RECYCLING UNUSED SCENES FROM A BOOK

Mar 15, 2014 by Wayne Zurl

Shake and Bake and Double-O Buckshot
By Wayne Zurl
This story is fabricated from an outtake which originally appeared in the award winning Sam Jenkins novel, A NEW PROSPECT. The scene was deleted prior to publication. It’s based on an actual incident which took place in New York in 1975.

At ten past five, Stanley Rose and I walked back into Prospect PD. We found Bettye Lambert sitting at her desk reading the latest Jesse Stone novel. Her blonde hair shined like a lighthouse in the mist.

I felt contented with a job well done. Stanley, the pessimist, complained all the way back from the psych ward at Blount Memorial Hospital.

“Hey,” I said to Bettye, “what are you still doing here?”

“Hey, yourself, Sammy. I’m wanted to be sure you guys were okay.”

“As Ralph Kramden said to Alice, ‘Baby, you’re the greatest.’ Thanks for waiting. We’re fine and everything went off without a hitch. The little guy who took a hostage is in a straight jacket waiting to get candled by a county shrink.”

“I’m glad,” she said, and smiled. “When I heard you tell the dispatcher you were leaving the hospital, I made a fresh pot of coffee. Want to tell me what happened?”

“Sure, and I’d love a coffee. You don’t have to get home?”

“I have to hear what happened.”

“I hope our fearless chief appreciates you,” Stan said. “Cause I was going to leave his ass at the hospital.”

Stanley dropped his 235 pounds into one of the guest chairs in front of my desk. His ebony complexion contrasted sharply with his khaki uniform shirt.

“Do I detect a note of disfavor in your voice, Sergeant Rose?” I asked.

“It’s hard enough supervising the cops here,” Stan said. “You’re gonna give me an ulcer.”

“Sam, darlin’, what have you done now?” Bettye shook her head and looked lovelier than any other desk sergeant on the planet.

“Betts, you should have seen it. Junior was pinned down behind his car. We pulled up in a hail of bullets.”

Stanley interrupted. “Anyone mind if I interject a note of reality?”

Bettye looked back at me as she poured three cups of coffee.

“Go ahead, Stanley,” I said. “I just wanted to see if she’d believe me.” I resigned myself to the truth. “You tell the story.”

Stan chuckled and rolled his eyes. “I must have snoozed through that hail of bullets. But I remember seeing Junior talking to the hostage taker through the front door. But after our ace negotiator here,” he poked his thumb at me, “talked to that Mexican in pigeon Spanish for a few minutes, the guy let his stepdaughter go.”

“You see,” I said. “He’s so judgmental. I get results.”

“After he got the results we wanted,” Stanley said, “our impatient police chief waited a whole five minutes before kicking the door in.”

I shrugged. “It wasn’t really necessary to prolong things.”

“Here ya go, boss.” Bettye handed me a cup of black coffee. “And, Stanley, here’s yours, light and sweet.”

“After he kicked the door in and we entered the trailer with our guns drawn, we found the little guy hiding under the kitchen sink,” Stan said.” He was holding a cheap steak knife for protection, but he could have had a gun.”

“The wife and the stepdaughter said he had a knife. No one knew anything about a gun and we searched the place carefully. You’re so conservative.”

“Well, I’m glad everyone is safe.” Bettye said.

“They’re all not so easy,” I said.

“No, they’re not,” Stan added.

“I remember a barricaded subject incident years ago that was anything but easy. I came close to killing a cop,” I said.

“Lord have mercy,” Bettye said. “What happened?”

I looked at Stanley. “You up for a war story?”

“Sure. The coffee’s hot and I’ll be here until midnight.”

“You two remember Shake and Bake?” I asked.

“Yeah, the stuff you put on chicken,” Stan said. “I was only a kid when they ran those commercials on TV. They still make that stuff?”

Bettye shrugged. I didn’t know either.

“Sometime back in the mid-70s when I worked a sector car in New York,” I said. “We got assigned to assist the adjoining car. ‘Man with a gun,’ the dispatcher said.
‘Possible hostage situation.’”

I raised my eyebrows. It’s the kind of call every cop hates.

“It was August—ninety or better and humid. More humidity than East Tennessee ever feels.”

I thought about the typical New York late summer weather and shook my head.

“There’s nothing like Long Island humidity, except maybe Southeast Asia.”

Stanley smiled. He’d been to the Philippines during his time in the Air Force.

“We had no A/C in the cars back then. I used a thermometer once to check—a-hundred-and-twenty-degrees around our legs. Summers were as hot as hell.”

Stanley slumped down in his chair and stretched out his long legs. Bettye took a careful sip of coffee.

“Before that call we were having a typical lousy day, one job right after another, with no time to write them up or even grab a quick lunch. Then we got the call. Cars from all the surrounding sectors pulled up near the house. As soon as everyone arrived, a road sergeant and the lieutenant deployed us around the place. I carried a shotgun in our car, so my partner and I took a spot right outside the front door. Everyone else spread around to form a perimeter.”

I blew across the top of my cup to cool the steaming coffee.

“The L.T. used a bull horn to contact the guy inside, who shouted a few words out the front window each time he heard a question. This mutt sounded whacked out—in love or more probably in lust with his fourteen-year-old stepdaughter.”

Bettye shook her head. Stan listened patiently.

“After everything was over and the dicks questioned the girl, we learned that the mother had already gone to work and during breakfast that morning stepdaddy told the kid he wanted to make love to her. But she told him he was crazy and wanted no part of the guy. Later, he came home from work around the time she got back from school and it became obvious he wasn’t a man capable of handling rejection. At gunpoint, he told her if she wouldn’t have him, he had no choice but to kill her and then kill himself.”

“And I once thought LA had a monopoly on head cases,” Stan, the former Los Angeles cop said.

I continued. “But as Robert Burns said about those best laid plans, the girl kicked him in the groin and ran for the front door. Jerko took a shot at her with his Winchester 30-30 and hit her in the ass on her way out.”

Bettye winced and Stanley said, “Ouch!”

“That girl was some gutsy kid. Even with a bullet hole in her cheek, she crawled behind a neighbor’s parked car and started screaming her head off. The neighbors called 9-1-1.”

I took a sip of coffee and could visualize the area where I used to work clearly.

“The first sector car pulled up and one of those cops dragged the girl to safety while his partner called for an ambulance and assistance. Those were all small sectors—crowded neighborhoods with little stores scattered here and there. Four cars and two supervisors arrived in no time.

At 5:00 p.m., Bettye switched over the phones and radio to the 9-1-1 center, but left our base station turned on. In the lobby, the radio crackled and the county dispatcher sent a Rockford PD car on a first aid case and one of our units to verify the recovery of a bicycle reported stolen days earlier. When the chatter ended, I continued my story.

“I believe the boss almost talked that crazy bastard into coming out when everything went silent. It seemed like five minutes went by with no action. Maybe it was less.”

I paused myself, trying to create a dramatic effect.

“Then we heard a shot. I didn’t know if the subject shot himself or took a shot at one of the cops.”

I shifted in my seat, pulled out the bottom desk drawer, and set my foot on it.

“The lieutenant screamed through the bull horn trying to get the shooter to answer. Our sergeant came over and lay down next to me. ‘You’ve got the apple on this one, Sam,’ he said. ‘If this asshole opens the door and doesn’t have his hands up, do what you gotta do.’”

Stanley turned on his Ebonics act. “Nice to put y’all in a po-sition like dat.”

I nodded. “Yeah. He was all heart. I lay there, next to a large bush, only thirty feet from the front door. My partner lay next to me, his revolver pointed at the house. My first two rounds were magnum double-O buck. The next two were slugs. At that range there was no question of the man surviving. I was ready. If he pointed a gun at us and wanted to do a Butch Cassidy, he’d be dead—no question in my mind.”

At that point we all took sips from our coffee cups.

“Five minutes more went by and we heard communication from most of the cops. Only one man didn’t answer the radio. That made me uneasy. Another cop, positioned closest to his assigned spot, low crawled there and couldn’t find him.

“The lieutenant called over the bullhorn again asking for the subject to talk to him. Nothing but silence all around. Another few moments and the front door started opening. I clicked off the safety, put the bead front sight at about lower mid-door, and put a little pressure on the trigger. Both my eyes were open looking down the barrel of that 870 Remington. I had already stopped my breathing.”

Stan drew his legs back and straightened in his chair. Bettye sat forward holding her cup tightly in her lap.

“Then the door opened a little more. I saw a blue shirt and a PD patch. I screamed. My partner screamed, ‘Don’t fire. Don’t fire!’ Then other cops picked up the chant. No one relaxed, but no one started shooting either.”

Stan blew out a silent breath. Bettye shook her head. My audience looked spellbound. Maybe I should enter one of those Appalachian storytelling contests.

“What happened was, the cop posted at the side door got antsy waiting for something to go down and decided to enter the house without telling anyone.”

“Bad move.” Stan said.

“About as bad as it gets,” Bettye said.

“Yep. That’s what everyone thought.”

Without giving me a chance to resume the story, Bettye asked, “What happened?”

“Inside, Officer Impatience found the subject sitting in a chair with a Model 94 Winchester in his mouth and the top half of his head splattered around the upper half of the kitchen.”

Stan shook his head.

Bettye said, “Oh, Lord have mercy.”

“After that cop cleared the doorway, we ran in to check the scene. What a mess. The house had no air conditioning, so with that temperature, fifteen minutes of fresh blood and brains on the floors and walls and ceiling, stunk to high heaven. I looked at that deranged bastard lying on the floor. My partner backed out, afraid to be sick from the stink. Two other cops came in with handkerchiefs over their noses and checked the rooms for other people or bodies—there were none. The sergeant patted my shoulder and gestured for me to get out. We’d leave it for the detectives and the M.E.”

Neither Bettye nor Stan commented.

“Outside,” I said, “I saw the L.T. reaming out the cop who went through the house. No question in my mind, that guy wanted a Bravery Medal. But he was lucky to get away with an ass-chewing. If we didn’t wear those big red shoulder patches, something easy for me to see, a blast of double-O buckshot would have ruined his whole day.”

I sipped more coffee. The temperature tasted just right.

“What about the Shake and Bake?” Bettye asked.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “I got home a little late that night. For an hour, on the drive east, I swore I could smell the blood from that hot kitchen. You know how you smell a dry floater long after the body’s gone? I always wondered if those smells stuck to the nasal hairs.”

Stan nodded, he knew. Bettye said nothing.

“Well, Kate already had dinner ready. She made chicken that night. Chicken with the new and improved, barbeque flavor Shake and Bake. It had the same sweet smell of the spilled blood in that kitchen. I lost my appetite—she understood. Funny how some things trigger memories.”

Bettye and Stanley nodded, but still offered no comment. Some people know when it’s a time to just listen.

THE END

A NEW PROSPECT Copyright 2010, Wayne Zurl
www.waynezurlbooks.net