Total pages in book: 75
Estimated words: 73716 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 369(@200wpm)___ 295(@250wpm)___ 246(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73716 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 369(@200wpm)___ 295(@250wpm)___ 246(@300wpm)
Both females were young. Late teens, at most, but it didn’t matter.
Not to me, and not to any other police officer out there once a weapon had been pulled on them. It didn’t matter if it was a twelve-year-old who was in a gang or a fourteen-year-old who hated you on principle, someone pulling a weapon on a police officer was perpetrating a crime, plain and simple.
Police officers experience all the crappiness of the world, and in the midst of a crime, we knew never to assume that even young kids were just kids, despite the fact that they should’ve never known the violence of the world at their age.
Or, at least, I did.
My mistrust of kids had come from a thirteen-year-old, wanna-be gang member who’d been given the task of shooting a police officer.
It’d been my rookie year as a cop, fresh out of the Navy, and I’d stopped on the side of the road to help what I’d thought was a woman and a child. The child was the thirteen-year-old kid who’d held his mother at gunpoint until I’d pulled up, and then had turned the gun on me.
Luckily, his aim was terrible or I’d have been feeding the worms.
I’d, of course, been wary of small children in Iraq during my deployments. It wasn’t unheard of for them to be used as diversions or bait.
I’d just not expected that similar things from children on my own home soil.
“Get off me!” the teen screamed.
The one underneath me started to squirm, but I held firm, keeping both women subdued for the whole fifteen minutes until backup had arrived.
It was unlucky for me that I’d been working the backstretch of our area that day, because that meant that no help was forthcoming for a while.
By the time backup had arrived, I had both women in the back seat of my car, and they were trying to bust my cruiser’s windows with their flimsy excuse for heels.
One had even managed to crack the window in her haste to tell me how much she’d hated me.
“What the heck happened?”
That was the first statement I’d heard in the last fifteen minutes that hadn’t had a curse word weaved into it somewhere.
“Well, it all started when I ran the plate after I clocked them speeding and weaving in and out of traffic…”
***
I watch it again. And again. And again.
Over and over until I’m nearly sick.
What the video showed was completely different than what had actually happened. Or, at least, only the ending without little explanation of how it’d gotten to that point.
I yank the woman out of the car by her hair, then throw her to the ground and straddle her back roughly while tugging her arms behind her.
All the while I’m screaming at the person with the phone to ‘stand down!’ and ‘don’t fucking move!’
Except the phone’s shining in my eyes, and all it looks like is that I’m yelling while sitting on the woman beneath me.
My eyes squeezed shut.
“You’re gonna come to sleep, aren’t you?” I heard Audrey ask from the doorway.
I hit pause on the computer, and looked up to find her leaning against the doorjamb, her arms crossed over her middle, her eyes hooded with sleep.
“Yeah,” I lied. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
“Tell me what happened that night,” she ordered, walking toward me.
Putting the computer on the side table, I leaned back in my La-Z-Boy and dropped my head backwards, staring at the ceiling in frustration.
“I was doing my normal thing on the interstate and major highways in my area. Running it, looking for suspicious activity, et cetera. I was approaching the end of my shift and was sent to a domestic dispute at an interstate truck stop. I was heading towards the truck stop when I spotted a car in front of me traveling at an accelerated rate of speed and weaving in and out of traffic, almost as if she had someone chasing her. In and out, with only inches to spare, until she came into heavier traffic that she couldn’t weave through. So she just passed them on the emergency side lane.”
As I told her the story, her face softened.
“I once saw a YouTube video that shows how fast an officer has to think on the fly,” she murmured, looking up to catch my eyes. “The bad thing is, that you now have to run on your instincts and gut reactions when it comes to your safety. If you thought that was necessary, then it probably was. Though, even if it wasn’t, it’s a good time to always be proactive. What if you hadn’t reacted and you’d been stabbed or shot and killed?”
I didn’t like to think about that.
I was more than aware of the consequences. I’ve attended nine police officer funerals in my years as a cop. I knew better than she did the sacrifices we had to make each day, and the possibility of putting that shield on over our hearts one day, but not the next.