Keith Rawson

Having His Cake

It was my third week of shit detail out near the Palo Verde power planet, going ape from doing nothing but cruising dirt roads and busting up high school beer parties when I nearly killed Maeve Jenkins daddy.
 Ten years ago the Palo Verde run was the most sought after duty area in Maricopa County. Hell, there wasn’t a cop in the whole state of Arizona who didn’t want a chance at beating the living crap out of some uppity, self righteous nuclear energy protestors. But that was a decade ago and oil prices being as high as they were, the tree huggers had decided saving their wallets was a whole lot more important than trying to stop the powers that be from producing radioactive waste. Now the Palo Verde run was reserved for jack-offs on Duty Sergeant Campos’ asshole list.
I was on the asshole list.
I was an asshole because I was a thirty-two-year-old Sherriff’s deputy who was stupid enough to have fallen in love with a seventeen-year-old girl he originally met via a mass pot bust headed up by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency
I was an asshole because I just happened to get caught in the back of my cruiser with the said seventeen-year-old and suspected narcotics dealer’s tit in my mouth and my trousers bunched up around my knees.
    Lucky enough the seventeen-year-old in question’s old man, (who was considered the real suspect in the bust, but most law enforcement involved felt he was forcing his under age daughter to take the fall.) Dean Talbac, was nothing more than poor white trash and that the entire town of Buckeye was breathing a collective sigh relief because chances were I was going to end up marrying the said seventeen-year-old and getting her out of Dean Talbac’s nasty ass, run down, middle of Bumfucking No Where single wide before he either tried screwing her or killing her for not letting him stick his shriveled up pecker in her. But Talbac was raising up enough of a stink to make sure that Sergeant Campos needed to keep me out of sight and out mind, at least until the seventeen-year-old in question (Sorry, her name’s Katie, it’s force of habit to leave the names of minors out of written reports.) turned eighteen.
So I was sent out to the sticks, 10PM-to-9AM shift cruising back roads, taking two hour long naps, and reading Max Brand paperbacks. After a couple of weeks of this, I was bored off my ass and I got into the habit of making sure my equipment was in fine working order. What I mean by my making sure my equipment is in fine working order largely entailed me hitting a dirt road like CR #17 and pushing my cruiser to the 120 MPH range and kicking up some serious dust.
It was Wednesday night, which just happened to be my Friday and I was three hours into my shift; two and half of it was me playing high speed pursuit. I’d just finished pushing the cruiser up to eighty down three hundred yards of a snarled, rutted access road that didn’t even warrant a county designation. By the time I pulled off onto CR #22—which was the most direct and under used route out to Palo Verde—the cruiser’s suspension was creaking like a retired football players knees and I’m sure I’d lost a good ten pounds of pressure out of all four tires. I didn’t care; the shift was drag ass and all I kept thinking about was the getaway me and Katie had planned down in Tucson on my days off.
I hit CR #22 at sixty-five and lead footed it. The road was smooth as silk and I pegged the needle; my vision zooming down to pinpricks, caught up in the speed and motion; the fat man was lucky as hell that he somehow registered.  I slammed the breaks hard with both feet sixty yards from point of impact; the rear of the cruiser fishtailed to the left and by the time I stopped my passenger side door was all of nine or ten feet from him and I’d bathed him in a tidal wave of silt and dust.
I jumped out the cruiser, pulled my baton and quick stepped over to where the fat bastard was crouched in the center of the road. They teach you at the academy to aim for center mass when you’re taking a suspect down with your stick; it’s the same concept as when you’re pulling your service piece: Aim for the largest, most obvious target. But with as pissed as I was, I was set and ready to beat the sack of shit’s brains out. It was only at the last second that I forced myself to regain a bit of composure and I re-aimed my first strike so I ended up clipping him in the throat. The hit caused the fat man to gag out a mixture of thick white foam and blood from his mouth and nose; he looked like an oversized sixth grader giggling so hard that he squirts milk from his nose and I have to admit the sight of it brought a slight smile to my face.
It wasn’t enough to stop me from wailing on him.
“WHAT!”
I brought the stick down on his right shoulder; collar bone making a sound like an aluminum bat making hard contact with a softball.
“THE!”
Right elbow, same sound, plus a yelp like a whipped dog.
“HELL!”
Lower back.
“DO YOU!”
Stomach.
“THINK YOU’RE DOING!”
“WAIT! Wait! Stop! Stop!” The fat man held up his hands over his head and for the first time I noticed the man was kneeling in a three layer wedding cake. He stared up at me, his eyes deer in the headlamps wide, blubbery tears forming small valleys down his dusty cheeks, his mouth and hands smeared with a mixture of white and green frosting and blood; a snug tuxedo shirt barely containing his enormous body.
“Please, Frank, don’t hit me no more! Let me explain what I did!” The man was Mike Jenkins, Maeve’s daddy—although I barely recognized him due to his radical weight gain.
    I’d known Maeve Jenkins from back in high school. I’d diddled around with her cooch back in the first couple of months of my senior year. For some reason Maeve had acquired a reputation as the town slut; although I felt the distinction was entirely unwarranted, because in order to drive the nail home into Maeve’s juicy wet center, you had to drop to one knee and promise to put a ring on her finger. And back in high school, the only two things on my mind was getting my dick wet and getting the fuck out of Buckeye. So I dropped the good old girl and got together with the real town slut, Christy Madison. But there were more than a few townies who wanted to break off a piece Maeve’s ass, and I think she’d been married and divorced at least six times since high school. I’d even been invited to a few of her weddings, including her latest to Christopher Tulsan, where Mr. Jenkins had obviously just come from.
“Mr. Jenkins?” I asked, my head cocked sideways like a dog staring at a bug. “Sir, what are you doing?”
I really liked Mr. Jenkins back when I was dating Maeve. He worked out at Palo Verde as a shift supervisor who put in sixty hours a week to support his wife, daughter and mother-in-law. I remembered him as a good man with a quick smile and an unwavering love of the Arizona Cardinals even though they sucked serious ass. He was always a big man, but, Christ, the current version of him had to be clocking in at over three hundred and fifty pounds.
“Gimme a minute to explain why I did it, Frank.” He said as he tried wiping the crusted frosting off his lips with a filthy shirtsleeve. “Let me explain before you take me back to those goddamn bitches.”
“Sir, I don’t know what your—“
“I know they sent you for me, boy. I know they sent you out to get back their fucking cake. Well you and them can suck my fucking cock, boy!” He jabbed his pork link fingers at me for emphasis; I blinked and rubbed my jaw.
“No Sir. I was. . .I was just out here on pat—“
“You go tell those bitches to go fuck themselves, you hear?” He reached down between his legs, scooping up a filthy wad of cake and frosting and jammed it into his mouth. “Goddamn cunts, I haven’t eaten in three goddamn weeks. They kept starving me, saying I had to fit into my suit for the wedding. And they said I could have my cake at the wedding and when they wouldn’t let me have it, I took it, goddamn it!”
My shoulder rig crackled to life; dispatch calling out a 211. You could hear the sarcasm and barely suppressed laughter in the dispatcher’s voice as he rattled off the description of Mr. Jenkins and the cake. Mr. Jenkins heard it all clear as day, his body shuttering, snot and tears pooling around the dam of frosting on his upper lip.
“Just kill me, Frank,” He said weeping, his three or chins resting on chest. “Just fuckin’ do it. I can’t take this shit anymore.”
I almost did.
I pictured myself drawing down on him and putting a 9 MM slug in his skull while he wept into the remains of his only daughter’s ruined wedding cake. I even found myself rubbing the smooth butt of my glock, wondering? I couldn’t even imagine what this man had to endure on a daily basis? Did he still work at the power plant, or did he just sit at home, stuffing his mouth, watching TV and listening to his wife constantly bitch at him about how he should lose weight, how he should better himself, how he should get off his fat ass and do something for once in his life! 
I figured I’d be doing him a favor.
But then again, how the hell would I explain myself shooting him? How would I write up the report? Would I say he was evading arrest? That all four hundred plus pounds of him and toting a triple layer wedding cake wouldn’t stop moving when I ordered him to halt? Shit, I was already going to have explain the beating I dished out.
I holstered my baton, squatted down in front of him and slung an arm over his shoulder. I whispered to him how everything would be alright. That I was sorry that I hit him, and then I read him his Miranda’s as I eased him to his feet and maneuvered him into the back of the cruiser and called it in.
I didn’t bother to cuff him.