.

I shook my head. “Don’t they have anything that can help?”

“Not really. The drugs ... this isn’t like cancer, where the drugs can hold things off for months or years. They measure effectiveness in terms of days or weeks.”

“Then we’ll be visiting this summer.”

He grimaced. “I probably won’t be up for visitors by then.”

“Get over it, Jack. Maybe we’ll do it over spring break, but we’re coming out to see you. Tell Teresa to figure out where we’re staying and come up with some sightseeing stuff.”

He laughed and nodded. “I’ll let her know.”

With that I helped load their stuff into the van and then helped my brother get into the passenger seat. I followed them over to the airport and helped him into the private jet. When I got home, I just sat there staring out at the lake. I had just lost my grandfather and was now losing my brother. I wasn’t ready to lose him yet. I told Kelly that we were taking the kids to San Francisco over spring break. “When is spring break, anyway? I need to pencil it into my schedule.”

Kelly blinked and headed to the kitchen. The kids’ schedules were on the refrigerator. “Last week of March,” she called out. She came back to the living room and said, “Matucket State’s is the week before that.”

“Kelly...”

She held a hand up. “I’m just letting you know. I’ll make arrangements. Where will we stay? I’ve never been there. Have you?”

“No. They have a ritzy condo, but that’s all I know. Jack said he would get Teresa to sort something out.”

“What’s in San Francisco besides the Golden Gate Bridge?” she asked.

I shrugged. “Cable cars? I don’t know. There must be something to do out there. Isn’t Alcatraz in the middle of the ocean near there? Maybe we could lose the kids there, save money on the flight home?”

“Don’t build my hopes up.”

Monday morning, I called everybody I had blown off and rescheduled my meetings. I didn’t mention my brother. Everybody understood a death in the family but mentioning Jack’s problems would just complicate things. There wasn’t a damn thing any of us could do about it anyway. I sat down with Riley one night and she showed me on the computer what she had discovered.

“Uncle Jack said it started in his arms and legs, right?” she asked. I nodded and she continued, “He has what’s called limb-onset ALS. Did he say anything like that?”

“I think so. I know he said he didn’t have the other big type, something called bulbar-onset. That’s where his speech gets slurred first,” I replied.

Riley pulled up some websites and showed me what she had found, none of which was good. Leaving aside the truly abnormal cases like Stephen Hawking, who lived with the disease for over fifty years, the average person lives at most two to four years. If Jack was first diagnosed in the summer of 2023 and expected to be dead by the spring of 2025, his case was fast and aggressive. Some of what she showed me looked horrendous, with the end stages being ventilators, inability to move or speak, loss of bodily functions, and tons of drugs that really didn’t do much for you. I’ll be honest, I told her I’d prefer to take a long walk off a short pier.

“You’re pretty smart about this stuff, honey. Planning to become a doctor?” I asked her.

She shook her head and didn’t smile. “How do you become a doctor for something like this, when you know all your patients are going to die?”

“I don’t know, Riley. I don’t think I could do it. Ask your grandmother someday. There’s a hospice unit at the hospital that does nothing but care for people dying from cancer. Maybe she could tell you.”

“I don’t think I could do that, Dad.”

I shook my head. “Me neither.” I remembered back to when I left the army. “That’s probably why I never wanted to do anything medical. I remember when I got out of the army and didn’t know what I wanted to do, the one thing I knew I didn’t want to do was anything medical.”

“So, you became a cop instead.”

“I became a cop instead.”

“And you liked that?”

“I did, but you’re not becoming a cop. You’re going to college.”

She grinned at me. “Or else?”

“Or else I am turning you over to your mother! See how much you like that!”

RSC got back to normal, and I continued building my client base. I avoided the scut work of audits and performance reviews, preferring to stick to departmental design and organization. Maybe you needed a SWAT team, but maybe you didn’t. Maybe you needed to change your staffing plans, your mix of Patrol and special elements (juvenile, K-9, community outreach, etc.) Did your department’s training and doctrine reflect the types of crime you were currently facing? Was it a problem I could help with, or were you better off finding somebody else?

That last question alone made me stand out from more than a few consultants. Most consultants would promise anything to get the contract. If NASA said they were having a crime problem on the Moon, Miles & Madigan or Hillard Heintze would promptly claim they had a package ready to go. By telling a department that I didn’t have a solution for them, I would actually increase my credibility when they came back and asked me for help in an area I could assist them with.

It didn’t hurt when the new Sullivan County Special Response Team managed to capture a gang of moonshiners. They were still only partially trained and not up to full strength, but they managed to capture the moonshiners without anybody getting shot, using regular Patrol officers as backup per doctrine and training. Most importantly, they nabbed a large cache of weapons and bombmaking paraphernalia that the FBI and ATF, the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms boys, were very interested in. When Dom Ballantine held the press conference, he didn’t mention me, which was fine; when he talked to his county council, he did say my name and praise me, which was even better. They were the ones who coughed up the cash, and I got a nice monthly retainer check for my consulting package.

Happy clients made for clients who gave you good referrals. The counties adjoining Sullivan County began asking for assistance. Some of the departments were already working with me, but the number began to grow. I began to block out one week a month in southern Georgia for consulting and visits. I also began talking to some of the county council members. They were politicians, so thoughtful and considered action was not guaranteed, but one thing I tried to impress upon them was that all the departments I was working with were going to be using similar training, doctrine, and organization. If they wanted to move things to the next level, a regional response system, they needed to develop the political framework that could really exploit it. I was currently being paid by the specific individual departments I was working with. If they wanted a regional system, who was signing the check? They needed to do some planning.

When I was home, I was working on two big projects. One was a training and doctrine manual based on a nut-and-bolts approach to policing at the patrol level. It wasn’t going to be like the giant one-size-fits-all manuals that the big outfits pushed, like I would have been pushing if I had gone with M&M. I wanted something that was aimed at the guys in the blue shirts, patrol officers, that was specific to Georgia and how they were trained at the Georgia police academies. Just as important was highlighting the academy training and classes specific to various specialties; the academy did some of that, but my selections integrated with the training I was offering.

So many people thought that detectives solved all crime, and that if we could increase the effectiveness of detectives, crime would be eliminated. That was nuts. Depending on the department, detectives never made up more than twenty to twenty-five percent of the police officers on a force. Most police officers were in Patrol, and eighty to eighty-five percent of all crime was solved by Patrol. It would be great to make the detectives more efficient, but you could get three times the bang for your buck if you made the patrol officers more efficient!

My other big project was a future book on posse comitatus. Simon & Schuster had gone along with the idea and had sweetened the pot. I was still making the same ten percent royalty rate, but they had coughed up a twenty-grand advance. Since I had to pay that back if I didn’t write a book, I had an incentive to write a book!

Posse comitatus is Latin for force of the county, a group of people gathered by the local peace officer to suppress lawlessness. This concept dates to Ninth Century England, where the ‘shire reeve’ or sheriff would call up people to assist with capturing outlaws and keeping the peace. By the Seventeenth Century this was formalized in England into who could call up the posse comitatus and what it could do. In America, this was the legal basis for the local sheriff or marshal calling up a local posse to go chase bank robbers, a common element of most movie and television Westerns. It also forms the basis of the requirement for citizens to render assistance to police officers upon request.

In modern times, posse comitatus typically refers to the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878. Following the Civil War, Federal troops were stationed throughout the South to maintain order during Reconstruction. After the disputed election of 1876 a compromise was reached. The Army would be pulled out of the South and Rutherford B. Hayes would be named President. This was eventually codified so that the United States Army could no longer be used to maintain law and order inside the United States. The restriction isn’t absolute and mostly applies only to the Army, but there are tons of loopholes. The Governor of a state can still call out the National Guard, the Coast Guard has a statutory law enforcement mandate despite being a military service, and the President can call up the military for assistance during times of emergency, and he gets to determine what’s an emergency. There’s even an Insurrection Act dating back to the early 1800s allowing the President to call out the troops. Still, it delineates the separation of the military and law enforcement, and most soldiers are very reluctant to get involved in local legal affairs; do it without orders and your career is shot and you’re probably staring at a court martial.

The entire concept of posse comitatus was not something well understood by the average American and could prove to be a useful subject for a book by ‘one of America’s leading historians of police and law enforcement’. That was from one of the reviews of Slave Patrols, provided by one of Simon & Schuster’s tame reviewers. It was one of those unsaid rules that at some point I would be expected to give a marvelous review of somebody else’s book.

Still, I needed to do some research. While my dissertation, A History of Policing In America Covering Slavery and the Posse Comitatus, had covered the Posse Comitatus Act, it had mostly concentrated on the first two items, the history of American policing and the slave patrols. To do a decent book that was more than what could be found on Wikipedia, I needed to do more research. I began taking my laptop over to Matucket State’s library like I had done years ago. I needed to put in at least a day a week of research to fill out the details.

In any case, between spending a quarter of my time in Sullivan Springs and about the same amount of time lecturing in Georgia and Alabama, research was going slowly. Simon & Schuster wanted to publish the new book, working title Posse Comitatus: A History, in October. For that I needed to finish the first draft by the end of April. After that it needed a couple of months for the back and forth of editing, which took us into the summer, followed by printing and artwork. That just wasn’t possible. I told my editor I wouldn’t be ready to submit my first draft until mid-summer at the earliest, and even that might be pushing it. He grumbled, loudly, but short of demanding the advance back and cancelling it, he was stuck. Without proof that I was goofing off, Simon & Schuster couldn’t cancel the contract until sometime in 2025, and if they did cancel it unilaterally, I could take my book to another publisher. With three books under my name already, it wouldn’t be hard to find somebody else to publish it. I told them a publication date of next spring was more realistic.

We flew out to San Francisco on Sunday, March 24, and were greeted by Teresa. Diego and Miguel were at the condo with their father. She had a minivan from one of their dealerships for us and had arranged for us to use a furnished demo unit in the condo that was up for sale. She helped us load our luggage and then drove us from SFO to their home. Both the empty unit and their condo were larger than our house.

One part of me wanted to say that we could pay our own way, but the smarter part said to keep my mouth shut. Jack had earned $65 million in his NFL contracts with the Raiders, plus millions more in endorsements. Most of that money had been invested in the company his lawyers had set up, Linebacker Enterprises. Linebacker Enterprises consisted of Linebacker Motors, a chain of car dealerships, and real estate in the Bay Area. It wouldn’t surprise me if the condo was in a building that Linebacker Enterprises had an interest in. The minivan Teresa had gotten for us had a Linebacker Motors sticker on it.

As Jack had told me, if you have to suffer from an incredibly awful dread disease that costs a fortune in medical care, it helps to be a multimillionaire. My brother was probably worth well more than a hundred million. As he once said, pretty good for a kid from the Matucket suburbs.

Jack was sitting in a recliner when we came in the door, and his face lit up when he saw us. “Hey, guys, how you doing?” he asked. Jack’s speech was still clear, but I wondered when that would end.

“Great! How about you?” I dropped my suitcase and went up to him. I stuck out my hand and he reached for it, but his grip was weak. I noticed a wheelchair in the corner. Jack was wearing khakis and a zippered sweatshirt. How much longer before he’d be wearing sweatpants?

Kelly and the kids were in next. After saying hello to their uncle, Riley and Seamus were off to visit with their cousins and explore the condo. Teresa pulled some beers out of the fridge and served them up. Three she poured into glasses, the fourth she left in the bottle and added a flexi-straw. Jack grinned at me. “Can you imagine the grief we would have given somebody back on the team drinking his beer through a straw?”

“Hell, we would have required him to use the girls’ locker room and come to practice in a cheerleader’s outfit,” I agreed.

“You ought to get a photo for the next reunion.”

I had to swallow at that. Jack was two years after me, Class of 2005. His next reunion was next summer, 2025. He’d be dead by then.

“Hey, Grim, lighten up,” he said. “Don’t sweat it.”

“Jesus, Jack, how do you do it?” I asked. I looked at the two women; Kelly had a look of horror on her face, but Teresa had a resigned smile on hers.

“What was it you once told me? Something about just having to carry the load? Grim, this is the load. I just have to carry it.”

“I am just so sorry, Jack.”

“Nothing to be sorry about, Grim. You didn’t cause it. Look at the bright side. It’s only going to be for another year.”

I damn near threw up at that and Kelly started crying, but we had it under control by the time the kids came back in. Teresa said, “The boys have been great about helping their dad. He’s got them teaching him Korean, so he knows it before, well...”

“Hey, what if I end up in the Asian section of Heaven? I don’t want to need a translator,” Jack added.

I gave him a dirty look. “If I’d known you had this dark side, I’d have gotten you on the cops years ago.” Jack just laughed at that.

That night we stayed in, and Teresa ordered up pizza and wings. Jack was getting weak but could still talk and function. Moving was different, though. He needed the wheelchair to move around now. He gave us a bunch of options for sightseeing.

“There are a ton of things to do in San Francisco. You can spend an entire day just riding around on the cable cars. Definite sightseeing opportunity.”

Teresa said, “I know it’s a touristy thing, but it’s still fun.”

I looked at Kelly and said, “So we ride the cable cars one day.”

“Fine by me.”

Jack added, “There’s Fisherman’s Wharf. Great place for restaurants. You’ve got the Golden Gate Bridge. You can drive over it and there’s a park at each end if you want to take photos. If you want to go to Alcatraz, take Diego and Miguel with you, let them know what their future lives will be like.”

Diego protested, “Dad!” Miguel added something in Spanish which made Teresa smack him in the back of the head, and they took off with Seamus. Meanwhile, Riley started fiddling with her phone.

“We’ll take Seamus with us. Maybe they can form a prison gang,” I said.

Teresa said, “If you like Chinese, we’ve got the original Chinatown here. Then there’s Ghirardelli Square. That’s nice.”