“Anyway, there were six feds all done up in tactical raid gear, and our ‘perimeter security only’ role didn’t last five minutes. Then two of our SWAT team guys are with them going through the door for additional manpower, and the other two are set up in an overwatch position covering the entry. I hear the call over the radio, they’re going in. I’m about a hundred yards out so I can barely hear the shouting, but then the shooting starts and everybody’s talking all over themselves on the radio and I can’t understand shit. Suddenly a suspect comes running out of the back of the house with an AR-15.” He glanced at Ed. “I don’t know if you know much about police work outside of watching TV, but running into bad guys, actual criminals with actual guns, much less ARs, is pretty damn rare and it freezes your blood cold. Mostly who cops deal with are idiots and assholes, not actual bad guys, with or without guns. So I took the shot.” He sighed and shook his head. “Technically, it was a good shot, and a good shooting. Person was running at an angle about eighty yards from me, so I had to figure the lead on the fly, and the bullet hit exactly where I wanted it to go. She was dead before she hit the ground.”
“She?” Ed said.
George looked at him, his face gray and stony. “Yeah,” he said curtly, “she. Now, she wasn’t the first person I’d ever killed. When I was practically still a rookie, barely two years on the job, I had to shoot a guy in a domestic. He’d been beating on his wife and when we showed up he came at us with a baseball bat. If I hadn’t shot him he would’ve laid that bat across my partner’s skull. But at the time of this raid, I was the only person on our department in fourteen years who’d actually ever killed someone on duty. Most small departments, it’s like that. We only had one, maybe two murders a year, and they weren’t big mysteries, half the time the person who did it was standing over the body when we rolled up. So me shooting somebody, much less someone who looked like a teenage girl, with a black rifle in her hands, was quite something. For me, and for our department.”
“I get my partner to stand watch over the body and go inside to find out what the fuck happened on this supposed ‘no big deal’ search warrant—” at which point George interrupted himself. “I guess I should have known it was more than just a simple search warrant if they had twelve guys including a loaner SWAT team working the house. But anyway, I go in there and talk to the lead fed, and they’re all standing around the homeowner who’s DRT on the floor in the front room with a pistol near his hand. So they killed the dad and I killed the daughter, and I still don’t know why the hell we were even there because all my Captain told us was we’d be assisting feds on a search warrant and that it was no big deal.”
George flexed his hands, obviously upset at the memory. “So I’m hot, you know I’ve got a temper, and I get all in the feds’ face wondering just what kind of shit they dragged us into and what the hell the search warrant was about because the girl, she was blond and turned out to only be 22 years old, and the homeowner, he looked like an accountant. A lot like you,” George said glancing at Ed. “No offense.” Ed just shrugged
“Turns out,” George growled through clenched teeth, “they didn’t even have a search warrant. They were hitting the house using the blanket protection of the federal martial law which had just gone into effect. I mean, the President had declared a National Emergency eight months earlier because of the civil unrest and halted all gun and ammo sales and assemblies of more than ten people, and everyone was still in an uproar over that. Then he doubles down with martial law, including a total gun ban and curfews and warrantless arrests and a dozen other things nobody could quite believe were real? It was crazy, you remember, nobody knew what to think or even, for sure, what the new rules were. And yet there we were, hitting the house like a platoon of Rangers because the homeowner owned several firearms including handguns and an ‘assault rifle’ and they had no record of him turning them in, even though the deadline to do so was barely a day past.”
“They suckered you into helping out on a gun raid?”
“Yeah,” George said, practically spitting. “And I know they didn’t tell my Chief the truth, or at least tell us the whole truth, but because if they had, there’s no way we would have helped out on a raid to confiscate guns. We kinda knew those were going on but most of our guys weren’t about to do that, for a lot of different reasons, and my Chief had no interest in risking our lives on something he viewed as illegal and unconstitutional. So I keep talking to the feds hoping to find out something that would ease my conscience, you know, that it’s not really just about the guns, that the guy is a serial killer or a pedophile or bank robber or making meth in the basement or something. But no. The guy had no criminal record. Didn’t even have a fucking parking ticket to his name. The only reason they were there was because of the guns. For that they kicked down his door, and with what I know now I’m not convinced they even properly identified themselves as police. He came running up with a gun in his hand and they downed him. Shit, for all I know they shot him down and planted the gun, wouldn’t surprise me after all I’ve seen now. Daughter saw it and went running out the back, which they were supposed to have covered before they went in the front but didn’t, and I shot her. Maybe she didn’t even know it was cops busting down her door, maybe she thought they were home invaders and she died not knowing it was her own government doing this to her.”
George looked at Ed, and it was the closest Ed had ever seen him to crying. The sadness in his eyes was palpable. “And they had a whole list,” he told Ed, his voice cracking. “I saw it. It had to have forty, maybe fifty names on it. That was their sole assignment for that week, heck maybe that month, they were just going house-to-house knocking down doors, seizing guns that had been bought legally, and arresting anybody there. And probably shooting a bunch more people,” he added. “They didn’t seem to care whatsoever that they’d just killed a man who’d honestly done nothing wrong other than not turn in guns the government decided were now bad and who ran up when he heard his front door getting kicked in. In fact, the way they were talking, they were looking forward to killing more guys like him. I’ve known a number of cops like them, that if it’s legal that meant, to them, it was right, and they never gave any thought to the idea that just ‘cause they can doesn’t mean they should. The type of guys who never consider the fact that some laws are not just stupid but wrong, and these feds were that times ten. These guys were just ecstatic about their new freedom and power to do damn near whatever they wanted. Might makes right,” he said again.
George didn’t say anything else for so long that Ed thought perhaps maybe he couldn’t finish his story, maybe the memories were too much for him. It was the most emotion Ed head ever seen the man display.
“So I killed them,” George said finally. “Those six federal agents. Right where they stood. Because…” He shook his head. “They were just going to keep doing what they were doing. And it was wrong. Hell, it was evil, even if it was technically legal. And… because they’d made me complicit in what they were doing. Made me kill a young lady who’d never done anything wrong. Before it was over they’d probably kill a lot more innocent people. Or get other cops, like me, to do their dirty work for them. I couldn’t let that happen.”
“Six. How’d you manage that?” Ed asked softly.