P Deutermann - The Cat Dancers

With a great deal of reluctance, he kept coming back to sergeant Kenny Cox. Kenny was eight years his junior, and, as his deputy, the logical choice to take over MCAT whenever Cam hung up his gun belt. He was originally from southern Virginia, raised in a farming family, and had a degree in criminology from a junior college. He’d served in the army and had achieved the Ranger designation before transferring to the Provost Marshal Corps. He’d done one and a half hitches and then gotten out, for reasons never clearly explained in the time Cam had known him. He suspected it had something to do with Kenny’s growing impatience at having to take orders from shavetails with zero military police experience but with plenty of instant authority over him.

He’d ended up in Triboro in pursuit of a young lady, or so he’d said, and that aspect of his nature hadn’t changed one bit. He was reportedly a world-class skirt-chaser, but disarmingly up-front about it, and the women to whom he paid attention seemed to sense that and go with it. Cam had once asked him if he was ever going to get married and settle down, and he’d asked Cam to name one good reason to do that. Cam told him for the comfort of his old age, and Kenny allowed as to how old age wasn’t something he was going to plan for. His parents had both died in their late fifties from lung cancer. Kenny was a smoker himself and positively defiant about it whenever the subject of smoking and health came up. He once said that one of the advantages of being a cop was that there was a ready-made solution to the problem of a long-term wasting illness.

He affected a cowboy attitude, but he was actually a highly competent detective who embraced technology in the pursuit of bad guys. He was also a natural leader. Some of that had to do with his imposing size, but he had a force of personality that tended to put him out front anytime something got going. He’d been involved in three shooting incidents during his career, all cleared as righteous. That was higher than average in the Manceford County Sheriff’s Office, but not unheard of, especially for someone who was SWAT-qualified. There’d been an equal number of incidents in which Kenny personally had talked a barricade subject down, and one where the subject had given it up the moment he saw Kenny, in full SWAT gear, step into the house and look at him.

He was something of a legend among the younger single guys in the sheriff’s office, but not because he went around telling tall tales. In fact, he took the opposite approach, letting other people tell the tall tales and then just grinning innocently about it. Cam happened to know that he wasn’t much of a boozer and that he was a master of discretion when it came to his love life. Once in awhile, the MCAT crew would retire to one of the cop bars in the area, and Kenny was always the first to leave, usually hinting that he had some sweet young thing waiting. Maybe that was all true, or maybe it was just Kenny’s way of keeping the legend alive. The one and only time Cam had seen him really drunk was after one of his deer-hunting buddies had been killed in a SWAT operation. Kenny hadn’t been on the run that day, but the guy who’d shot his friend was a three-time loser who’d been let out on bond by none other than Annie Bellamy, as a matter of fact, once again because of a procedural screwup.

The county cops had gathered down at Frank’s Place, a bar and grill favored by the Manceford County deputies over on the western edge of town. Cam had found Kenny drinking alone in a corner booth, and despite some warning looks from some of the other guys as he approached, Cam joined him. Kenny had been drinking Jack Daniel’s and had more than his load on, to the point where Frank had already picked up Kenny’s keys. Anyway, that was the first time Cam heard Kenny really unload on the subject of lawyers, judges, the criminal justice system, and the simplest cure to the problem of rising crime-namely, regular doses of twelve-gauge justice, preferably delivered from a darkened cruiser late at night.

Cam knew Kenny was drunk, sad, and furious all at the same time, but this was a side of his deputy he’d never seen. Kenny’s face and voice revealed a potential for homicidal violence that was entirely consistent with both his size and aggressive nature but not with his being a supposedly mature and professionally seasoned cop. The booze overload finally propelled him out into the back parking lot for some purgative relief, after which Cam ran him home. Kenny had sat in the right front seat of the Mero, his head hanging out the window. Kenny lived alone on an old farm place on the banks of the Deep River, southwest of town, and they’d spent the remainder of the night drinking coffee and solving the problems of the world. By the time Cam left at dawn, the Kenny he knew was back and the murderous red-eyed monster who’d wanted to soak every single one of those wet-brained, creeping Jesus, Communist do-gooder, robe-swishing, gavelwielding sons and daughters of diseased whores in vats of battery acid had slouched reluctantly back into its lair.

Cam had entertained some similar sentiments from time to time. He’d once toyed with the idea of getting a law degree to improve his resume, so he went over to UNC and took the L-SAT exam, which he failed miserably. He made an appointment with one of the law professors and asked what had happened. “Simple,” the professor had said when he looked at Cam’s test report. “You don’t think like a lawyer; you think like a human.” The test was rigged to allow the applicant to find either the just solution or the legal solution. Cam had gone for justice every time, which meant that he would never make it through law school. “The test did you a favor, young man,” the professor said.

And that had been Cam’s problem with lawyers ever since: They examined criminal incidents from the perspective of the law, as they were supposed to. They applied their abundant intelligence, a body of complex ancient law, elaborate procedure, and the nicest sense of professional ethics to people who were hatched out on the margins of civilized society, hadn’t the first idea of right and wrong, and whose total intelligence manifested itself in cunning. The lawyers were never present when the cops caught these things, often still awash in the blood and gore of their victims, a sticky knife in one hand and blood lust glowing in their beady little eyes even as they were trying to figure out how to get out of the corner they were in yet again. That was when every cop out there, at one time or another, looked around for a club.

Senior cops would tell junior cops just to put it away, saying that they didn’t want to get down there in the blood gutters with the animals. But the truth was, the longer one was in the cop business, the more one realized that the stinking killer cuffed in the backseat was going to get hosed down, cleaned up, and dressed in the first clean clothes he’d ever seen. Then he’d be taken into the cathedrals of The Law to appear before all its high priests, with a fair chance of getting away with whatever heinous crimes he’d committed, depending not on what the little monster had done but on how good or inept the opposing lawyers were when they eventually played their intellectual game.

So, what to do next? His personal style would be simply to ask Kenny if he was running a vigilante squad, but that obviously wasn’t on, given the notoriety of this case. Internet service providers around the world had embargoed the original execution scene postings, but enough people had downloaded the video clips to keep the thing very much alive in all sorts of chat rooms. Assertions by police and other authorities that the execution scenes weren’t real rang increasingly hollow each day the two minimart heroes remained missing, and it was only a matter of time before one of the big news organizations ran a special, putting the videos together with the shooting at Annie’s house. Cam could still hear that voice from the crypt saying, “That’s two.”