.....With the late morning rendezvous outside the Blockbuster fulfilled, The Wrecking Crew was complete. Word. It was a silly nickname for the posse, although no sillier than most self-inflicted nicknames.
.....As usual, Scot T was the last to arrive, red hair still tousled with bedhead. He tamped it down with his Tigers cap. The boy sidled up to The Crew and his hand dropped down with casual ease to cup Lolita’s ass.
.....“Whassup, niggaaaahz?” he drawled, lurching forward to bump fists with Pierce.
.....He winced and pulled back at the jab of a sharp elbow to his side from Lolita. The wigger blinked at her in confusion.
.....“Yo, bee-yotch,” he drawled, weaving back and forth as his hands threw down with a mishmash of MTV-sampled wannabe gang signs. “Why you be hatin’...”
.....She shushed him, gesturing with her eyes towards the video store.
.....Scott T looked over and shrunk a little, his hands retreating to the pockets of his baggy pants.
.....Doc Taylor was in the house... or at least, in the doorway of the shop. A well-maintained black man in his mid-seventies, he eyed the group as he handrolled a cigarette. Belying his snow-white hair and deeply creased features, his hands were steady and his eyes were sharp... apparently as sharp as his hearing.
.....Whoops.
.....Scot T cleared the faux jive from his throat. “Good morning, Dr. Taylor.”
.....“Morning,” replied the doctor. He considered Scot T’s get up dubiously. “Boy, you don’t get a belt for those pants, you’re gonna trip and break your neck someday.”
.....The boy nodded seriously. “I’ll look into that, sir.”
.....The doctor nodded, spit-sealing the cigarette.
.....With a snap of fingers blue flame danced on the tip of his thumb. The Wrecking Crew remained unimpressed by the slight of hand. Every bag of tricks gets old fast in a small town, and they had seen the bottom of the doctor's bag years before.
.....Doc dipped the tip of his cigarette into the flame, paper and stray seeds crackling. Inhaled deeply and held it. He exhaled with pure smoking satisfaction.
.....“You do that.”
.....He stepped down from the doorway and headed down the street, leaving a sweet potpourri of suspect tobacco smoke in his wake. The quartet inhaled deeply.
.....Scot T began to weave about in postured aggrievence.
.....“Yo,” his hands resuming their flight. “Who the hell he be callin’ boy?”
.....Pierce opened the door to the video store, bowing low as he gestured with a sweep of his free hand their first stop of the day.
.....“Word up, niggahs,” Pierce laughed. “Let the Wrecking Crew roll.”
.....They rolled.
.....The monitors bolted to the ceiling of the Blockbuster sputtered promos for upcoming releases. Remakes of flicks that no one was all that impressed the first time around. The bottom of the barrel was being scraped.
.....They were ignored by the patrons trolling the rows as they scanned the banks of videos and DVD clamshells for the evening’s diversion. The current crop of new releases didn’t look all that inviting and cost twice as much to rent, so the majority cruised the aisles for old favorites.
.....It was an uneasy time of the morning, early enough that most of the John Wayne titles hadn’t been returned yet and late enough that the returns had already been rented for the evening.
.....In the Video Game section, Mike dropped his selection as Pierce slammed a shoulder into him. The rest of the group hung back, glinty-eyed at the coming release. Pierce eyed the case laying on the floor at their feet.
.....“Ooh. Medal of Honor,” he smirked at Mike. “Gonna go home and spend the night jerking off and pretending to be a warrior?”
.....Mike glanced at the girls and back. “Back off, Pierce.”
.....He took some comfort in the look of unease that Lolita had darted towards Pierce.
.....He couldn’t care less what Debbie thought. He seriously doubted that the cheerleader-knockoff of Paris Hilton was even capable of carrying any thought heavier than a pom-pom.
.....The security camera paused in its rounds and swung back to zero in on the group, red light blinking watchfully. Finally, things were getting interesting.
.....Pierce stood tall, addressing his troops. “Real warriors don’t need to jack-off.”
.....Debbie drew herself up to him, and curled around his arm.
.....“Not when they’ve got themselves a real warrior princess,” she purred. She playfully snapped at his ear and spared Mike a cat-that-ate-the-cream look.
.....“He’s gonna be a hero some day,” she added. There were Gold Stars in her eyes.
.....“Yeah, if he can make it all the way through basic training,” Mike scoffed.
.....Pierce leaned in towards Mike, his green eyes narrow.
.....“I can take you anytime, asshole,” he snarled, jabbing Mike with a splay-fingers to the chest. Mike winced and stepped back to keep his balance, then stepped forward to kneel down and pick up the video game.
.....“Fuck you, Pierce,” he muttered, without looking up.
.....Pierce moved in, jutting his crotch towards Mike’s face.
.....“Yeah, well...since you’re down there...”
.....Game in hand, Mike stood back up and glanced at Debbie. He cocked an eyebrow at Pierce. “What, a real warrior princess isn’t to your taste anymore?”
.....Pierce blinked, his face going red. Mike took advantage of the lull to move towards the door.
.....Pierce called after him. “Have fun, faggot.”
.....Mike flipped an extended middle finger without looking back, exiting without another word.
.....With an air of disappointment, the video camera resumed its rounds.
.....The engine of the Hummer patrol vehicle ticked as it cooled in front of the police station where Sheriff Roy Crawford had parked.
.....Instead of going straight on up to his office upon arrival, he had sat down on the stairs for a spell to watch the sun climb higher into the sky. He listened to the sounds of Harding in the course of another Sunday morning.
.....Birds chirped, children playing.
.....No single train of thought dominated his mind, just the indulgence of the idle pleasure to be found in where he sat. His eyes were half-closed and head tilted back as the sun bathed his face with warmth.
.....The stone steps lay cool and hard beneath his buttocks, leading upwards behind him into the open mouth of the ancient building which housed the Harding Police Department.
.....Seemingly chiseled whole from rough-hewn gray rock, the station squatted protectively at the center of the town, dark and unyielding since before the birth of the twentieth century.
.....The pragmatic design of the building appealed to his aesthetics. It was built long before the advent of the generic blocks of steel and glass that served as county office space since before he was born. Usually trimmed with siding pressed in colors better suited to a finish of a seventies-era refrigerator discarded in the landfill.
.....As had those who served before him, Roy could observe both ends of the business district from his vantage point.
.....If he were to cock his head to the right, Roy would be able to discern the sun glinting off of the dull metallic backside the town limits sign four blocks down the secondary road that split the burg in half.
.....An equal distance to his left, its companion stood muted in the shadows unmet by the sun making its way towards noon.
.....Back to back they were posted as sentries, offering in white on green their taciturn message.
.....The blunt nature of the signs suited Roy just fine. Tall and built like a fading linebacker, but with a farmer’s plain features that belied his parent’s Okie roots, Roy had no use for the occasional transgressor in his town.
.....In the seven years since assuming the post, he had arrived unto the conclusion that strangers invariably meant impending trouble, and in his small world, Roy had little to no patience for that.
.....Like the new arrival he had just eyeballed outside the Blockbuster Video.
.....He’d looked familiar. Although the stranger was probably nothing more than just someone’s cousin from out of town and dropping by to maintain the ol’ family connections, Crawford still had Julia run the tags, even if for nothing more than kicks.
.....All those new high tech toys up in the dispatch office, just gathering dust in the absence of any real criminal activity to monitor. Now and then it was a good idea just to go through the motions, and keep the routine sharp.
.....Just in case.
.....He pulled a drag off of his Marlboro and sighed out the smoke.
.....He had no room for complaint though, he reflected. Harding was as quiet as most small towns go, and more likely quieter than most.
.....More ever as not, the only conflict that he or whichever of the deputies were on duty on any given night would encounter would be whether to park the patrol car on a hidden back road for a nap, or to just to spend the shift watching all-night movies off the satellite.
.....It was a routine broken only occasionally by a barking dog complaint or an unruly patron at the Larkspur Tavern.
.....The bell began to toll from the tower of the Protestant church and the Sheriff sighed, his idyll time over. Although it was his day off, the events of the night before needed to be explained and tided up. He field-stripped his Marlboro and left the remaining tobacco to flutter off in the breeze, tucking the filter in his hip pocket as he stood.
.....His knees popped at the effort as he made his way up the stairs.
.....Julia was parked at the dispatch desk watching the Home Shopping Network on the big plasma screen. He eyed the programming dubiously.
.....“Something useful might come up,” she offered in response to Crawford’s look.
.....He watched as a whippet-lean model with fried-out blonde hair waggled a cubit zirconia-studded ring from one of her skeletal fingers. An off-screen voice hawked its merits.
.....Over sixty-thousand bucks the screen would’ve set back the department. That is, if Homeland Security hadn’t have picked up the tab. One of those fancy Samsung flat-panel HDTV monitors with 1,920 x 1,080 resolution. He didn’t have the slightest idea what those numbers meant, but the salesman made it sound as if it was something pretty damned good.
.....It wasn’t his money, so what the hell?
.....He heard that there was a 102-inch model in the pipeline, so what with the next budget round coming up, he just might have a used 80-inch to replace the 42” plasma that he was making do with at home. It didn’t make any of the crap they showed on the television these days any better, but at least all those extra pixels made it look like you were getting your money's worth.
.....He could have haggled on the price and scored it over at the Mall from Best Buy at nearly half the price, but with the Homeland allocations came the obligation to purchase such things through the proper channels.
.....Not that the department would have ever even considered the need for such an extravagant toy in the absence of such allocations. And with the approach of the end of the fiscal year, sometimes the boon seemed more of a boondoggle, as he and the department struggled to find creative ways to spend the funds in their budget, lest they have the swag decreased in the next fiscal year.
.....Improbably, his department had found that there were certain limits to the amount of high-tech toys that could be packed into the arsenal. In the surrounding mountains, deer were being targeted by the same high-tech sniper scopes that were putting terrorists and insurgents in the crosshairs over in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they were helping take the venison down with the same type of cold efficiency.
.....He’d seen what one of those Geneva Convention-approved rounds could do to a hunk of flesh, and he had no interest in seeing what it would do to a human. Enemy of the State or not.
.....Meanwhile, the best plasma screen that unlimited funds could buy was being used to shop for costume jewelry.
.....“Yeah, we can start sporting bling,” he agreed. “That’ll look good on the next budget evaluation.”
.....Which reminded him: he needed to have Joey down in the motorpool paint that new cigarette boat in department colors, just to cover their asses on the off chance that some beancounter might come around snooping. Someday he’d have Julia use that internet thing to track down a lake within driving distance so that he and the boy could see what those four-hundred cubes could do on open water.
.....“Don’t be a poop,” Julia retorted. She stuck her tongue out and tossed her red mane of hair as she swung around in the office chair to grab a Virginia Slim from the deck that lay by the keyboard.
.....He’d be a poop if he wanted to, but with Julia on dispatch he never much felt like being one.
.....Police uniforms weren’t supposed to make a woman sexy, and in Julia’s case it didn’t. She made the uniform sexy. He would have made a play a long time before, but he abided by the one piece of sage advice that his old man had managed to pass along before disappearing to who-cared-where: never fish off of the company pier.
.....Nevertheless, he still indulged in leaning over her to scan the screen of the computer, breathing deep of her perfume. And cigarette smoke.
.....“Anything come back on that tag I had you run?” he inquired, faking being able to understand what was on the screen. If he did understand, he would have realized that Julia was trolling MySpace.
.....Everyone needed a hobby, and Julia’s was torturing the true trolls. Today, she was a thirteen year old Goth chick who was looking for someone old enough to be dead. It’s a wide, weird world out there, and she was getting more than The Reaper’s share of hits.
.....“Nope.” She hit a button and the unicorn-themed desktop took over the screen. “He’s just some guy from California. Daniel Wolfe, I think his name is. Want me to have county run a deeper search on him?”
.....“No, just keep the info on file.” He stood back and cupped his back. It popped obligingly. “Did Clyde turn in a report on that clusterfuck last night?”
.....“Which one?” she asked, then laughed at his frown. “It’s on your desk.”
.....“Fan-fucking-tastic.” He started towards his office, then paused. “Still, have him see me the minute he gets in.”
.....He shut the door behind him and Julia brought MySpace back up. His door cracked open again and he stuck his head out.
.....Julia sighed, waiting.
.....“Did you check around to see whether that guy in the Valiant was planning on sticking around?”
.....She didn’t bother to look up as she typed in a response to her latest Daddy. “Well, he’s got a reservation out at the Watergate. Room 22.”
.....“Damn.” Crawford frowned. “For some reason, I’ve got one of those hinky feelings about the guy.”
.....He closed the door again and left Julia to torture the pervs in peace.
.....As usual, Scot T was the last to arrive, red hair still tousled with bedhead. He tamped it down with his Tigers cap. The boy sidled up to The Crew and his hand dropped down with casual ease to cup Lolita’s ass.
.....“Whassup, niggaaaahz?” he drawled, lurching forward to bump fists with Pierce.
.....He winced and pulled back at the jab of a sharp elbow to his side from Lolita. The wigger blinked at her in confusion.
.....“Yo, bee-yotch,” he drawled, weaving back and forth as his hands threw down with a mishmash of MTV-sampled wannabe gang signs. “Why you be hatin’...”
.....She shushed him, gesturing with her eyes towards the video store.
.....Scott T looked over and shrunk a little, his hands retreating to the pockets of his baggy pants.
.....Doc Taylor was in the house... or at least, in the doorway of the shop. A well-maintained black man in his mid-seventies, he eyed the group as he handrolled a cigarette. Belying his snow-white hair and deeply creased features, his hands were steady and his eyes were sharp... apparently as sharp as his hearing.
.....Whoops.
.....Scot T cleared the faux jive from his throat. “Good morning, Dr. Taylor.”
.....“Morning,” replied the doctor. He considered Scot T’s get up dubiously. “Boy, you don’t get a belt for those pants, you’re gonna trip and break your neck someday.”
.....The boy nodded seriously. “I’ll look into that, sir.”
.....The doctor nodded, spit-sealing the cigarette.
.....With a snap of fingers blue flame danced on the tip of his thumb. The Wrecking Crew remained unimpressed by the slight of hand. Every bag of tricks gets old fast in a small town, and they had seen the bottom of the doctor's bag years before.
.....Doc dipped the tip of his cigarette into the flame, paper and stray seeds crackling. Inhaled deeply and held it. He exhaled with pure smoking satisfaction.
.....“You do that.”
.....He stepped down from the doorway and headed down the street, leaving a sweet potpourri of suspect tobacco smoke in his wake. The quartet inhaled deeply.
.....Scot T began to weave about in postured aggrievence.
.....“Yo,” his hands resuming their flight. “Who the hell he be callin’ boy?”
.....Pierce opened the door to the video store, bowing low as he gestured with a sweep of his free hand their first stop of the day.
.....“Word up, niggahs,” Pierce laughed. “Let the Wrecking Crew roll.”
.....They rolled.
.....The monitors bolted to the ceiling of the Blockbuster sputtered promos for upcoming releases. Remakes of flicks that no one was all that impressed the first time around. The bottom of the barrel was being scraped.
.....They were ignored by the patrons trolling the rows as they scanned the banks of videos and DVD clamshells for the evening’s diversion. The current crop of new releases didn’t look all that inviting and cost twice as much to rent, so the majority cruised the aisles for old favorites.
.....It was an uneasy time of the morning, early enough that most of the John Wayne titles hadn’t been returned yet and late enough that the returns had already been rented for the evening.
.....In the Video Game section, Mike dropped his selection as Pierce slammed a shoulder into him. The rest of the group hung back, glinty-eyed at the coming release. Pierce eyed the case laying on the floor at their feet.
.....“Ooh. Medal of Honor,” he smirked at Mike. “Gonna go home and spend the night jerking off and pretending to be a warrior?”
.....Mike glanced at the girls and back. “Back off, Pierce.”
.....He took some comfort in the look of unease that Lolita had darted towards Pierce.
.....He couldn’t care less what Debbie thought. He seriously doubted that the cheerleader-knockoff of Paris Hilton was even capable of carrying any thought heavier than a pom-pom.
.....The security camera paused in its rounds and swung back to zero in on the group, red light blinking watchfully. Finally, things were getting interesting.
.....Pierce stood tall, addressing his troops. “Real warriors don’t need to jack-off.”
.....Debbie drew herself up to him, and curled around his arm.
.....“Not when they’ve got themselves a real warrior princess,” she purred. She playfully snapped at his ear and spared Mike a cat-that-ate-the-cream look.
.....“He’s gonna be a hero some day,” she added. There were Gold Stars in her eyes.
.....“Yeah, if he can make it all the way through basic training,” Mike scoffed.
.....Pierce leaned in towards Mike, his green eyes narrow.
.....“I can take you anytime, asshole,” he snarled, jabbing Mike with a splay-fingers to the chest. Mike winced and stepped back to keep his balance, then stepped forward to kneel down and pick up the video game.
.....“Fuck you, Pierce,” he muttered, without looking up.
.....Pierce moved in, jutting his crotch towards Mike’s face.
.....“Yeah, well...since you’re down there...”
.....Game in hand, Mike stood back up and glanced at Debbie. He cocked an eyebrow at Pierce. “What, a real warrior princess isn’t to your taste anymore?”
.....Pierce blinked, his face going red. Mike took advantage of the lull to move towards the door.
.....Pierce called after him. “Have fun, faggot.”
.....Mike flipped an extended middle finger without looking back, exiting without another word.
.....With an air of disappointment, the video camera resumed its rounds.
.....The engine of the Hummer patrol vehicle ticked as it cooled in front of the police station where Sheriff Roy Crawford had parked.
.....Instead of going straight on up to his office upon arrival, he had sat down on the stairs for a spell to watch the sun climb higher into the sky. He listened to the sounds of Harding in the course of another Sunday morning.
.....Birds chirped, children playing.
.....No single train of thought dominated his mind, just the indulgence of the idle pleasure to be found in where he sat. His eyes were half-closed and head tilted back as the sun bathed his face with warmth.
.....The stone steps lay cool and hard beneath his buttocks, leading upwards behind him into the open mouth of the ancient building which housed the Harding Police Department.
.....Seemingly chiseled whole from rough-hewn gray rock, the station squatted protectively at the center of the town, dark and unyielding since before the birth of the twentieth century.
.....The pragmatic design of the building appealed to his aesthetics. It was built long before the advent of the generic blocks of steel and glass that served as county office space since before he was born. Usually trimmed with siding pressed in colors better suited to a finish of a seventies-era refrigerator discarded in the landfill.
.....As had those who served before him, Roy could observe both ends of the business district from his vantage point.
.....If he were to cock his head to the right, Roy would be able to discern the sun glinting off of the dull metallic backside the town limits sign four blocks down the secondary road that split the burg in half.
.....An equal distance to his left, its companion stood muted in the shadows unmet by the sun making its way towards noon.
.....Back to back they were posted as sentries, offering in white on green their taciturn message.
.....The blunt nature of the signs suited Roy just fine. Tall and built like a fading linebacker, but with a farmer’s plain features that belied his parent’s Okie roots, Roy had no use for the occasional transgressor in his town.
.....In the seven years since assuming the post, he had arrived unto the conclusion that strangers invariably meant impending trouble, and in his small world, Roy had little to no patience for that.
.....Like the new arrival he had just eyeballed outside the Blockbuster Video.
.....He’d looked familiar. Although the stranger was probably nothing more than just someone’s cousin from out of town and dropping by to maintain the ol’ family connections, Crawford still had Julia run the tags, even if for nothing more than kicks.
.....All those new high tech toys up in the dispatch office, just gathering dust in the absence of any real criminal activity to monitor. Now and then it was a good idea just to go through the motions, and keep the routine sharp.
.....Just in case.
.....He pulled a drag off of his Marlboro and sighed out the smoke.
.....He had no room for complaint though, he reflected. Harding was as quiet as most small towns go, and more likely quieter than most.
.....More ever as not, the only conflict that he or whichever of the deputies were on duty on any given night would encounter would be whether to park the patrol car on a hidden back road for a nap, or to just to spend the shift watching all-night movies off the satellite.
.....It was a routine broken only occasionally by a barking dog complaint or an unruly patron at the Larkspur Tavern.
.....The bell began to toll from the tower of the Protestant church and the Sheriff sighed, his idyll time over. Although it was his day off, the events of the night before needed to be explained and tided up. He field-stripped his Marlboro and left the remaining tobacco to flutter off in the breeze, tucking the filter in his hip pocket as he stood.
.....His knees popped at the effort as he made his way up the stairs.
.....Julia was parked at the dispatch desk watching the Home Shopping Network on the big plasma screen. He eyed the programming dubiously.
.....“Something useful might come up,” she offered in response to Crawford’s look.
.....He watched as a whippet-lean model with fried-out blonde hair waggled a cubit zirconia-studded ring from one of her skeletal fingers. An off-screen voice hawked its merits.
.....Over sixty-thousand bucks the screen would’ve set back the department. That is, if Homeland Security hadn’t have picked up the tab. One of those fancy Samsung flat-panel HDTV monitors with 1,920 x 1,080 resolution. He didn’t have the slightest idea what those numbers meant, but the salesman made it sound as if it was something pretty damned good.
.....It wasn’t his money, so what the hell?
.....He heard that there was a 102-inch model in the pipeline, so what with the next budget round coming up, he just might have a used 80-inch to replace the 42” plasma that he was making do with at home. It didn’t make any of the crap they showed on the television these days any better, but at least all those extra pixels made it look like you were getting your money's worth.
.....He could have haggled on the price and scored it over at the Mall from Best Buy at nearly half the price, but with the Homeland allocations came the obligation to purchase such things through the proper channels.
.....Not that the department would have ever even considered the need for such an extravagant toy in the absence of such allocations. And with the approach of the end of the fiscal year, sometimes the boon seemed more of a boondoggle, as he and the department struggled to find creative ways to spend the funds in their budget, lest they have the swag decreased in the next fiscal year.
.....Improbably, his department had found that there were certain limits to the amount of high-tech toys that could be packed into the arsenal. In the surrounding mountains, deer were being targeted by the same high-tech sniper scopes that were putting terrorists and insurgents in the crosshairs over in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they were helping take the venison down with the same type of cold efficiency.
.....He’d seen what one of those Geneva Convention-approved rounds could do to a hunk of flesh, and he had no interest in seeing what it would do to a human. Enemy of the State or not.
.....Meanwhile, the best plasma screen that unlimited funds could buy was being used to shop for costume jewelry.
.....“Yeah, we can start sporting bling,” he agreed. “That’ll look good on the next budget evaluation.”
.....Which reminded him: he needed to have Joey down in the motorpool paint that new cigarette boat in department colors, just to cover their asses on the off chance that some beancounter might come around snooping. Someday he’d have Julia use that internet thing to track down a lake within driving distance so that he and the boy could see what those four-hundred cubes could do on open water.
.....“Don’t be a poop,” Julia retorted. She stuck her tongue out and tossed her red mane of hair as she swung around in the office chair to grab a Virginia Slim from the deck that lay by the keyboard.
.....He’d be a poop if he wanted to, but with Julia on dispatch he never much felt like being one.
.....Police uniforms weren’t supposed to make a woman sexy, and in Julia’s case it didn’t. She made the uniform sexy. He would have made a play a long time before, but he abided by the one piece of sage advice that his old man had managed to pass along before disappearing to who-cared-where: never fish off of the company pier.
.....Nevertheless, he still indulged in leaning over her to scan the screen of the computer, breathing deep of her perfume. And cigarette smoke.
.....“Anything come back on that tag I had you run?” he inquired, faking being able to understand what was on the screen. If he did understand, he would have realized that Julia was trolling MySpace.
.....Everyone needed a hobby, and Julia’s was torturing the true trolls. Today, she was a thirteen year old Goth chick who was looking for someone old enough to be dead. It’s a wide, weird world out there, and she was getting more than The Reaper’s share of hits.
.....“Nope.” She hit a button and the unicorn-themed desktop took over the screen. “He’s just some guy from California. Daniel Wolfe, I think his name is. Want me to have county run a deeper search on him?”
.....“No, just keep the info on file.” He stood back and cupped his back. It popped obligingly. “Did Clyde turn in a report on that clusterfuck last night?”
.....“Which one?” she asked, then laughed at his frown. “It’s on your desk.”
.....“Fan-fucking-tastic.” He started towards his office, then paused. “Still, have him see me the minute he gets in.”
.....He shut the door behind him and Julia brought MySpace back up. His door cracked open again and he stuck his head out.
.....Julia sighed, waiting.
.....“Did you check around to see whether that guy in the Valiant was planning on sticking around?”
.....She didn’t bother to look up as she typed in a response to her latest Daddy. “Well, he’s got a reservation out at the Watergate. Room 22.”
.....“Damn.” Crawford frowned. “For some reason, I’ve got one of those hinky feelings about the guy.”
.....He closed the door again and left Julia to torture the pervs in peace.
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