It was my third week of shit detail out near the Palo Verde power planet, going bugshit from doing nothing but cruising dirt roads and busting up high school beer parties when I nearly ran Maeve Jenkins wedding cake and her daddy over.
Ten years ago the Palo Verde run was the most sought after duty area in the county; hell, there wasn’t a cop in all of Maricopa county who didn’t want a chance at beating the living crap out of some uppity, self righteous nuclear energy protestors. But that was a decade ago and oil prices being as high as they were, the tree huggers had decided saving their wallets was a whole lot more important than trying to stop the powers that be from producing radioactive waste. Now the Palo Verde run was reserved for fuck ups and jack-offs on Duty Sergeant Campos’ asshole list.
I was on the asshole list.
I was an asshole because I was a thirty-two-year-old man who was stupid enough to have fallen in love with a seventeen-year-old girl.
I was an asshole because I just happened to get caught in the back of my cruiser with that seventeen-year-olds tit in my mouth and my trousers bunched up around my knees.
Lucky enough the seventeen-year-old in question’s old man, Dean Talbac, was nothing more than poor white trash and that the entire town of Buckeye was breathing a collective sigh relief because chances were I was going to end up marrying the said seventeen-year-old and getting her out of Dean Talbac’s nasty ass, run down, middle of Bumfucking No Where single wide before he either tried screwing her or killing her for not letting him stick his shriveled up pecker in her. But Talbac was raising up enough of a stink to make sure that Sergeant Campos needed to keep me out of sight and out mind, at least until the seventeen-year-old in question (Sorry, her name’s Katie.) turned eighteen.
So I was sent out to the sticks, 10PM-to-9AM shift cruising back roads, taking two hour long naps, and reading Max Brand paperbacks. After a couple of weeks of this, I was bored off my ass and I got into the habit of making sure my equipment was in fine working order. What I mean by my making sure my equipment is in fine working order largely entailed me hitting a dirt road like CR #17 and pushing my cruiser to the 120 MPH range and kicking up some serious dust.
It was Wednesday night, which just happened to be my Friday and I was three hours into my shift; two and half of it was me playing high speed pursuit. I’d just finished pushing the cruiser up to eighty down three hundred yards of a snarled, rutted access road that didn’t even warrant a county designation. By the time I pulled off onto CR #22—which was the most direct and under used route out to Palo Verde—the cruiser’s suspension was creaking like a retired football players knees and I’m sure I’d lost a good ten pounds of pressure out of all four tires. I didn’t care; the shift was drag ass and all I kept thinking about was the getaway me and Katie had planned down in Tucson on my days off.
I hit CR #22 at sixty-five and lead footed it. The road was smooth as silk and I pegged the needle; my vision zooming down to pinpricks, caught up in the speed and motion; the fat man was lucky as hell that him and the cake somehow registered. I slammed the breaks hard with both feet sixty yards from point of impact; the rear of the cruiser fishtailed to the left and by the time I stopped my passenger side door was all of nine or ten feet from him and I’d bathed him in a tidal wave of silt and dust.
I jumped out the cruiser, pulling my baton, set and ready to beat the snot out of the fat bastard. I stepped up to him double quick, rearing back my stick, yelling:
“Just what the Hell--!”
The fat man stared up at me, his eyes deer in the headlamps wide, blubbery tears forming small valleys down his dusty cheeks, his mouth and hands smeared with white and green frosting, his enormous body bursting out of a snug tuxedo shirt.
Mike Jenkins, Maeve’s daddy.
For lack of a better term, Maeve Jenkins was what you’d describe as the town slut. Except in order to get into her panties you’d have to drop to one knee and promise to put a ring on her finger. The only problem with this was good old Maeve would have to divorce whatever fella she was married to at the time. The girl had been married six times since high school. I’d diddled around with Maeve’s cooch a couple months back when I was a senior and she was a sophomore, but I was never hard up enough to take the plunge. I always liked Mr. Jenkins, though. He was good man, who worked six days a week to support his wife, mother-in-law, and daughter, and he did it without a word of complaint. I remembered him being a big man, but damn, the man was an absolute whale now.
“Mr. Jenkins?” I asked, my head cocked sideways like a dog staring at a bug. “Sir, what are you doing?”
He wiped at his lips with his shirtsleeve, clearing his throat.
“Them bitches send you out here after me, Frank? They send you out here to get their goddamn cake back?”
I blinked, rubbing my jaw.
“No Sir. I was. . .I was just out here on pat—“
“Well you can just go and tell those bitches to go fuck themselves, you hear?” He jammed more frosting into his mouth; he wasn’t listening. “Goddamn bitches, I haven’t eaten in three goddamn weeks. Saying I had to fit into my suit for the wedding. They said I could have my cake at the wedding and I took it, goddamn it!”
My shoulder radio cackled to life; dispatch calling out the cake theft. You could hear the sarcasm in the dispatchers voice as he rattled off the description of Mr. Jenkins and the cake. Mr. Jenkins heard it all clear as day, his body shuttering, snot and tears pooling around the dam of frosting on his upper lip.
“Just kill me, Frank,” He said, his three or chins resting on chest. “Just fuckin’ do it.”
I almost did.
I pictured myself drawing down on him and putting one in his skull while he wept into the remains of his only daughter’s ruined wedding cake. But I thought to myself, how the hell would I explain myself shooting him? How would I write up the report? Would I say he was evading arrest? That all four hundred plus pounds of him and toting a triple layer wedding cake wouldn’t stop moving when I ordered him to halt?
I sheathed my night stick and bent forward, murmuring into Mr. Jenkins ear how everything would be alright and I eased him to his feet and into the back of the cruiser and called it in.
Here's Seth and Jason. No, Jason's not a short dude, Seth just happens to be a giant.
