Officer Alex and the adventures of “Mister Funny Man”
The sun was directly overhead and casting shadows of barren tree branches across the path of the sidewalk I was walking on beside a local mall, and I could swear for just a second that I saw a vapor trail of my own breath upon exhaling. The days were getting colder sooner than normal, and it made me sad.
While I do not fare well in conditions of extreme heat, I certainly do not thrive any better than a wood beetle in extreme cold.
I went down a mental checklist of where my gloves and winter face mask were (think of a disconnected turtle neck I could pull above my nose) in the cavernous trunk of my venerable Crown Vic for future reference when I heard muffled footsteps behind me, and the slightest bump to the butt of my gun as I instinctively pulled my elbow over it to protect it. What the hell?
“I touched your gun,” someone said almost casually at that same instant, now at a dead-run beside me.
“Mother of God,” I said in response…and then began to run as well, bait swallowed whole.It was daytime. It was cold. I was running. And some nimrod had just randomly touched my pistol after sneaking up behind me. EVERY one of those things was wrong, as wrong as thinking your stepsister has a blouse full of goodies or accidentally shooting your neighbor’s cat, yet it was all going down like a Clinton financial partner and I knew it as I was doing so, while completely unable to stop myself.
This was transpiring years before my career would involve a shirt, tie and shoulder holster so I had that much going for me, but I still preferred to check the mailbox using a car instead of my feet. Everyone knew this.
I wasn’t as fast but I had instantaneous fury on my side and it made us closer to even in speed, though it was clear I’d never make up the distance between us. What looked like a “he” rounded the corner of a concrete wall that housed a dumpster up ahead, and just as I came around it also I saw the open door to a utility hallway inside the mall and what appeared to be the silhouette of a man or woman that was about to have my hands placed upon them with fierce determination and considerable focus.
The hallways that run between and behind storefronts in a mall are convoluted to say the least, and run at inconsistent lengths and angles that prevent direct line of sight for very long, but they carry sound extremely well.
I could hear the now-audible sounds of their feet, and they could hear my intentionally guttural sounds of rage—think Jack Torrance from the maze scene at the end of The Shining—a psychological trick I was rarely too ashamed to use.
This hallway finally ran out into a larger maintenance corridor lined with concrete block and large enough to accommodate two vehicles to pass one another, and my customer was heading towards the harshly lit bay door that would take us back outside…near a drainage culvert if I recalled correctly.
This distance had been narrowed somewhat, but it was eliminated completely when Mr. Funny Man attempted to navigate said concrete sluiceway and tripped, face-forward, down into it instead.
(I would have smiled had vomiting not been so near.)
I came over the edge and willingly let gravity take me down upon his/her back, where he or she very successfully broke my fall.
My teeth were barred and my eyes narrowed as I began to roll them over, and I’ll be damned if they weren’t half smiling with blood covered teeth as they again repeated “I touched your gun,” followed by pain mixed laughter.
It was Craig, from my academy class. Off duty. Always with the jokes, always with the pranks, even with a mouthful of blood he thought he was just the funniest guy in the world.
(Everyone knew this.)
When officer Alexander D. Teach is not patrolling our fair city on the heels of the criminal element, he spends his spare time volunteering for the Boehm Birth Defects Center.