The Protectors: Vigilante Justice (Vigilante Cops Book 1)

by Bernard Lee DeLeo

“Wait El, your ribs!” Connor noted Arvizo and Ladd already cuffing their kneeling prisoners. “I have to go after El.”

  “I’ll circle around and try to cut her off in a moment!” Ladd called out, as Connor had already holstered his Ruger and raced after Ellie.

  The woman glanced back, cursing in Spanish as Ellie gained steadily on her. While still running, the woman pulled a butterfly knife from her parka pocket. Seeing Ellie would catch her in another couple minutes, the woman slowed, flicking the butterfly knife open. She hid the deadly blade against her as she pretended to be hunched over gasping for air. Ellie slowed and went a few feet too close.

  “Okay… kneel down,” Ellie told the woman who signaled with her left hand she understood, while staying bent over at the waist.

  The woman, not knowing Connor was only half a block away, dropped slightly as if to go down on one knee. Instead she spun and lurched forward, jabbing the knife into Ellie’s midsection. Ellie went down on her back. The vest she wore stopped the knife, but did little to ease the pain of her already bruised ribs, and the jolt as she fell back on the sidewalk. Sucking air as stars formed and her vision blurred, Ellie grabbed the woman’s wrist with both hands. The woman punched down at Ellie. Connor caught the descending wrist while jamming the barrel of his Ruger .40 caliber automatic under her chin as she knelt over Ellie with her right wrist locked in Ellie’s grip.

  “Let the knife go or I empty the clip up through your head!” Connor yelled from inches in front of the woman’s face.

  The woman released the knife, screaming in pain as her wrist bones began to crack under Connor’s grip.

  “You…you breaking… my wrist!”

  Connor pulled her up off Ellie, keeping the Ruger in the same spot beneath the chin while holding pressure on the woman’s wrist as she danced in pain. Ladd, with sirens and lights going, pulled up alongside as Connor forced the woman to her knees. Jason exited his patrol car and ran to Ellie’s side. Ellie, breathing hard with a slight wheeze, managed to roll and push herself up to a sitting position.

  “Shit!” Ellie exhaled, taking Jason’s offered hand. He pulled Ellie to her feet. “What a… dumb ass… rookie mistake!”

  “Damn, girl,” Jason gestured at the butterfly knife, “now that’s a knife.”

  Seeing Ellie was okay, Jason turned to help Connor. Still keeping a grip on the woman’s wrists as she held them behind her head, Connor holstered his Ruger once the woman was on her knees. With Jason watching, Connor quickly handcuffed the woman. He then helped her to a standing position. Jason shut off the siren and retrieved an evidence bag. Ellie slipped on a glove and carefully picked up the knife and put it in the evidence bag Jason held for her.

  “I don’t know if you were driving the Altima when it hit the little girl,” Connor told her; “but we most definitely have you on attempted murder of a police officer. Ellie, you okay to frisk her? Get that look off your face, and don’t even think about putting a hand on the stun gun.”

  Jason laughed, seeing Ellie’s face go from happy anticipation to eye rolling disinterest.

  “Okay… step back. I’ll search her,” Ellie agreed in monotone voice. “I think I should see if Donaldson’s a little short handed in admitting. We want to make sure this lady doesn’t smuggle anything into our holding cell. With my recent cavity search experience I’d be happy to help with your journey into our system, girlfriend.”

  The woman’s eyes widened as Connor and Jason laughed. Ellie roughly but thoroughly searched her. She found a small handheld purse in the pocket of the woman’s parka and handed it to Connor. He opened it. Every slot inside held a different credit card and license.

  “I can understand why she didn’t stop after hitting the little girl, or with a riot gun pointed at her,” Connor remarked. “I’m really curious about those bags her little friends threw in the trunk. Is Luis calling for impound?”

  “They should be coming any minute,” Jason replied, taking the woman’s arm and loading her into his squad car. “You want to ride up front or in the back, El?”

  “I think I’ll ease into the front if Connor doesn’t mind scrunching in with Pollyanna. We’re only going down the street.”

  “I’ll read Polly her rights on the way. Another thing, Jas, was it you or Luis who snapped the picture of Ellie under Fanny?”

  “It was Luis.” Jason grinned. “He snapped one with his cell-phone as we ran up, just before you pulled Fanny off.”

  “Good, then I trust there won’t be any surprise photos from your arrival here, right?”

  “You write this part of the report. Don’t be too hard on yourself, Ellie. We’ve all made a few boneheaded moves out here, right Opie?”

  “Get in the car before I help you in,” Connor retorted, drawing a curious look from Ellie.

  “It seems we’re all going for coffee once we kick free of our perps,” Ellie said. “Apparently, my partner has not been forthcoming about embarrassing encounters. I’ll tell you one thing - that was too close for me. She could have stabbed up at my throat.”

  “Luis will be grillin’ me on what happened. He’s relentless. He can sense when I’m lying.” Jason slipped in the driver’s side. He shrugged at Ellie’s sour look as she entered the passenger side. “Just sayin’.”

  * * *

  The four officers were sitting around a table in the Café of the Bay on McArthur Blvd. with coffee. Citibank allowed them to park in the bank parking lot next door to the Café, even on crowded days but they didn’t misuse the favor.

  “I wish I would have seen which house they came out of,” Connor said. “They won’t give up the address. Donaldson said he’ll hold them incommunicado until the end of the day with red tape. He’ll have to let them make a phone call after that.”

  “We’ll do a house to house on the side of Penniman you saw them walk down from,” Luis offered. “We might get lucky and one of the neighbors will know something.”

  “Or we could get our asses shot off when we hit the right house without knowing it.” Jason ducked a head slap from his partner. “Just sayin’.”

  “They hadn’t been walking far or I would have noticed them sooner.” Connor nodded. “I like the idea. We’ll concentrate on the houses near High.”

  “On the bright side we nailed the hit and run along with netting two duffel bags full of fake papers,” Ellie offered. “Maybe they’ll be able to trace where they got the paper. You can’t buy that stuff in a stationary store. It’s an inside job somewhere.”

  “We’ll lose the case anyway if we don’t find anyone else running it other than illegals,” Luis replied.

  “Hey, we get a piece of the action,” Connor said. “It’s what we do. We can’t worry about when they’ll kick us free of it. Like Ellie said, we took some serious paper off the market. If we can get a lead on the house maybe we’ll score big.”

  “Okay, let’s get down to business before our break’s over.” Ellie rubbed her hands together comically. “What did Opie do and when did he do it?”

  “No comprende,” Luis stated right away, seeing the look on Connor’s face.

  “I’m not going there,” Jason added uneasily, wishing he hadn’t said anything earlier.

  “You two girls owe me,” Ellie argued. “I saved your damn lives, remember?”

  “Shit, Connor.” Luis shrugged, avoiding Connor’s stare. “She’s right.”

  “It’s not that big a deal.” Jason held up his hands as Connor leaned across the table, peering straight at him. “Tell her and get it over with. Ellie’s like a pit bull with this stuff. Even if Luis and I keep quiet, she’ll just torture it out of you.”

  Connor looked at his partner, and the small smile of anticipation was all it took to break him. He leaned back and sipped his coffee for a moment before beginning to tell of an incident which still made him livid.

  “Luis has a few years on Jas and I. We were in the same academy class. Me and Jas were all gung ho to rid Oakland of crime.”

  Jas
on laughed and Luis nodded in agreement. “You should have seen these two, Ellie. If they had been partnered up, the two of them would have been dead inside of a month.”

  “I get my badge and uniform and hit the streets with Ray. It’s a little quiet so I start pushing the envelope, stopping perps on the street to and from work. Jas and I are comparing notes, getting intel on stolen cars, and trying to start our own little investigative gig for the excitement. Old Carney had Donaldson’s job back then and he liked our enthusiasm.”

  “Until Connor decided to singlehandedly tackle a stolen car,” Jason put in, chuckling and shaking his head.

  “We had it planned to call each other on anything like that and back the other up,” Connor continued. “I couldn’t get him on his cell-phone so I decided to follow the stolen Camry. They entered the drive thru at Kentucky Fried Chicken here on MacArthur. I blocked them in with my old Dodge Dart I had at the time. I was in uniform, having just left the station for home. I jumped out and had the people inside covered, shouting for them to put their hands up on the windshield which they did. I approached the driver’s side ready for action. The small blonde woman next to the driver starts screaming about how she had been kidnapped. I tell her to stay calm and sit still. By then I’m thinking golly gee, I’m like super-cop.”

  This admission causes general laughter. Connor takes the break to sip some more coffee. The tenseness he usually felt when thinking about the episode begins to fade.

  “I order the driver out. He’s a big, long haired white guy with a wild beard. Wild Beard’s looking at me like I’m hamburger, and he’s thinking of putting me on a bun. I get him to kneel and put his hands behind his head. Only problem was I turned my back on the blonde. While I’m getting the driver face down on the parking lot surface with a gathering bunch of passersby stopping to have a look, the blonde sneaks up behind me and puts a bat upside my head. No one shouted a warning. Lights out, that’s all folks. I came to with my hands cuffed behind my back in my own cuffs. People are still ordering at the drive thru and going right by me on their way out. I roll my way up painfully to a sitting position when a squad car pulls up with sirens blaring. It’s Luis and Jas.”

  “Oh, if only I would have had my camera phone then,” Luis says wistfully, drawing laughter from even Connor. “He had blood all over. We thought he’d been shot.”

  “My cowboy days ended that night seeing Connor propped up against his car looking like ‘Night of the Living Dead’,” Jason said.

  “I managed to tell Luis not to touch the cuffs because they might have prints. They’d taken my gun, my ID, and everything I had on me. The only reason I can figure why they didn’t kill me is because they had a crowd of people watching them do it.”

  “The manager called it in because Connor’s car was making it hard to drive away from the drive thru. Jason and I took the cuffs off carefully. Conner let us know then he’d been hit in the back of the head, not shot. We took him into Highland emergency. They kept him overnight. The perps dumped the Toyota but they indeed left their prints on Connor’s cuffs. Ray, Jason, and I busted them at their squat over on East 12th the next morning. They still had Connor’s stuff but they’d blown the money he had in his wallet and charged up his credit cards. There was new stuff all over still in the boxes. We also found the bat Blondie used on Connor - still with his blood on it.”

  “Until I got called up on active duty and shipped overseas I was Batman, and not in a good way.” Connor smiled ruefully.

  “I guess that explains why you handle women so carefully.” Ellie grinned back.

  “Yep. All it took was nearly getting my head bashed in to make me realize it was not a good thing to assume facts not in evidence. They may be all small and harmless looking, but put a Louisville Slugger in their hands, and it’s a whole different ballgame. Women don’t have to look like Fanny to take a piece out of you.”

  “Well… that eased my pain a little, but not all of it.” Ellie rubbed her rib area as she stretched. “That bitch poked me right under my bruise. I have their mug shots. Shall we go turn over some rocks?”

  * * *

  After parking their squad cars perpendicular to Penniman Avenue and out of sight from the avenue, the four police officers began knocking on house doors close to High Street. They showed homeowners the mug shots of the three people already in custody. At the second house Luis Arvizo tried, a teenaged boy answered the door, looking surprised and a little uneasy seeing two police officers. The olive skinned boy nearly Arvizo’s height stepped back from the door.

  “Hey look… I’m sick, honest to God. I’ll be at school tomorrow.”

  Jason and Luis coughed and fought back laughter. Luis held up the pictures so the boy could see them.

  “Have you seen any of these three people before?”

  “Yeah, two houses that way on the right.” The boy pointed further down toward High Street. “You can’t miss it. The house is painted puke green. Their music blares all night long.”

  “Do you know how many others might be there?” Jason asked.

  “I’ve seen those three and three others drinking out in front of the house when I come home from school - two other guys, and an older woman.”

  “You’ve been a real help,” Luis told him. “What’s your name?”

  “Al… Al Higuera. You guys aren’t going to tell them who pointed out the house, are you?”

  “Nope.” Jason handed Al his card. “You call me if anyone even looks like they think you did, okay?”

  “Sure… thanks.”

  Luis turned toward the boy before he closed the door. “Oh, and Al, get your ass in school tomorrow.”

  Higuera laughed and nodded his assent before closing the door. Jason and Luis hurried out to the sidewalk. They passed the indicated green house toward the other end of Penniman Avenue where Connor and Ellie were knocking on doors. Ellie saw them coming. She tugged on Connor’s jacket sleeve before he could knock on the front door of the third house they were trying. They met their companions out on the sidewalk.

  “It’s the green house two doors down,” Luis told them. “The kid we talked to said he’s seen three others there he knows of - two men and an older lady. I’ll call Ben and give him the address. We’ll need a warrant to go any further with this. If we go bang on the door and roust them out of their holes this will have all been a waste.”

  “Agreed,” Connor replied. “You call. We’ll go pick up the warrant. The Sarg said he’d had the DA look at the false papers we confiscated, and showed him the three we picked up were illegals. The DA has a judge picked out for the warrant.”

  “If we get an okay to serve the warrant it’s agreed Ellie stays in the car, right? She’s bad luck lately,” Jason advised with a straight face. “If we let her lead we’ll probably get blown up this time out.”

  “Oh, you’re a riot. Don’t let this look of disgust fool you. I’m really laughing on the inside.” Ellie waved Jason off as she hurried down the sidewalk toward the squad cars.

  On the way to the precinct Ellie glared at Connor every few minutes. Connor kept his eyes on the road ahead, a slight smile showing at the corners of his mouth. He knew whatever it was seething within his partner would soon spew forth at its own pace. Playing the ‘what’s wrong’ game with Ellie reminded Connor of walking into a minefield without a map.

  “Did you guys yuck it up over Jason making me the albatross around your neck?”

  “Jas cares about you. He was trying to point out your string of bad luck without pissin’ you off. So far he’s 0 for 1. We all go through periods where the forces of darkness work against us. Jas didn’t want you to walk point for a while until you get back in the light.”

  “Forces of darkness!?” Ellie laughed. “So you guys think we hit a period where we walk around like that ‘Peanuts’ kid with a black cloud over his head?”

  “Don’t you?” Connor looked over at her seriously for a moment before turning back to his driving.

  �
��You’re serious?” Ellie asked incredulously.

  “Hell yeah, and I’m due. Just before Ray’s retirement he was afraid to ride with me. In his last two weeks we had half a dozen close calls. On his last day he looked at me and said ‘no offense kid, but today we’re going to patrol the Bank of America parking lot’, and that’s what we did.”

  “I’m going over Ray’s tonight and check your story,” Ellie warned, giggling at the parking lot patrol remark.

  “Good, ask him about the darkness. He’ll tell you. We’ve all had times we thought it best not to walk point. You’ve had some close ones and the guys know it works in threes. We want the third one to be funny not deadly.”

  “You said you had half a dozen close calls in two weeks.”

  “Ray thought he was due along with me. He didn’t want to tempt fate on his last day. I partnered up with you and things went back to normal. I’m hoping my cloud doesn’t start forming the moment yours moves on.”

  Ellie snorted. “It sounds like a self fulfilling prophesy to me, Opie.”

  “What? You mock the darkness?” Connor started looking out his windows, craning his neck when they reached a stoplight, as if looking for the lightning strikes to start forming. He finally ended with putting his hands together in prayer fashion. “Forgive her Lord. She’s been under a lot of stress lately.”

  “Why haven’t I heard about the darkness before, Opie?”

  “It’s bad luck to talk about the darkness. Even this conversation is bad luck. Respect the darkness, El.”

  Ellie began tearing at Connor’s shirt, patting him down while he tried to keep the car on the road as he fended her off.

  “You’re wired, Opie. Those two birdbrains are sitting in their squad car laughing their asses off, aren’t they? C’mon, where’s the wire or the hidden mic. I’m not fallin’ for this shit. Frack you, Jason. Frack you, Luis,” Ellie yelled into Connor’s shirt.

  “Have I ever played any practical jokes on you?” Connor met Ellie’s accusing look without blinking.

  Ellie stopped searching and leaned back. “No.”

  “There you go. I hate practical jokes. I’m explaining why Jas was trying to make you take these close calls more seriously.”