ALLEGEDLY TRUE POLICE STORIES – SERIES
Mule and Father
“Are you two are the dumbest assholes alive?” Lieutenant Joseph Jerome Jones, known as Jay to his family and to a few who worked for him, including the two in front of him now, was turning bright red, and his jugular was protruding at least five inches from his neck. He was shouting so loud at the two men four feet away from him that his kindergarten diploma hanging on the wall behind him was shaking. According to Jay it was the only diploma that “really meant anything.” He had his hands flat on his desk to hold on for dear life, or otherwise, he would be doing life without parole for at least second-degree, not first-degree, murder. “I have had it. If I could transfer you two, I would, but nobody in their right mind would have you. Shit! Shit! Shit! Fucking ass holes, the both of you.” With this last outburst, he grabbed his chest and went pale.
Mule grabbed for him, but the Lieutenant put his right up while he said at the top of his voice, “Leave me alone, I’m fine, I want you two to leave this office now, return to your desk, and oh, yes, you shit heads will apologize in person to the Trooper you outran at Centreville Barracks today at three p.m. and kiss his ass so this goes away. If you don’t I will have your tiny little pickers cut off at high noon. Now get out and do something related to police work for a change.” With that, both men left the glass-enclosed office, and Father slowly and lightly closed the glass door behind them.
Mrs. Willard, or as she was known to the troops, ‘Madam Hitler,’ was the Major Crimes secretary, whose desk was right outside the Lieutenant’s office. She smiled as the two exited. Father, as well as half the squad, wondered who in the Department had authorized her oversized leather chair in which she sat for 10 hours a day, not moving except for two pee breaks, one at exactly 10 am and the other at precisely 4:15 pm, lunch was delivered every day to her desk by guys from the local Mexican restaurant. Tom Henderson, a former Marine with 11 years plus of service and five years in Major Crimes, asked her on one October day how she came by the chair. Her response was so vulgar that even Henderson’s Marine Corps Drill Instructor would have been shocked. In her 7-minute reaction, no one remembers if she answered the question. “He’ll transfer you two back to patrol the next fuck up. He can’t cover for you two forever. Oh, by the way, here is your new schedules effective this coming workweek, that’s Sunday for you two morons. Good luck, boys.” She looked at them with her usual smile, a cross between all-knowing and demonic. As Madam Hitler handed the schedules to the two, Mule thought, ‘If I ever were to go rouge or just go out of my mind, she would be first I would take out, what a bitch.’ Father wondered, ‘What the heck.’
The new schedule read 7 pm to 3:30 am, Wednesday through Sunday, or as it was affectionately called, ‘The Shit Head Shift.’ Everyone, about 30 or so over the past 11 years, who had been placed on the shift was either back in Patrol, retired, or resigned. Neither Mull nor Father was close to retirement, and nobody in patrol “in their right mind” wanted them back, so the next step was resignation.
As both sat down at their respective desks, which were joined and across from each other in the squad room, Father was about to pontificate on the virtues of the concept of the road least taken to lift Mule’s spirits, when Sargent Harold Collins, better known as Holy Mackerel, appeared. “Another fuck up! Just give me the details, short and to the point.” He really meant I want the real version, not the one going to the Captain. Mule jumped in, saying he would tell the story, not Father. Mule knew Father could ill afford another ‘ding’ on his record. Father was married with three girls and needed the job. On the other hand, Mule was single, didn’t care where he worked, and could suffer the consequences far easier than Father.
“Well, I take complete blame. As you know Sargent we were headed up to Atlantic City to interview that girl who allegedly witnessed the Jenkin’s homicide. Since I was driving I decided to go up 301 instead of 95. Father was riding shot gun and sound asleep when I saw the sign ‘Delaware 5 Miles’. I decided to gun the engine to see how fast she would go.” Holy Mackerel knew bull shit when he heard it, and he also knew Mule would take the blame. After all, Father used to be a priest and would forgive Mule his less-than-honest version of the actual events. “After going about a mile I looked in the rear view and saw a State Troop closing fast. Shit, I was going 92 at the time so he must be doing over a hundred, damn dangerous if ask me. Well, for some reason I decided to outrun him to the line, which I did. I never thought he would get the tag number and report us after all we are fellow brothers in blue.”
“Stop the bull shit Detective Dillard, I’ave heard enough. Just put it down on paper and have it to me by 8 am tomorrow.” Holy Mackerel turned and looked directly into Father’s baby blue Irish eyes, “And you Father, I know you were driving,” he turned and walked back to his desk. If they weren’t such good detectives and kept his stats respectable, he would shit can them no matter what the Lieutenant said.
“Mule, you don’t have to take the blame,” Father whispered across the two desks.
“Yes, I do. Just shut up and you write the fucking statements. If I take the blame you write.”
Father called his wife and let her know they would be at the station for a couple more hours, so getting home before 10 pm was “iffy.” Mule had to call his next store neighbor and ask her to let out Hero, his cat. Hero, an overweight Grey, did not do well confined in the house at night. With both telephone calls made, Father got down to writing another work of fiction, and Mule closed his eyes for what he thought was a well-deserved nap.
As Father wrote the next great American novel and Mule slept, their fellow Detectives wondered how they would survive this Fuck Up. None knew what got them assigned to Major Crimes, but some guessed. The absolute truth was much more interesting than they could imagine or even make up.
Father, also known as Timothy Linton, was a Roman Catholic priest until he was 29 years, 214 days, 17 hours, and nine minutes old, hence the nickname of Father. He would have stayed as a priest except for the occasion of a grave site prayer service. According to Father, he was saying a prayer at the grave site of 71-year-old John Rathcamp, a good Christian and an even better person. George was married to the former Sherry Jones, a lovely lady with a “good figure” four years younger than her now-deceased husband. Back to the gravesite, as Father said, “May John’s soul and the souls of all the faithful departed,” when he suddenly realized that he coveted the widow Sherry Jones Rathcamp. Before John Rathcamp’s body was ground temperature, the good Father and the weeping widow were spending the night at the Hilton, room 234. Father Tim departed from the priesthood after the consummation of their passion pit, unofficial vows of love and devotion. The now-former priest joined the police department in short order. Sherry Jones Rathcamp was the older and devoted sister of the current Commissioner of Police. After just eight months ‘On-The-Road’, he was transferred to Major Crimes. “It’s who you know, after all,” Father would say when telling anyone asked about his unbelievably fast rise to detectivehood.
Mule, on the other hand, came about his transfer to Major Crimes in the usual way. He had screwed up so badly, so many times in Patrol, that no one in the Patrol Division wanted him due to his stellar record. The final screw-up, fuck ups of all fucks, the last straw, came on a hot, humid, sunny, breathless, and long day. Mule, his real name being Benjamin Dillard, had been in the Department for seven years without ever getting an average evaluation. He always came in somewhere near last on the promotional tests he took. The Department’s day of infamy came on June 24, 1976, on U.S. Route 1, nine miles north of the District of Columbia. Before June 24, he was known as Ben to all who were bothered to acknowledge his existence.
The on-duty day supervisor of squad 31, on June 24, 6:45 am exactly, according to the Internal Affairs’s Investigator Gary Johnston, appointed two officers, Bobby Jones, no relation to Mr. Golf, and Ben Dillard, to escort the Mule Train Across America from Washington, D.C. to the county line 15 miles straight up U.S.Route 1. A simple task, the supervisor is quoted as saying to Internal Affairs the next day, “I failed to consider the ‘The Dillard’ factor. The Dillard Factor is much like Murphy’s Law: what can go wrong will.
The Wagon Train left the West Coast in June 1975 and traveled across this great country for a year to the cheers of thousands of Americans along the route without incident to celebrate the Bicentennial in Pennsylvania on July 4, 1976. Then, on June 24, they ran into Officer Ben and the Dillard Factor.
Well, to the Department’s credit or discredit, depending on how one looks at it, no one in the police department knew anything about escorting a mule train consisting of old, sick, skinny mules and horses, wooden-wheeled covered wagons, and weird-looking people who spoke some English that only they could understand and that had traveled across the USA in the twelve months, obviously without ever having bathed.
The documented version of the event would have been 180 degrees from the actual event except for the thirty-seven witnesses who happened to be good, honest, surely God-fearing, law-abiding members of society. Jones and Dillard, in their respective marked police vehicles, met the Wagon Train of about 12 covered wagons at the District line at 7 am, right on schedule. According to the itinerary, they were scheduled to hand over the wagon train to another department at the north County line at 6:50 pm or, in police terminology, 3 hours of overtime. The Dillard Factor did not come into play for about 5 hours.
Old skinny mules and horses pulling covered wagons do not cover that much ground in an hour. By noon, the convoy was just six miles up the road with nine to go. By 10:30 am, the temperature was shy of 100 degrees with 95 percent humidity. Both officers had to turn off their vehicle’s air conditioning and roll down the windows. As the Wagon Train headed north, the cruisers continually circled the wagons for traffic control at two miles per hour, maybe less. Everyone was hot, including the animals, which no one cared about. To make things worse, U.S. Route 1 was packed with the heaviest traffic of the year; all were women drivers, according to Dillard’s written statement.
At the Murkirk bend, a famous bend in Route 1 where Roger Murkirk in 1778 allegedly killed eleven Red Coats with a single shot of his musket. Not many people thought it occurred, but a state plaque on the side of the road made the claim. If anyone had researched the plaque claim, they would have discovered that Roger Murkirk was a distant relative of the 24th governor, Thomas Veazey, who 1837 decreed the event and had the plague put up marking the spot. Bogus history made good. Exactly nine feet north of the plaque, several animal rights people were in the roadway with signs protesting the poor treatment of the Wagon Train animals. The Wagon Train came to another stop.
Dillard was hot, wanted to go home to a cool shower and cold beer, and wasn’t going to put up these lunatics shit. He got out of his cruiser and approached the demonstrators with his hand up, motioning them to get out of the road. Within minutes, Jones called for a supervisor. The Wagon Train crew was calm at first but, within minutes, started yelling whatever was at the animal lovers, making them more engaged and enraged. The supervisor arrived within five minutes, with the first order of business being to get the Wagon Train moving again. Twenty minutes into negotiations, the Wagon Train crew was still yelling obscenities, and the animal rights demonstrators were now blocking the entire road with no desire to disband.
Dillard was hot and highly agitated. According to his beloved mother, he was a cold-weather boy not given to hot climates, an issue not addressed on the recruit application. Suddenly, Dillard claimed later that he did not remember what he was thinking. He returned to his now overheated cruiser, got in, started the Plymouth, and slammed the automatic transmission into what he thought was drive. He wanted out of there before he exploded. The only person watching him was Mrs. Zida Mills, co-founder of the Wagon Train tour convoy. She saw him slam the car door and watched as the cruiser lurched backward into Shep; why would anyone name a mule? Shep is another story, the oldest and skinniest Mule in the Wagon Train. Dillard tried, but he could not stop the cruiser until it had run entirely over the Mule. Several witnesses told investigators that the Mule let out an ungodly sound. Dillard, Jones, the supervisor, and everyone else ran to Mule. No one touched the animal but rather stared in disbelief. Blood and whatever else were all over the police car and road. The Mule’s large, long, protruding, covered with bright blood tongue lay on the road directly under the Murkirk plaque. Maybe some, including Zika, could have forgiven Dillard, but suddenly, he started laughing. He had just run over a mule. Hell, he had not seen a mule before 7 am. He didn’t know the difference between a mule and an ass, if there was a difference. Jones and the Supervisor grabbed Dillard and stopped his laughter by covering his mouth.
Susan Comy of Normal, Oklahoma, has been an animal lover ever since she found a Tabby in the field outside her house. She stood seven feet from Dillard and took exception to his laughing. She launched all 311 pounds of her full-figured body at Dillard. She hit him just above the knees, and Dillard went down like a sack of potatoes. Her two comrades, Mary Dunfield and Gloria Simpson, joined her by jumping on top of Dillard’s head. Dunfield began punching Dillard in the face with fury as Gloria held his head. The initial assault lasted seconds before Jones and the Supervisor jumped into the fray.
Hence, his new Department nickname: Mule.
At exactly 10:45 a.m. the next day, Mule and Father stood before the entire State Trooper Centerville barracks detachment in the rear parking lot, which was actually the front parking lot, but the rear of the building faced Route 301, so the rear became the front, and so on. State Troopers held back their laughter as Mule made his apology. During Mule’s brief statement, somewhere from within the group of Troopers came a perfectly timed Mule call. At that, the entire crowd broke down in hilarious laughter.
That evening, Mule and Father took sole possession of the dreaded 7 p.m. to 3 a.m. shift—the worst assignment good old Jay could dish out.
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