Big bad cop
I hated the punks the minute I walked into the White Castle.
Maybe it was because they acted just the way I did at their age.
I always had the urge to be the toughest son of a bitch on the block, and would beat the crap out of anybody to prove it.
In high school, teachers used to tell me I would either wind up on death row or become a cop.
I became a cop.
That didn’t cure the urge, but the uniform made people back off so I didn’t have to prove things all the time.
That night I wasn’t wearing a uniform, and I was a little drunk, and those punks looked at me like I was scum, and I hated them for it.
Being like I am, I never got along with higher ups in the department – they always lorded over me, even though they weren’t nearly as tough as I was.
That ran through my head then, too, how I couldn’t always do everything I wanted because of some son of a bitch with captain’s bars would come down on me.
Sure, I told myself not to fly off the handle.
This was a public place, where any kind of trouble would get back to internal affairs. I figured maybe later I could find them again in a back alley where I didn’t have to worry about no witnesses. If I could control my temper I wouldn’t have to worry about no investigation.
So I told the punks to back off, that I was a cop.
They laughed, asked me where my badge was, and if I left my engine running.
I could have backed off, and should have, but I saw red.
I forgot where I was or who could see.
I forgot about internal affairs.
I started wailing on them that mean part of me taking over so that they didn’t stand a chance. When I had them down, I dragged out my gun ready to put a bullet in each of their brains to teach them respect for the law.
The more reasonable part of me kept telling me to hurry up, get it over with, so I could get the hell out of there before someone called the police.
My luck a patrol car pulled up for a midnight snack.
The three punks screamed so much the two officers didn’t hear me tell them I was a cop, too.
The light was bad. But the cops saw my gun. And told me to drop it.
When I didn’t, they shot.
The impact and pain of the bullets deflated the rage.
I managed to drag my badge out. The two cops were so sorry, they couldn’t stop doing stuff for me, calling in everybody to get me to a hospital fast, taking the three punks to jail, where I knew they would wail on them later.
But it didn’t end there.
Internal affairs came to see me in the hospital, asking all kinds of questions.
The punks, they said, claimed I started the fight.
Newspaper reporters swept interviewed anybody who saw anything and plastered their reports on the front pages.
And this pissed me off so much that if I hadn’t been trapped by the hospital bed, I would have found those reporters and beat the crap out of them, too.
Fortunately for me, cops don’t rat on cops, so they told internal affairs that they made a mistake shooting me, that I didn’t have my gun out, that they thought that way because of the bad light. Nobody on the department, even scum like internal affairs, cared what the punks or their lawyer had to say, even though I had wailed on them so bad they eventually ended up in the hospital, too.
The best part was the fact that the newspapers came around, and they called me a hero.