Officer Down (A Digital Short Story) Read Online Free PDF Page A

those joke dentures you see in novelty stores, he managed somehow to stay on his feet.
    Angry and scared, and thinking about what almost happened to me, I charged him. A second jolt from the stun gun dropped him to his knees. Spittle drooled out of his mouth as he sputtered while his body continued to quiver. Incapacitated now, still he didn’t go down.
    I zapped him a third time, panting and aiming to light up his nuts. I missed, hitting his rock-hard thigh instead. Too bad, but the jolt was enough to get the job done.
    His eyeballs rolled up into his head. He gurgled. Then he crashed to the floor. Down and out, but incredibly, still conscious.
    Face down and twitching, he murmured something unintelligible.
    I cuffed him behind his back, retrieved my .45, and coughing gave myself a minute to catch my breath before I hauled him up on his feet. After I did, I said, “You good to walk?”
    He muttered something and nodded.
    “Good.” His skin was slick with sweat and his knotted muscles still trembled. “You mess with me,” I went on, “and I’ll Taser you all the way down to the van. Understand?” His head lolled as if it was too heavy for his neck. I shook his arm. “Understand?”
    “Yeah…yeah.”
    “Good.”
    I led him into the hall, but stopped short.
    A dozen shadowy figures lined the gloom of the hallway. Strung-out hopheads. Emaciated drug-zombies. They wore soiled clothes that hung off them like rags on a scarecrow. Stringy hair curtained their skull-like faces in greasy, limp ropes. Dark circles rimmed their lifeless eyes. They truly were the living dead.
    “Ain’t got no beef with none of y’all,” I shouted. Talking street, sounding tough I hoped. “Just Tyrell here. Don’t give a rat’s ass ‘bout the rest of you.” To me the trash talk sounded foolish, but I kept it up as I pulled Parks along. “Y’all mess with me,” I warned. “Then we throw down. You don’t want that, so y’all just stay fly.”
    They did, and Parks and I made it downstairs and out to the street without incident. The dopers followed at a distance, gathering around the sagging porch. I yanked open the back doors of the van and pushed Parks toward it. “Get in.”
    I’d stripped bare the interior except for a black-iron security fence welded between the cargo space and the front seats. It was covered with a scratched-up, laminated sheet of Plexiglas. I’d been spit on enough times to have learned. Welded to the ribbed floor and along the van walls were several iron tie-down rings.
    At the sight, Parks hesitated. The effect of the stun gun was wearing off. I waved it in his face and squeezed the trigger. White-blue electricity crackled between the metal prongs.
    “I feel you,” he said, climbing in. Knowing the drill, he knelt near the rear doors. “Where’s you taking me?”
    “Jail.” I cuffed him to a short length of chain then to the iron ring welded into the floor.
    “Ya know, bitch…” He rattled the chain for effect. “Da bruthers on them slave ships was treated better than this. Ain’t no way for a sista to treat a bruther, you feel me?”
    “Oh, shut up.” I slammed the back doors shut.
    I took Northwest Boulevard and headed downtown. Driving from the crack house, I tried to relax. But I was sore and cranky, and no amount of rolling my neck and shoulders did anything to relieve my aches or improve my mood. Excess adrenaline surged through my body, making me jittery. Fear made me shake. I tried not to think about what would have happened if I hadn’t reached my stun gun in time—it had taken three zaps to put the huge bastard down. I shuddered, unable to chase the dark thoughts away.
    Neither could I force away the image of those gaunt, washed-out faces I’d left behind. The drug zombies who stared at me from the front porch with their empty expressions: lost, helpless, wasted kids with nothing to live for beyond their next fix…and the sure promise of an early grave.
    As I drove south on