Max in Combat Mode
by Gary Clifton
“McCoy,” Detective Red Harper rolled his cigar stub across his mouth. “No matter how out of place he looks, he’s here. He’s part of the legal staff. They say he needs a few months’ field training — in Homicide, for Pete’s sake — before he moves upstairs. Captain says we’re his training officers. I volunteered you for the first week.”
Detective Davis McCoy eyed the newcomer skeptically. “Lawyer, huh?” McCoy knew many good lawyers but suspected Max wasn’t one of them.
Maxmillian Dumars ReBeau III had a law degree from someplace like Chickentracks U. Anyone with a lick of insight would take one look and say, “If this guy isn’t a zombie undertaker, he’s gotta be an unemployable lawyer.” The son of a New Orleans attorney who was doing ten years in Leavenworth for perjury, Max was pear-shaped, frail, and incapable of uttering a sound that wasn’t a whine. Prematurely thinning, wispy, reddish hair was disheveled at the neck and already nine inches above his eyebrows.
Not only was Max dumber than a day-old mule, his wide butt wouldn’t fit a standard Police Department armchair. When he struggled to his feet, his backside, wedged in vacuum-packed mode, lifted the chair a foot or so before letting it crash back to the floor. They found a chair with no arms, but it had wheels. On Max’s first approach, he missed, tearing out the crotch of his new pants.
McCoy’s long-time snitch, D.V. Griffith, called. He’d operated Purple Spoon Topless for eighteen years and shot and killed nine unruly customers or would-be armed robbers in his Purple Spoon career.
“Biker in here jes’ now,” the old man wheezed. “Wantin’ to trade a machine gun for some crank. Tol’ him I didn’t do no dope. He lef’ in a pickup. Got the tag number, McCoy.”
* * *
McCoy parked in front of the Spoon.
Max surveyed the neighborhood. “Good grief, McCoy, we’re not really goin’ in this awful place?”
A drunk was passed out under a battered pickup with a flat tire. A large gray sewer rat sniffed tentatively at his feet. A brisk, Dallas winter wind blew a newspaper against the rodent, causing at least a temporary retreat.
“If they rush you in here, Max, just start shootin’.”
“Can’t... My firearm isn’t loaded... Too dangerous.”
“It’s just as well, Max. With only a pistol, you’d have about half the weapons of every dude in this place. If trouble starts, jes’ show yours to ’em.”
“Oh, my...”
Old D.V. described the biker and the gun he’d offered for trade then handed over the license number. He couldn’t give a damn about bikers or the law; he was just banking a future “attaboy” for some Homicide Division help next time he let the air out of a customer.
The alarm office had the driver’s ID in five minutes: Lester Wagers Dwight, called “Crowbar,” a member in good standing of the Blood Lords outlaw biker gang. They drove down to the Blood Lords’ house. The old F-150 was parked in the front yard.
Crowbar himself answered the door. Following long practice of stepping over the corners of the Fourth Amendment, McCoy opened the screen and stepped inside.
Crowbar, the jailhouse lawyer, complained: “Hey, man, you can’t...” He was alone in the house.
“See my attorney,” McCoy pointed to Max, standing timidly in the doorway.
While the biker and Max enjoyed a complaint contest, McCoy found the weapon. An old M1 carbine altered to fire fully automatically was pressed beneath mattresses in the back bedroom.
McCoy stepped back to the front room and held up the rifle: “Crowbar, you’re under arrest for possession of a fully automatic firearm.”
“You gotta have a search warrant,” Max and Crowbar said in unison.
“Gun was in full view,” McCoy replied.
“Naw, hell, man, it was hid under my mattress,” Crowbar flashed his intellect by admitting the gun was his.
McCoy chuckled, “Crowbar, a confession is always welcome.”
At that, Crowbar began his superman imitation by diving headlong through a window.
“Oh my,” said Max, horrified.
“Chase him on foot! I’ll get the car,” The intrepid Max waddled out the front door, missed the first step and sprawled across the front yard.
“On second thought,” McCoy tossed him the keys, “I’ll chase. You bring the car.”
At turtle-warp speed, McCoy trudged after Crowbar who, weakened by a regular diet of heroin and beer wasn’t gaining. Three blocks down the street, Crowbar was still making running motions but only at a walk. He stumbled out into the middle of a busy street in a dead heat with Max arriving in the Dodge. Nobody had asked if Max could drive.
At a fairly fast clip, Max struck and ran over the exhausted biker, whose body thumped along under the Dodge before popping out the rear like a discarded rag doll. Crowbar was deader than elevator music.
Brass showed up in fives. Few gave a hoot about Crowbar. Their collective intent was to blame somebody else.
McCoy toed the long blue line and wrote the report(s): “As special probationary officer ReBeau attempted to cut off the fleeing fugitive, the perp veered in front of the Dodge. Collision was unavoidable.”
Back in the Homicide squad room, Max sat quietly. Then, in the century’s most colossal case of understatement, he declared, “I don’t think I’m cut out for law enforcement.” The next day, he found a job with the Dallas Public Defender’s Office.
McCoy lamented, “Doggone, my week is barely over.”
On Max’s last day, not surprisingly, he’d absentmindedly squeezed into an armchair. As he rose to leave, the chair stuck, thudded back to the floor, and Max marched out the door.
“McCoy, what the hell you laughing at?” Harper demanded.
“Just thinking... Some poor mope down at County sittin’ in a cell, suddenly figurin’ the last thing between him and forty years in the joint is Max. Sorta brings a tear to the old eye, hey?”
Copyright © 2026 by Gary Clifton
