Maggie and I had finished supper, settled into our easy chairs and flipped on the TV to catch the evening news.
Big mistake.
We were used to our local newscasts being depressing, but tonight’s broadcast hit rock bottom.
The program always opened with ‘Breaking News’ flashing across the screen after which, the anchor would switch to a reporter somewhere on the city streets.
This time, the reporter was standing in front of a modest bungalow and the lights from multiple police cruisers were flashing in the background.
“A three year old girl has been pronounced dead, the victim of a senseless drive-by shooting. A neighbor tells us that about five this afternoon, a car pulled up in front of the house and fired multiple rounds, one of which struck and killed the child. This is the third drive-by shooting that has claimed a child’s life in the last month. Police are urging anyone with information to call the TIPS hotline.”
“How horrible!” Maggie declared. “What is wrong with people?”
I didn’t have an answer. In my five years on the force, I asked myself that same question almost every day.
The next story focused on another rally at the J.C. Nichols Fountain on the Country Club Plaza. Some people were carrying placards reading ‘Don’t Shoot!’ Others were wearing T-shirts with the words, ‘I can’t breathe!’ These were, of course, references to the Michael Brown and Eric Garner incidents. The demonstrators that were interviewed talked in no uncertain terms how police brutality and harassment had to stop.
Suddenly, the screen switched back to the news anchor. “This story just in. Kansas City Police have just shot and killed a young black man who had been involved in a car-jacking incident. For the latest on this story, let’s go to our reporter on the scene.”
The screen switched to a reporter standing in the parking lot of a local shopping center.
“In a memo just issued by the police department, it appears that officers were responding to a 911 call about a reported car-jacking when they encountered a young man holding a knife to the throat of a female hostage.
“After a brief discussion, the man released the hostage and charged the officers with his knife. One of the officers fired his weapon striking the man in the chest. Twenty-two year old Leroy Sheetz was pronounced dead at the scene.”
The name sounded familiar and suddenly I made the connection.
“Damn!”
“What?” Maggie said, startled.
“The guy that has been running with DeMarcus Tweedy. The captain told me his name was Lamar Sheetz. I’d be willing to bet that Leroy Sheetz is his brother. If that’s the case, then there’s going to be hell to pay.”
I had thought that things couldn’t get any worse, but they just did.
My premonition came to pass the next day.
I was in my office setting up a new file cabinet when the phone rang.
It was Ox.
“Hey, Partner. Bad news.”
“What now? Are you okay? Surely not Amanda again.”
“No, we’re both fine. It’s Corey Chapman and his partner, Wilson Freeman.”
I recognized the names of two officers who worked out of our precinct.
“What happened?”
I could tell Ox was struggling to hold it together.
“They had just stopped a car for an illegal left turn. The driver had already moved on and Cory and Wilson were just idling at the curb finishing up the paperwork when two men approached the squad can and opened fire point blank. They didn’t have a chance.”
“My God! So both of them are --- ?”
“Yes, they’re both gone --- murdered in cold blood.”
Then it hit me. “You said they were attacked by two men. Have they been identified?”
“Yes, the whole thing was recorded on a street cam.”
“Let me guess. DeMarcus Tweedy and Lamar Sheetz.”
“You got that right. No doubt it was payback for what happened to Leroy Sheetz.”
My blood ran cold when I remembered Tweedy’s words when I was on my knees in the storage shed with his gun against my temple. “The Good Book says, ‘an eye for an eye,’ an’ dat’s just what’s gonna happen. Every time a cop kills one of us, we gonna kill some of them.”
“I suppose they got away clean.”
“They did. Every cop in the city is looking for them. First Vince and now Chapman and Freeman. We’ve gotta stop these guys.”
My heart ached for the families of the fallen officers and I was in a real funk when there was a knock on the door.
I peeked through the peep hole lens I had recently installed and saw it was Billy Bob and Oren.
“Hey Uncle Walt. I hope we’re not interrupting. I’ve got something I think you’re gonna want to hear.”
I was still having difficulty getting used to the ‘Uncle.’ “Sure, boys. Come on in.”
“We just came from the Three Trails.”
Much to Willie and Mary’s delight, the Thrasher brother’s new cleaning company, Two Men and a Mop, had taken over the cleaning duties at the hotel.
I was fearful when I saw the concerned look on their faces. My worst nightmare was that Mr. Feeney and his frequent aromatic deposits in the john had driven the boys away.
“It all started with Mr. Feeney,” Billy Bob began.
My heart sank when I heard those words. “Please don’t tell me you’re quitting.”
“No, no, nothing like that, although the second time he stopped up the stool in the #3 crapper, the thought crossed our minds.”
“What then?”
“We were vacuuming the hall when Feeney found us. He was all hot and bothered. He said he had gotten hold of a bad burrito and was tossing his cookies when it happened.”
“What happened?”
“He barfed his false teeth and flushed them down the stool. He begged us to try and get them back.”
“What did you do?”
“I went down to the basement and traced the four inch stack to a cleanout trap back in a crawl space next to the east outside wall. I wiggled back there and was unscrewing the cap from the cleanout when I heard voices outside. I figured it was a couple of the tenants, but when I heard what they were saying, I knew it wasn’t.”
“So what were they saying?”
“I peeked through a crack in the foundation and saw two black guys. Uncle Walt, they’re planning to torch the hotel Saturday night.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely! They said as soon as the tenants smelled the smoke, they’d come pouring out of the building. It would be like shootin’ fish in a barrel. One said it was payback for what the old cop had done.”
“Thank you, Billy Bob. You boys did good. This may be the opportunity we’ve been looking for to get these guys off the street.”
Then a thought struck me and I had to ask. “Did you find Feeney’s false teeth?”
Billy Bob grimaced. “Sure did. They were hung up in a big ball of hair in the trap. I took them up to Feeney. He thanked me, rinsed them under the faucet and plopped them right back in his mouth. It was really gross!”
The term ‘potty mouth’ just took on a new meaning for me.
My next stop was the precinct.
I told the captain what Billy Bob had heard.
“I hate to use your hotel as bait,” he said, “but you’re right, this just might be our chance to nail these two. We’ll get Mary and all the tenants out of the building and into a motel the day before. We don’t want to put anyone in harm’s way. I’ll have teams standing by in unmarked cars and snipers on the surrounding roofs. There’s no way Tweedy will give us the slip again.”
“I hope you’ll have some fire trucks close by too,” I replied. “That building is over a hundred years old and would go up like tinder if they actually get a fire started.”
“The plan is to take them before they get that far, but yes, we’ll have the fire department nearby.”
The evacuation went
well and by four o’clock on Friday afternoon the hotel was empty. The captain had assigned a half-dozen officers to roam around the hotel and sit on the porch dressed as tenants just in case Tweedy drove by. We didn’t want anything to be out of place and scare him off.
I dropped by about six on Friday evening. The temperature had to be in the thirties, but Officer Fredericks was sitting on the front porch bundled up in an old coat.
“Aren’t you freezing?” I asked.
He gave me a disdainful look. “I’d rather freeze than be cooped up in that tiny room. How can people live in a dump like this? No offense.”
“None taken. If all you can afford is forty bucks a week, there’s not a lot to choose from out there. At least they have a roof over their heads, a warm bed to sleep in and a bathroom.”
“Speaking of bathrooms --- .”
“Hold that thought,” I said, spotting a familiar figure coming up the sidewalk.
“Mary! What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be at the motel making sure our guys aren’t trashing the place.”
“I just got to thinking about the place being burned up and I came back to get my Barry Manilow albums. I don’t know what I’d do if I lost those.”
“Out of all the stuff in your apartment, the most important thing is Barry Manilow?”
“Yeah, so what?”
“First of all, we’re not going to let the place burn down.”
I was about to say, “Second, you can go to the flea market and pick up dozens of Barry Manilow albums for fifty cents each.” But I quickly reconsidered.
“Hurry, grab your albums and I’ll drive you back to the motel. By Sunday noon, everybody will be back and everything will be hunky-dory.”
I just hoped I was right.
By noon on Saturday, the captain had everything in place. Snipers were on the surrounding roofs and unmarked cars were on every block near the hotel.
It would be a long, exhaustive wait until dark when Tweedy was expected.
I sat in one of the unmarked squad cars with Ox and Amanda.
I was happy to see that they were getting along well. Change is never easy, but sometimes it is necessary.
As usual, Ox had stocked the car with plenty of snacks and a thermos of hot coffee.
Every so often, there would be chatter on the police radio, saying that everything was clear, no suspects in sight.
Just before nine, a message of a different kind came over the radio. “A fire has been reported in the 2700 block of Benton Boulevard. The building is a forty unit apartment and tenants are jumping out of windows to escape. Traffic is snarled. All fire units in the area have been dispatched. Units 27, 38 and 45 proceed to the scene for crowd control.”
I recognized those units as three of the unmarked cars that had been assigned to the Three Trails.
Something was going terribly wrong.
I heard the three patrol cars respond in the affirmative and moments later I heard sirens from the fire trucks that were descending on the burning building.
Then it hit me. The fire on Benton wasn’t a coincidence, it was a diversion. With every fire truck in the area battling a blaze and rescuing people from a forty unit building, there would be no units available to respond to the Three Trails when it went up in flames. The building would be a total loss and any tenant trying to escape would indeed be an easy target.
The sirens from the pumpers had just gone silent when we heard one of the snipers. “Suspect approaching from the alley behind the building. All units, respond on my mark. Three, two, one. Hit him!”
Spotlights flooded the scene, revealing a startled Lamar Sheetz carrying a gas can.
“Drop the can!” a bull horn bellowed. “Drop the can and on your knees! Put your hands behind your head.”
Sheetz hesitated for a moment, then seeing every avenue of escape blocked, he fell to his knees.
“Don’t shoot!” he shouted, locking his fingers behind his head.
The good news was that we had Lamar Sheetz in custody. The bad news was that he was alone.
DeMarcus Tweedy had undoubtedly set the other fire and was probably on his way to join Lamar to shoot the ‘fish in a barrel’ but was scared away when we arrested his accomplice.
By striking when we did, we prevented Sheetz from burning the building, but we lost our chance to get Tweedy.
The avowed cop killer was in the wind and most likely planning his next strike.
CHAPTER 18
The public outcry over the executions of officers Chapman and Freeman was overwhelming.
Many people had been understandably upset by the tragic deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner and the demonstrations demanding an end to police brutality were continuing across the country.
With the deaths of Chapman and Freeman, a new segment of society hit the streets in protest. Not only in Kansas City, but all over the nation, citizens rallied in support of the police.
A Virginia man launched a Facebook event that quickly spread across the nation. The event was labeled ‘Blue Light Week.’ The idea was for homeowners to replace their regular porch lights with blue lights to show their support for the men in blue. He sent out 190 invitations to his Facebook friends and in less than 24 hours, there were over 28,000 shares.
Newspapers and TV stations picked up the story and soon every hardware store in town was carrying the blue lights.
Officer Chapman was single, but Officer Freeman left behind a wife and two young sons. When funeral arrangements were announced, the response was so overwhelming, the venue had to be moved from one of the local churches to the Sprint Center to accommodate everyone who wanted to come and pay their respects.
Police officers from all over the country took vacation days to travel to Missouri in support of their fallen brothers.
A motorcycle escort had been arranged to accompany the hearses from the mortuary to the Sprint Center. License plates on the Harleys were from as far away as New York and California.
I desperately wanted to sit with the members of my old squad, but since I was no longer a cop, it just wasn’t going to happen.
Maggie and I had made arrangements to get together with Ox and Judy after the service. If I couldn’t be with my friends during the service, I definitely wanted their companionship afterward.
The service itself was solemn but beautiful.
There wasn’t a dry eye in the building when the flags that draped the two coffins were presented to Chapman’s mother and Freeman’s widow and two sons.
When the last notes of Taps had died away, signaling the ‘end of watch’ for the two fallen officers, the building began to empty.
Maggie and Judy had agreed to meet and go on ahead to get a table at the restaurant. I was to meet Ox, and he and I were going to make a brief visit to a nearby hotel suite where the members of my old squad were having an ‘after service’ get together.
I made my way through the crowd to where I was to meet Ox, but the big guy was nowhere to be seen.
I spotted Officer Dooley. “Hey Dooley, have you seen Ox?”
“I saw him about fifteen minutes ago. He was talking to another officer --- a black guy. I hadn’t seen him before. I figured he was one of the out-of-town guys. They just talked briefly, then left together.”
“Thanks.”
Something wasn’t right. Ox wouldn’t have just left me high and dry. He would have called or texted to let me know what he was doing.
It took me a good fifteen minutes to wade through the crowd. When I got to the street, I figured I would just go on to the hotel suite. Ox probably just got mixed up and thought we would meet at the after party.
I was halfway to the hotel when I felt my phone vibrate with a text message.
I opened the screen and it was from Ox’s phone, but the message certainly hadn’t been sent from my friend.
It read, “I have your partner. If you want to see him alive, come to the old Westport High School on 39th Street. Come alone. If I see ano
ther cop or anyone else, I’ll put a bullet in his head.”
Suddenly it all made sense. Tweedy had gotten hold of a cop uniform of some kind. It didn’t even have to be a K.C. cop uniform. The Sprint Center was filled with cops from all over the country and he could blend in and no one would be the wiser.
I could just imagine his words as he moved in on Ox. “Come with me quietly or I’ll kill you right here first and then empty my gun on anyone close by.”
Knowing Ox, he went quietly so that no one else would be hurt.
I knew without a doubt that if I went alone as he asked, neither Ox nor I would walk out of the old school alive.
I knew I couldn’t call the captain or any other cop, but I needed backup, so I called Kevin. Ten minutes later, he met me outside the school.
I don’t know why Tweedy picked Westport other than it was abandoned, but his selection turned out to be a blessing for me. I had attended Westport for a few years when I was in high school and knew the building pretty well. I tried the front door, and as I expected, it was unlocked. That was obviously the way he wanted me to enter.
When I was in high school, I weighed about a hundred and fifteen dripping wet and hated everything that was connected to P.E. or organized sports. When the coach had the class running laps or, heaven forbid, choosing up sides for dodge ball, I and another fellow geek would slip out of the gym by the back exit.
I showed Kevin the door, he whipped out his lock set and had it open in a flash.
I had no idea where Tweedy was holding Ox, but I figured the best bet was in the auditorium. I gave him directions from the gym to the auditorium and went back to the front entrance.
I brought a flashlight and moved slowly through the halls toward the auditorium, checking each vacant room along the way.
When I got to the auditorium, I spotted Tweedy on the stage. Ox was tied to a chair and Tweedy had a gun to his head.
“Well, well,” he said. “I been lookin’ forward to dis for a long time now. I hope you come alone, ‘cause if I see anybody else, your buddy’s brains will be all over this stage.”
Lady Justice on the Dark Side (Volume 19) Page 13
