CRIME FICTION

True American Hero

Chapter 1: Confessions behind an Officer-involved shooting

I rolled up the sleeves of the police uniform, the freshly pressed tan fabric now marred with drying blood and gore. The blood on my hands had dried, baking in the hot sun as I waited for crime scene analysts to do their work, taking pictures and collecting samples off from my clothes and skin.

The process had been long and exhausting. Hours spent collecting evidence to find the who, what, when, and most importantly, why. Weeks would be spent on that “why”. Maybe months. All to explain what had happened in a matter of seconds.

I turned the faucet on hot and let it run until the steam fogged the glass before running my hands under the scalding water. I ignored the pain, sliding one hand over the other, watching as the water went from red to pink to clear. Only then did I use soap, scrubbing under my nail beds and in the gaps between my fingers. Every nook and cranny where the blood gripped too.

After a short while, I forced myself to stop, knowing better than to obsess over the cleanliness. This wasn’t the first time I had washed blood from my hands. I doubted it would be the last. That was the life I had chosen after all.

“It doesn’t bother you anymore, huh?”

I ran a hand over the mirror, freeing a patch of the glass free of fog, looking past my reflection to the man over my shoulder.

Sergeant Roberts was a short man with closely cropped black hair. Blood stained his uniform shirt, similar to mine but distinctly different, in the fact the blood belonged to him and not that of the man he had just killed. He winced as he pulled the congealed ball of red tissue out of his nose, looking at it once before tossing the bloody paper in the trash. I looked at him for a long time before speaking.

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess not.”

Roberts walked next to me, rubbing his nose gingerly before joining me by the sink. He took a moment before speaking, inspecting the flecks of blood that still clung to his nostrils

“Hey, listen man.” He said, placing a hand on my shoulder.

“No matter what happens, just know what you did out there today was some hardcore shit. Some shit a lot of cops will never or could never do. You proved yourself out there today. Showed you got what it takes to be a real cop.”

“Yeah.” I said, turning away from the mirror before adding, “Thanks, Sarge.”

“You seen some real shit, Moore. You did what you had to do and You came out on top.” Roberts said,

“Thanks.”

The real shit Sarge was referring to had happened about three hours prior. I was nine weeks out of the police academy and still in-field training. My training Officer had called off that day, some family emergency or something and my choice was to either stay at the station doing paperwork or ride with the Sarge. As most rookie cops do, I had a special hate for paperwork.

The choice was clear.

The day had gone as usual.

We got coffee, moved along homeless people from storefronts, and responded to a couple of domestic disturbances. Sarge asked the usual questions and I gave the usual answers.

“What did you do before this?”

“I was a Corpsman in the Navy and then a Paramedic after that.”

“You ever deploy?”

“Two tours to Iraq and one sea deployment around the Pacific.”

“You see any action?”

“There was this one time in Australia with these two girls and kiddie pool filled with Jell-O.”

“Shut up, Boot.”

“Copy that Sarge.”

The last question was rhetorical anyway. Sarge had been briefed on every trainee coming to his squad. A list of their test scores and prior experience. He knew of the combat action ribbons and my purple heart that now collected dust somewhere in a box of my ex-wife’s parents’ closet. He knew of my early separation from the service after a well-placed IED had peppered my left side with shrapnel and earned me a career-ending concussion.

We rode in the silence for a long time after that, before Sarge decided it was time for lunch. He wanted to go to some Vietnamese place with the best beef phở noodle soup in town. I nodded along sheepishly, not really hungry but hey, who doesn’t love phở. We never made it to that noodle joint. I wonder if it really was the best in town.

The call came out as an assault with a deadly weapon, domestic-related. Dispatch said a woman had come to the line screaming for a male to drop the knife. A male had been heard in the background telling her to get off the phone. More screaming and the line disconnected. We called for additional units.

When we arrived at the dingy long-term stay hotel, onlookers hung lazily from the railings watching with the bored expressions of people who had grown accustomed to a heavy police presence. The hotel was a shit hole. A refuge for convicts and addicts who couldn't afford to live anywhere else.

I was about to ask if anyone had heard anything when a door slammed, and a woman screamed. It came from the third floor. I looked at Sarge and he looked at me. We went running toward the stairwell.

We raced up the steps, Sarge updating dispatch as I hurried past him to the third landing. He was out of breath as he huddled in close behind me. My gun was drawn. He asked me what I had.

A woman laid crumbled on the ground, her face contorted in unimaginable agony. Sobs racked her body as she gripped and her torn blood-stained dress.

“I got a woman, bleeding pretty heavily but conscious in front of a door. I think that’s a target residence.”

Sarge updated what I saw to dispatch. He was close, his hand on my shoulder and his breath hot on my neck.

“We need to get her out of there.” Sarge hissed, “Try calling her to us.”

I nodded and stuck my head past the little cover we had and in my most commanding cop voice, told her to come to me. Blood smeared the landing as she writhed on the ground. I could see the long gashes along her arm, three intersecting slashes. She raised her head as I spoke again, fixing me with an unreadable stare through eyes nearly swollen shut before letting out a string of woeful Spanish. I didn’t understand her.

“Fuck.”

I’m not sure if it was me or Sarge who said it first.

“ She can’t understand what I am saying. We have to get her.” I said.

“Yeah.” Sarge muttered, “And now before he decides to drag her ass back in and finish what he started with that knife.”

Sarge updated what we had over the radio. The gears of his mind spun as he formed a plan. I waited for his orders. I didn’t have to wait long.

“Listen, Moore, you’re gonna be taking lethal coverage on this. That ass hole comes out with anything in his hands you tell him to drop it. If he doesn’t, do what you got to. I can’t tell you to pull that trigger, but if it comes to you or him, you do what you have to. You got that?”

“Copy.”

“Alright, On my command, then. Get me close and I’ll drag her out.”

“Copy.” I repeated.

“Move!”

I approached slowly, keeping my gun aimed level with the peephole of the door, ready to take the shot, but hoping not to. I could hear sirens in the distance closing in as I made my approach. The calvary would be here in seconds and we could better form a plan. We would hold on to the door for as long as we needed. The asshole inside would have nowhere to go three stories up and surrounded by cops. All we had to do was get her out.

I used my peripherals as I stepped past the blood-soaked woman and made room for sarge to grab her. She let loose another barrage of Spanish but Sarge silenced her with a quick finger to his lips. The tirade ended and only weak sobs came from the woman thereafter.

“Alright,” Sarge whispered. “We’re gonna back out slowly. Stay sharp.”

I nodded, my eyes never leaving the door of the room where the woman had just been stabbed. I took a step backward, listening as Sarge shuffled back, half leading and half dragging the woman away from the door.

One step back. Police began to pour into the courtyard below. Two steps. Sarge hissed at the woman to be quiet as she began to cry out again in Spanish. Three steps. I heard a bang on the door and a muffled scream.

“Moore-”

“I heard it.”

A second later, the door swung inward and a man stomped out. He was a tall man with a wild shock of red hair that crowned the bald top of his head. Hate-filled blue eyes locked me in an icy stare. Blood and sweat marred his threadbare wife-beater, the fabric stretched over his impressive beer gut. He wore no shoes and holes showed pale skin through his dirty sweatpants.

“Get the fuck out of my house!” He growled, his voice low and his words slurred. I could tell by the dull look in his eyes that he didn’t know where he was or who we were.

My eyes drifted to his hands. The hands kill. Always look at the hands. Empty.

Sarge yelled for the man to get down on the ground. He did not. He moved toward the gun I had aimed at his face, either not recognizing the death it promised or not caring.

Either way, I was left with a choice.

A choice of whether he was a threat to my life and thereby I should end his or to risk my own by lowering my gun.

“Fuck me,” I growled, hurriedly sliding the gun into my holster as the man charged. I ducked a sloppy right hook to my face but was too slow to dodge the hammer fist he dropped onto the top of my head.

Stars danced in front of my eyes and blood filled my mouth as my teeth closed in on the tip of my tongue. I heard Sarge yell, struggling with the woman now thrashing in his arm as the six-foot-two pile of shit before me, laughed as I spat blood on his boots. It was a deep belly laugh, as if from a demented storefront Santa. And it pissed me off.

The laugh turned to a strangled cry as I shot to my full height, smashing the top of my head into his nose. A satisfying crunch followed, and the larger man staggered back. I pushed forward, dodging a desperate grab at my face with his left hand before delivering a hook of my own to his side, and dipping back to land an uppercut to his blood-soaked chin.

A snarl escaped my lips as I shoved him hard in the chest and sent him toppling hard into the wall. I caught my breath, spitting a wad of blood out my mouth as the bastard tried to right himself against the wall, all the while fixing me with that same hate-filled stare.

I couldn’t help but smile. Adrenaline flared like fire through every fiber of my being. I was an addict and this was my drug. This man, this woman-beating coward felt it too. I could see it, the look of an addict.

A look I knew I shared.

“You dirty fucking pig.”

“Yeah, let it out, big guy.” I teased, smiling through bloodstained teeth. My fists were raised, ready to strike at whatever he threw my way.

“Moore.” Sarge said in a warning tone.

The big man roared again, pushing himself off the wall as I rushed forward to meet him. I rolled under the blow and drove my knee hard into his groin. The man fell in a heap at my feet along the narrow third-story walkway, a frothy vomit spilling past my boots and trickling over the ledge of the balcony.

“Not the same as beating a woman half your size huh, bitch?”

“Moore!”

I turned to look at Sarge, his anger-filled gaze fixed on me as he tapped the body camera on his shoulder. The adrenaline had got the best of me. I gave him a knowing nod as I pulled my cuff from my pouch and turned my attention back to the man.

“Alright, sir, hands behind your…”

I could hear the disappointment in my voice.

“Charles, No!”

No sooner did my hands touch the wrist of the man named Charles, did the woman screamed. I was so startled by her shout, I barely noticed the man spin in my grasp and swipe viciously at my throat. It was only then I saw the glint of steel seeking to open me up.

I dropped the cuffs and shoved the man back, cursing myself for not seeing the knife he had secreted away in those baggy sweatpants. My hand wrapped around the grip of my gun, just as Charles slammed his body into mine, knife raised like so many horror movie villains.

We crashed into the thin metal rail on the third-story landing, the bolts straining to support our combined weight as I held off Charles’s descending blade, my forearm pressed against his. My arm shook, the blade growing ever closer to my exposed throat. The railing groaned as the man leaned heavier against me. I didn’t know what would break first. My strength holding back Charles’s arm and the knife aimed at my throat or the railing itself.

I was running out of time.

I could hear Sergeant Roberts fighting himself free from the woman, who was screaming and thrashing around next to us. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the other officers rushing up the stairs. I just need to hold out a little longer. Just a bit longer and I could get help. I felt the tip of the knife touched cool against my neck.

The gun exploded in my hand. Two shots fired in quick succession. It all happened so fast, I barely remembered pulling my gun free of its holster.

Charles’s body jerked as he stumbled two steps back before slamming into the wall behind him. Crimson flowered through the thin white fabric of his white beater. Two shots, just below his sternum. Charles growled, his hand seeking purchase on the cheap stucco wall he had fallen into.

He tried to speak but only a wet whistling sound escaped his ruined lungs. His words never were spoken, but the look in his eyes was clear. As was the knife still wrapped tight in his grip.

“Drop the knife.” There was a pleading edge to my voice I am not proud of, “You don’t want to do this.”

I don’t know who I was pleading with more. To the man with the knife or to myself.

He lunged and I shot. The first bullet was low, striking him in the throat. The last burrowed just below his left eye socket. He fell in a heap on the floor, blue eyes now lacking their former luster. For a moment the terror gripped me. For a moment I could not believe what I had just done.

And then I felt that familiar calm. A calm I had carried with me from my first tour in Iraq until now. Any icy feeling of numbness passed through me and the jagged blades of fear faded to nothing more than a dull ache. Everything seemed distant as if this all had happened to someone else far, far away.

“Shots fired,” I said over the radio My own voice sounded foreign to me. “Roll medical.” They would not be needed.

“You killed him! You killed my boyfriend, you monster.!”

I looked again at the woman with her beaten face and blood-stained dress, the gash now visible just below her throat along her collar bone. So she had understood me. She did speak English.

Even after all he had done, I was the monster.

Sarge struggled to control the thrashing woman and was awarded a harsh blow to the nose. Blood spilled onto his shirt as the other officers arrived and pulled her away. After that, the other officers took over and we were whisked away to a secure area where we were asked questions of the who, what, when, and the all-important why.

I felt numb through the whole process, just going through the moves as I was told. It was a practiced feeling now. One that is formed by my time overseas and in the back of the ambulance, doing my best to make calm out of chaos. It was only as I stood staring at the reflection of my Sergeant in steam blurred mirror that I thought I was only twenty-five years old.

A decade younger than my Sergeant and I had already experienced a life that had led me to be seen as immune to the trauma of killing. As if somehow over the years that part of me that was human had been eroded to a point where horror had become commonplace. Part of me wanted that to be true.

To believe that I no longer had to fear being paralyzed by fear. That I would always be able to do what needed to be done. That I could slip on this mask to numb control and stand tall against whatever monsters stood before me.

And yet another part of me feared what this all meant.

What did it mean to lose this part of myself?

How much more of myself could I allowed to be eroded before I would lose who I was. How much more of my humanity could I lose before I couldn’t recognize what I had become.

What would I be after? Would I hurt those I loved? Would I be a wild animal lashing out blindly at those around me? Or would I just be remembered as a killer and nothing more?

Would I become one of those monsters I faced?

“You know what you are, Moore?” Sarge asked, wiping the last of the dried blood from his lip with a wet paper towel.

“Huh?” It was all that I could say, so lost I had been in my thoughts.

Sarge turned to walk out of the bathroom, headed back to the locker room to change out.

“You’re a Hero.” He said, fixing me with a beaming smile as he opened the door to leave.

“You’re a true American hero.”

I thought about his words for a long while that night. I had served overseas. I had been shot at and shot back. I had saved lives and taken lives, though this was the first time I knew the name of the man I killed. Charles. Charles Watts.

Would he see me as a Hero? I doubted it. No, to him and his family, his kids, I was a monster. A killer. And in a way, I don’t know if they would be wrong.

I wonder if the difference between Hero and Killer comes down to a little more space between crosshairs. I have been a cop now for three years and I know there are those who would consider my death a great victory for their cause. As this country seeks to change and those who swore to protect become seen as those who oppress, I wonder how I will be remembered.

Would the person who killed me in the name of their great cause be deemed a Killer, or just another True American Hero?

More exciting reads —

Next Chapter 2: Slow Nights on Watch I

For the next crime fiction: An Unlikely Case of The Boogieman

For quick access to other chapters: Go here

Merlin Troy writes fiction inspired based on his time as a police officer, paramedic, and veteran. He is working on his first novel which will be available for readers when published on Kindle. Expected release: July 2021 Subscribe to receive his stories and updates.