Danica Williams - The Touch of a Cop

There were six of them, all armed with AK-47’s and they were brutal. Their heads were covered with balaclavas, the kind you see on TV on the cop shows. All of the bank employees, mostly young women, were shoved into one corner of the big room. A handful of clients had been inside the bank when the group of men stormed in leaving chaos and fear in their wake. The thugs treated them roughly, shoving them into a tight group with the women. The leader barked an order and two of them grabbed the manager and dragged her into the main office. Another went to secure the entrance to the office where they had gathered the hostages. He then grabbed a slender blonde with large breasts and yanked her from the hostage group, holding her up against himself as he moved away. The remaining thugs kept their assault rifles leveled at the rest of the hostages.

The blonde girl was sobbing hysterically, and the leader slapped her face, rocking her head back. He told her bluntly to shut up. He looked her over carefully, and then ripped her blouse open, tearing her bra in the process and leaving her breasts bared to his gaze. He pulled her to him, pawing one pale, full breast as he spoke for the first time to the hostages.

“Nobody moves!” he commanded. “If all goes well and nobody does anything stupid we will be out of here in just a few minutes and nobody will get hurt.” He started to speak and was interrupted by a call from the masked figure by the front door. “Shit, it’s a cop!” He raised his weapon and fired a burst through the door, sending the police officer running for cover.

He looked out the window, using the sobbing blonde as a shield, and could see what looked like twenty police cars outside surrounding the building. A single phone rang and after a minute or so, dragging the blonde along with him, he crossed over to it and answered. He spoke with them very briefly and slammed the phone down. The blonde became hysterical as he dragged her to the door. When he reached it, he pushed her through the glass. She fell to her knees with glass cuts all over her…and he shot her in the back of the head.

One of the hostages had remained calm and patient. He had seen such men before many times, and he hoped that everyone else would remain calm until the thugs could take what they wanted and leave. When the leader ripped the blonde’s blouse, he feared for the worst. But he knew perfectly well what was coming after the girl was killed. There was no longer any time left for patience. He had to act.

Only a few moments passed before the hostages began leaving the building, women first, their hands in the air. The first officer to reach a hostage received a strange and garbled message. “He’s in there,” she said, “and they are all dead.”

Cassie Taylor stood in the pouring rain directing traffic around the wreck on the bypass. She had no idea why they called it a bypass, it was used more by locals to get home than it was by travelers passing through. She glanced at her watch impatiently; her shift had just gotten off but she couldn’t leave until her replacement arrived, and today was the day she had to go to her mom’s house to pick up her daughter for the weekend.

The loudmouthed man who had hit the pickup truck in the rear end was gesticulating wildly while screaming into his cellphone. He threw his phone into the front seat and angrily approached the driver of the truck, who was standing quietly by the front of his vehicle answering the questions asked by Cassie’s partner. Cassie shouted a warning to her partner. Steve, holding a pen, a clipboard, and a flashlight while trying to write down the driver’s information, never saw the wild haymaker that decked him. The loudmouth was huge, one of those guys that smashes full beer cans on his forehead and lifts cars by their front bumpers to amuse his friends. Cassie was already in motion before her partner hit the ground, calling for backup as she ran.

She pulled her Glock as she ran…this guy was three times her size and mad. She could care less how many of the guys on her shift ragged her about pulling her gun instead of brawling with this kind of monster. As far as she was concerned, the guys could brawl all they wanted to, she was going to go home every night…without bandaids and casts. So far, every person she had threatened to shoot had believed her and let her put the cuffs on quietly. This one didn’t seem inclined to accept her authority, and grabbed quickly for her gun.

Neither of them ever saw the driver of the truck move. He snatched her gun away from her in one swift motion and smashed the handle of the weapon into the back of the troublemaker’s head so hard that the man didn’t stand a chance. He went down fast. Cassie blinked and accepted her Glock back from the man, stunned. The loudmouthed man lay out cold on the wet asphalt. She quickly knelt and handcuffed him, reporting to the radio that she needed a paramedic, but that everything was under control. Her supervisor, lights and sirens on, stopped and jumped from his vehicle.

Cassie managed to work through the following week without any major incidents. When the end of her shift came there were no surprises. “That figures,” she thought, “Tina is going camping this weekend with her Brownie Troop.” The thought of facing a long weekend alone did not hold any real joy for her without Tina’s company, but she could honestly use the rest. The last two years had really been a strain on her. Divorce from her asshole of an ex-husband, trying desperately to find a job that would support herself and her daughter had been ridiculously hard. The job with the Police Department had been an opportunity she had not really wanted, but in the final analysis had been her only real choice.

“Come on, you know you don’t have anything else to do,” Steve said, “Tina’s gone with your mom on the campout and you’re just going to sit around eating chocolate and being miserable.” She swatted at her grinning partner playfully. “Asshole, you want me to sit around swilling beer with a bunch of swaggering young cops trying to grab my ass so I can be more miserable” she said. “It won’t be like that, I promise,” he told her seriously, “the S.W.A.T. Team Commander will be there. They’ve contracted a civilian to teach them Unarmed Combat. He’s the guy that took out those robbers at the bank six months ago. Yesterday the Mayor offered him a job and a badge. We’re getting to know him and “washing it down”. Cassie had been a cop long enough to know that washing down a badge or a promotion was a long standing semi-sacred ritual involving someone’s shift mates buying rounds of beer and yakking for hours. It was usually a lot of fun…no civilians present, and cops were the world record holders for gossip. Besides, she was curious about this ferocious killer of men, probably a real macho jerk like the rest of them. “O.K., I’ll go, but you’ll owe me one” she told him.

Dressed in jeans, tee shirt, windbreaker and the obligatory off duty gun, Cassie entered the local cop bar a couple of hours later. She saw Steve and the S.W.A.T. Team Commander talking to an unremarkable civilian type that seemed vaguely familiar to her. Steve grabbed her and dragged her over to meet the civilian. “You’ve met Virgil before,” he said. Cassie had a flashback of the enormous loudmouth lying on the ground. She had another flash of Virgil handing her Glock back to her…not something she really cared to dwell on. Even so, she knew she owed her life to this stranger and she smiled and welcomed him to the Department. They shook hands, and he held hers just a tad longer than was necessary, his smoky grey eyes gazing into her own brown ones. She looked harder at Virgil. There was nothing remarkable about him unless you were fascinated with smoky grey eyes with flecks of blue in them. He was not overly tall, in his early forties, a touch of grey at his temples and black wavy hair cut fairly short. He had a decent build, neither skinny nor fat, but there were no obvious signs of the weight lifter or the serious martial artist about him, and he was very quiet. She watched Steve and the Commander’s interaction with him for a few moments. These were men she knew and respected, men used to being in control of any situation they came upon. And they were treating Virgil with respect.