Murder Me Sweetly
by Gary Clifton
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 |
part 2
After McCoy had called upstairs about the burned kid in South Dallas, he sat, size fourteen lizard-skin boots on his cluttered desk, studying an arrest warrant for Jeremy Ben Fred, KKK mogul. Jeremy Ben was the same suspect whose neck McCoy had threatened to break the day before.
The disheveled Jeremy Ben, trapped for eternity beneath the mug shot celluloid, scowled out at him. The arrogant Klansman had tossed a Molotov cocktail through an A.M.E. church basement window three weeks earlier, killing three little girls and maiming several others.
Despite Magg’s admonishment and full awareness of the current prohibition against hands-on interrogation of suspects, holding the photo in hand brought on the urge to choke the murdering monster.
The document hadn’t changed from the day before. In cop-catch lingo, McCoy, working alone, had “run his traps” the night before, looking for the fugitive. His search had included a half dozen Fourth Amendment search violations and some general shoving around of deadbeats. Jeremy Ben remained unapprehended and very difficult to smoke out. Kicking in the door of a snake who stayed in a hole was an inexact science.
Cops were amazed at the vacant stupidity. In an outfit where the richest guy had fifteen cents, a man with cash to pay KKK dues had to be an undercover cop. Go figure.
Too dumb to remotely doubt the identity of this new member of his Klan, Jeremy Ben had run his mouth with assumed impunity, enough to earn himself a free trip to death row. He blabbed to the undercover officer the details of burning “them black boys’ church,” except “black boys” wasn’t a word in his vocabulary.
McCoy spun around slowly in his chair and said casually, “Maggs, got’n idea.”
“Yeah?” replied Maggs, a cynically suspect participant in several of McCoy’s previous “plans.”
McCoy had just innovated the plan. The evidence remained worthless unless they had Jeremy Ben Fred. But on this day, he had a pretty good idea where the Grand Master of Hate might be.
* * *
Maggs, resplendent and leggy in a rented Wonder Woman costume, stood in front of a prominent Dallas County building waving a tin can. McCoy and Detective Red Harper hid in a nearby doorway. Husky, tough, with a rim of remaining red hair circling from ear to ear, Harper gripped his ever-present cigar stub in a corner of his mouth like a bear trap.
He’d been in Homicide when Maggs was in elementary school and had eaten eighteen or twenty thousand cigars in the interim. A head shorter and nearly twenty years older than McCoy, Harper was as ugly as an infected toe. Nearing mandatory retirement age, he retained a legendary reputation among thieves and miscreants in the Dallas area as a very, very poor choice to piss off.
* * *
Several miles away, a procession of vehicles that had collectively seen better days followed a battered funeral family car, which in turn tailgated an old hearse. The hearse led the way as the line snaked into a rural cemetery. A sad gathering of grieving people in their funeral finest clustered around an open grave.
The woman the police had earlier helped into a squad car in the schoolyard stood before a small coffin poised on ropes above the gaping hole. She stood in the hug of a sobbing man. A brisk cool spring wind whipped the woman’s coattails. The cemetery, well-practiced in silent acceptance of sorrow, easily swallowed another premature tenant.
* * *
When Maggs had squeezed into the stretchy Wonder Woman outfit, she was certain McCoy was guilty, because the damned thing was a full size too tight. He had picked it up with malice aforethought. The effect, however, was a guaranteed distraction to parading dirtbags.
The Klan was marching that cool spring day in front of the Allen Courts Building on Industrial Boulevard, protesting Dallas County discrimination against white people. Jeremy Ben would be present, but positive ID of a hooded clown was tricky business. Maggs and a shiny costume were going to fix that.
The secret police department weapon in a very tight costume stood out front of their march in her gaudy get-up, absorbing attention away from the Klan heroes by a factor of eight. Tough as she was beautiful, she vowed to withstand the cold wind until a rat was caught. Her tin can said, “Help the Homeless.”
But Jeremy Ben Fred, who couldn’t read a lick, had no idea what the words said. He was transfixed by other parts of Wonder Woman’s package. Most bizarre, the avowed racist, hater of all skin not ghostly white, leered right past his racial poisons.
He pulled off his hood, waddled over to the leggy heroine, and told her she had “the biggest jugs he’d ever seen.” He was pleasantly pleased when she smiled broadly at the comment. The rattlesnake had slithered out of his hole. The dozen uniformed cops monitoring the march had been warned to stand down for the featured attraction.
Harper and McCoy swarmed on Jeremy, and he was face down in cuffs in seconds. The five husky SWAT officers who suddenly appeared in Kevlar vests with “Dallas Police“ in bold across the back could handle the whole other fifteen or so KKK scuds without spilling their coffee.
Enter another soldier of hate: Buddy Ray Kincaid, age 21, Klansman since his earliest recollection, was marching in bitter, total hatred that day. He was known by his Klan buddies as “Big Bud.” His Klan robe, of which he was usually so proud, was suffocating, even on this cool day.
Big Bud had been triumphantly marching beside his closest buddy in the movement, Jeremy Ben Fred, the biggest mover in the KKK that he knew. Close since childhood, they’d spent time in the Dallas County Jail together, where they’d fought off a gang of “racist” black inmates. Brotherhood was next to Godliness.
Big Bud figured the errant drivers who swerved at the hooded warriors of inequality were pawns of the Jew-nited States of America. God, how he despised then all.
Then, smack in the middle of the march, his hero, Jeremy Ben Fred, broke ranks, pulled off his hood, and veered up a short flight of stairs to talk with a painted woman in a red, white, and blue swimsuit getup with black, knee-high boots. And for cryin’ out Christmas she wasn’t even... She was, good God, one of “them.”
When the two Zionist pig agents of the socialist government of traitors burst out the courthouse door and tossed Jeremy to the ground, the half-nekked trollop had a knee squarely in Jeremy’s back, helping the imperialist tyrants.
Jeremy lay there, handcuffed, helpless, betrayed by a skinny vamp. Big Bud’s mama had warned him of the treachery of wicked city women. After all they’d been through, Big Bud Kincaid, by damn, couldn’t let that wad of evil pass.
“Some sumbitch gonna die,” Big Bud declared. He was correct.
In less than a heartbeat, he was off with his hood and out with his .32-caliber, Saturday night special revolver. He busted a cap at the two plainclothes pigs hassling Jeremy, twenty feet up the stairs.
The jostle of the crowd made him fire wide. He missed the cops arresting Jeremy, but hit one of the other Gestapo oppressors’ vests, sprawling him to the sidewalk, his AR 15 clattering. Big Bud had made his last earthly mistake.
McCoy, still on one knee, pulled his Glock .40 caliber and put a round just over Big Bud’s left eye. Parts of Big Bud’s head scattered all over the courthouse steps, the crowd scattered every which way, and Big Bud scattered on off to Hell.
The young officer who had stopped a bullet regained his feet, brushed himself off, and retrieved his AR 15. The vest had done what it had been hired to do. Big Bud had not.
A fatal shooting generated more paperwork than the contents of a Sears Catalogue. McCoy, Maggs, and Harper spent the next week writing reports, then being interviewed by Internal Affairs, then writing reports, then listening to the shrinks drone on from squeaky chairs, and then writing more reports. Lieutenant Oliver took sick leave.
* * *
Copyright © 2021 by Gary Clifton
