Chapter 4: "I Think I Love You"

Suddenly, as the door slammed open, Mike Kelley stepped inside the room. He gasped in horror at the scene in front of him. Dirk quickly stepped around and brought his ever-ready camcorder into play. He caught the large gut, the much smaller than average penis and the look of angry surprise on the cop's face. The look of despair on the young man's face needed no interpreting. The pictures taken spoke the proverbial thousand words.

The cop rolled his obese body off the bed and landed heavily on his feet. "What the fuck?" he roared and pulled his gun. A whirlwind of motion erupted into the hospital room and Mike Kelley was thrown across the room. The gun discharged and the invader fell to the floor at the cop's feet, blood pouring from a wound in her left shoulder.

Two orderlies ran into the room, took one look at the insanely enraged cop with his little peter peeking out of his wide-open, unzipped pants and ducked back out of the room again. The woman whom the cop shot rose up, grabbed the gun hand and twisted desperately, squeezing with all her might. The gun discharged a second time. No one was hit.

"My name is Amanda Lust," the wounded woman told the still form on the bed. "Now you know who I am." He didn't hear her.

The cop screamed as the vise-like hand squeezed his fingers harder. Amanda pulled herself to her feet, using the cop's injured arm to give her a boost. She staggered over to the still form on the bed. She kissed his forehead gently and murmured, "Oh, Mark, I am so sorry, so very sorry." Finally the shock to her system from the gunshot wound and the loss of blood became more than she could bear. She collapsed and fell to the floor in an unconscious heap.

The cop, whimpering his pain desperately grabbed for his gun with his unbroken hand. As he clumsily tried to lift his side arm, a nurse carrying an empty bedpan hurried into the room, saw the cameraman faithfully recording everything. Her glance swept over the unconscious woman on the floor and came to rest on the saggy-gutted cop with his fly wide open as he began to raise the gun. With a look of uncontrollable outrage she brought the bedpan down on the cop's skull with all her might. He tried to turn his head toward her. She hammered his skull time after time after time until he fell. She spat on his face and removed the gun from his hand.

"Get out of here," Mike ordered his photographer. "Get out before someone takes that camera away from you. Go, man!" he yelled as Dirk hesitated. Finally the photographer nodded once and slipped out of the room.

Less than a minute later, two uniformed cops and a detective rushed off the elevator, down the hall and into the room. The cops, when they saw one of their own down and unconscious, drew their guns and looked wildly about for someone to shoot. Dirk, from the room across the hall, recorded the events as they unfolded. He had only retreated a few feet.

"Put those guns away, you idiots," the detective hissed. "We have problems enough here without you going Rambo on me and shooting everything in sight." Mike's hidden microphone caught it all. His faithful recorder recorded it all.

"That lard ass on the floor tried to rape the young guy on the bed," Mike said.

The nurse hovered over Mark holding his head up a little as she helped the parched man to drink. "Here, dear, drink slowly," she whispered.

"Keep a civil tongue in your mouth, Kelley," the detective ordered him, "You're not immune from arrest."

He looked at the nurse and ordered, "Get out of here." The nurse gave him a dirty look and showed her reluctance as she turned to leave, lingering only long enough to give Mark one more sip of water.

As if the detective hadn't interrupted, Mike continued. "Then the filthy bastard pointed his gun at me and the woman on the floor with the bullet in her shoved me out of the way and took the slug herself. Now you want to arrest me, go right ahead and I'll just add one more charge to the lawsuit I plan to bring against you, the city, the glob of shit on the floor there and the two trigger-happy fools with you.

Amanda moaned as she regained consciousness. "Oh hell," she mumbled under her breath, "I hurt." Weakly she slowly clambered to her feet. "How is he?" she asked the nurse.

"He's been beaten and dehydrated and may have been raped. How do you suppose he is?" the nurse answered him tartly.

"Oh god, Mark," she told the unconscious young man. "This is all my fault because I was so cowardly. I think I love you." She fell to the floor in an unconscious heap once again. Mike's "hearing aid" caught every word spoken. Dirk's camcorder recorded the sound and action.

While a doctor was called and two not-so-brave orderlies came shamefaced back into the room, Mike decided it was time to slip out of the room and head toward the elevator. Dirk caught up with him. "I thought I told you to get out of here," Mike said.

"I couldn't. There was all that action to see."

"You're just a danger junkie," Mike told him. They rode down to the ground floor and hurried outside to their waiting van. The excited pair rushed back to the newspaper office, each to pursue his part of the story.

Mike sat at his desk hammering out a story on his keyboard that had "Pulitzer" written all over it. He was positive he had hit the jackpot. His concentration was broken by the perky voice calling him. "Hey Mike, the man wants you post haste and in a hurry. He's been shitting bullets," the young intern intercepted him as he hurried toward his desk.

"Just a moment, Nancy," he told the young woman. "Didn't your mother ever wash your mouth out for using nasty language?"

"Nah," the tough talking little red head answered. "She was too busy turning tricks on navy payday."

Mike knew for a fact her mother was a soft-spoken English teacher at a local high school. "Tell the man I have another hot one. I'll type it up and bring it in."

"I think that's what he's yelling about. He got a call from the mayor's office. You better make it fast, his blood pressure is soaring." She hurried off to run her next errand.

Mike settled in at his computer station and began to punish the keyboard once more as he tried to impart the excitement and drama of the latest episode of what he decided was "the story that keeps on giving."

Just as he completed his task Dirk rushed into the reporter's cubicle and plopped four eight by ten pictures on his desk. The first one showed the fat cop, small peter peeking out of the unzipped pants either crawling on or off the horrified looking Mark Cantrell. His angry, bloated face was contorted with guilty anger. "Oh God! Thank you Lord, I done died and gone to heaven," the reporter intoned as he envisioned the shared Pulitzer he and Dirk would claim.

The second shot was of that woman taking the bullet meant for the reporter. She looked familiar for some reason. The third picture showed a hand as it reached up from the floor and crushed the cop's own hand that held the revolver. The agony from his broken fingers was plain on the cop's face.

The last picture was a masterpiece. It was a portrait of the nurse in action as she beat the fat cop senseless, his gun held loosely in his left hand. "Take those and follow me. I think we are going into the shit storm." Dirk followed quietly behind.

The Publisher's office was richly furnished as befitted a hard working newspaperman who studied business administration in college, rather than media and journalism. "Ah, Kelley," the great man said as the receptionist led the two real newsmen in. "We seem to have something of a brouhaha going on and it is incumbent upon us to find a rapid and satisfactory conclusion."

"How so?" Mike asked quietly.

"I killed the story you were working on in the interests of this newspaper," the publisher stated firmly, a look of self-satisfaction on his face. "This newspaper refuses to be a part of a vendetta against Judge Barton..."

"A drunken old fool who knows less about the law than I do," Mike interrupted.

"As I was saying, Judge Barton is an innocent victim here. Chief Anderson here," he nodded toward the chief of police as he came through the door, "and our office agree this has been blown all out of proportion. Dump your notes, leave those pictures here and ask for your next assignment."

"Fuck you, I quit," Mike told the astonished publisher. "There is a clause in my contract that gives me the option to quit without violating my contract if this sort of shit was ever tried on me."

"You can't talk to me like that!" the publisher yelled.

"Yes I can, I just did. I quit. Your father ran this paper like a newspaper, not a mouthpiece for your precious political party."

Dirk threw the pictures on the publisher's desk and said, "Me too."

As soon as they were out of earshot of anyone, Mike hissed, "Hurry up and get your stuff and let's get out of here. We have a date with fame and fortune. Television is beckoning." They separated and Mike took one elevator to the second floor and his work cubicle. Dirk rode the other to his department. Mike popped the diskette out of his computer, slipped it into an envelope and shoved it down the front of his pants where it came to rest inside his Jockey shorts. He was not a moment too soon.

A security guard came bustling up. "You don't take anything out of here. Your stuff will be boxed and sent to you later. Now do you go easy or do I get some exercise?"

"I'll leave," Mike told him in fake resignation. "Just make certain that laptop on the floor by my desk doesn't get damaged. It has some real hot stuff stored inside. Don't damage it."

The guard laughed, picked up the old laptop and threw it down hard on the floor. "Oh dear my hand slipped and it broke." The screen on the laptop went blue- a sure sign that something inside had died...

(this is a silly, I like the drama but the smoke and flames from a laptop is hard to envision)

Outside the news building Dirk stood waiting. "I guess this means we can't take the company van any more, huh?" He grinned and walked alongside Mike. "Where now, kemo slobby?" he asked.

"Are you ready to explore new territory?" Mike asked.

"You mean, like where no man has gone before?"

"Nope, more like sleeping with the enemy. How would you like to work in television?" They walked across the street to the newspaper parking lot and got into Mike's nondescript old Blazer.

"You're not kidding are you?" Dirk asked anxiously. It had been Dirk's dream since he got back from Afghanistan to become a photojournalist for one of the local TV stations.

"Trust me," Mike said.

"I remember what happened after the last man said that to me," Dirk told his partner with false, betrayed innocence. Mike laughed as the tension left his body and his scheming mind plotted the next step.

Mark slowly regained consciousness again. He hurt all over. His body was no longer shackled to the bed. Even the bed seemed different. He opened his one partially functioning eye and moaned at the effort. "Help me," he cried weakly, still in delirium.

"Hush, Sweetheart," his mother's voice said. "It's going to be all right now, I'm here."

"Yes, Mama," he said in a small child voice. He drifted off into a more natural sleep. His mother stood over her son, silently crying helpless tears. How could something like this happen to our family? She wondered.

Amanda came into the room, her shoulder heavily bandaged. "How is he?" she asked. She shuffled clumsily into the room and tenderly looked down at the sleeping Mark.

"You're the young woman who got shot protecting my so aren't you," she asked, looking her over.

"A lousy protector I turned out to be," Amanda answered bitterly. "Look at what they did to him. He was so beautiful and look at him now."