Durango
By
D.M. KURTZ
Installment 1: By The Book
“I’m tellin’ you,” Don was saying. His Jersey upbringing manifested itself quite clearly in his thick and often hard to understand tone. “You always shoot first, come what may. It’s you or them, you know that, right?” He moved with exaggerated gestures as he explained his position to Rodie, but his partner shook his head.
“You do realize that I wouldn’t have to bail you out so much if you just stuck to protocol?” Rodie replied with his light Southern accent. “There’s a reason they wrote the book. I mean, they literally wrote a book, books, on all this stuff.”
“Guidelines, sure,” Don said. “But experience will always trump what you learn at the academy.”
“That attitude can get you killed.”
“Oh, don’t you gimme that!” Don scoffed. “It’s what’s kept me alive, you know that? If I’d always followed ‘the book'” he raised his fingers with mock quotations, “I’d’ve been dead a long time ago. Instincts, pal, that’s what separates the real cops from those shlumps who sit on their ever-fattening butts until they write some poor sap a ticket, am I right?”
Don grinned, and Rodie chuckled at the stoic declarations that came from the lips of his partner. For three years to the date they had worked tirelessly together to protect the streets of their quiet city in Colorado from every form of lowlife one could imagine, and Don knew that his “shoot first” attitude was one that more than grated on Rodie’s nerves.
“Seriously, though,” Don remarked. His voice had turned somber as he swirled the dark black, steaming liquid contained within the ceramic mug in his left hand. “This sicko,” he continued with a nod to the images that flickered on the television screen that hung high above a worn and weathered bar to the right of their booth. “Right under our noses, the whole time. You can’t tell me that he’d still be breathing if I’d’a been the one to catch him, and that it wouldn’t be a good thing.”
“He’d be six feet under,” Rodie agreed, “but that isn’t how the law is supposed to work.”
“Heh,” Don grunted. “The law should put him six feet under, you ask me.”
His partner quickly shook his head. “That isn’t justice,” he argued, but Don only shrugged.
“Maybe not to you,” he replied softly. “But you don’t have kids, Rodie. I can promise you, just the, the thought of that monster getting… I mean, if one of those kids had been my daughter… I can’t, I can’t even think of what I’d do, ya know?” He finished the disturbing thought with a shake of his head as his lips pursed. “He’d better be in a cold grave soon, that’s all I’m sayin’.” In the ensuing silence that followed the pair simply stared at the screen and watched as two officers pushed the well-kempt, handcuffed man into the back of a squad car.
Copyright Ā© 2018 D.M. Kurtz
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D.M. Kurtz 