Stone cold to the touch and stone cold dead.
10:30 AM
Trooper Stanley Willis pulled away from the scene of the accident in his Miami-Dade Police Department dodge charger. He’d contained the situation and he needed to get to see his mother. She’d get agitated if he was even more than a few minutes late on his weekly visit. God he hated the visits and God he hated her and these goddamned inconvenient trips. If she didn’t hold the purse strings, he would have said; sayonara to the old bitch years ago.
His mother had put him down and belittled him all his life; he lived in constant fear of the domineering old bat. She had made his childhood miserable with her endless harping that nothing he ever did was good enough for her. He’d remembered when he told her he was gonna be a baseball star and she’d scoffed at him calling him a fool. He told her the Coach had told him he had a natural aptitude for the sport, but his mom had sneered and mocked him. Telling him, he’d amount to nothing, like his bum of a father, a feckless, work-shy bigot, who’d blamed the Negros for all his woes. Even when Stanley graduated from the police academy, she taunted him that they must’ve lowered their intake standards and that he’d always remain in uniform.
However, in spite of her he’d enjoyed police work and the comradeship of his co-workers. They had a bond, brought together by the events they experienced, that civilians could not comprehend, like having to attend to the aftermath of a murder. Be it a stabbing, shooting or plain old barehanded, cold-blooded strangling. The slaughtering of one another with whatever came to hand, pots, pans, toasters, needle, or scissors, it amazed Stanley. The murder, nearly always committed by one family member upon another family member; it was still by far the number one category of homicide.
Stanley could sympathize with them. God, he wished he’d had the guts to kill his mother years ago. Of course, now that she WAS dying he hoped he could prolong her life so that he could watch her die in painful agony for even longer. She’d often catch him smirking when the pain got too much. Yet a smile would cross her face and he knew, just knew, that she’d leave all her money to a cats’ home to spite him.
Yet, each week she’d summon him and each week he’d attend like the obedient slave he always had been. Roll on when the old nag was dead. He’d immerse himself in his job during the day and spend his nights in cop hang-out bars, maybe date a cop groupie — yes, there was such a thing — girls who loved to hang around cops, they even had websites. He’d give it a go soon, after the old hag had gone.
Tonight though, he’d have his regular bar cronies hanging on his every word, with his latest yarn, his story of the RTA — road traffic accident, he’d just left, that was a baffling case if there ever was one.
When he’d arrived at the scene of the accident, the paramedics were already there and had pronounced the motorcycle rider dead. He’d been decapitated so no argument there. Yet Sergeant Stanley Willis still had to go through the rigmarole of finding the cause of the accident. He crouched by the torso of the Hells Angel with ‘death or Glory’ tattooed on his arm. It didn’t matter how many corpses Stanley saw it still made his gag reflex kick in some, like this one, as fluid oozed from the raggedy stump of his neck.
He questioned the witnesses, who explained that the Hells Angel on the Harley Davidson fat-boy jumped the lights on red and had been sideswiped by a truck carrying industrial grade plates of glass, which had shot forward and decapitated the Hells Angel. His body continued on its journey until the motorcycle ran out of steam and toppled over. Even more gruesomely, the head smashed through the picture window of a Mexican diner where it spun on the floor spraying the diners in blood.
Unbelievably, none of that was the startling part of the tale, the kicker being that the Hells Angel's body was white and his head was black!
Stanley had spent the best part of an hour looking for another body, unable to believe the witnesses protestations that there was only one person on the motorcycle. He’d never seen anything like it in all his life. He had no explanation for it — a lily-white body with jailhouse tattoos pledging Aryan gang affiliations, yet with a face as black as coal. God image what Stanley’s Pa would’ve made of that!
He pulled up at his mama’s remote clapboard house and was apprehensive to see the front door ajar. He had his hand on the butt of his service weapon and approached gingerly. He pushed open the heavy front door, checked out the dark corners of his childhood home. He knew every nook and cranny, but there was no one there. He called out to his mama, gaining no reply, he quickly checked around and found it empty. He scratched his head. She was unable to get about on her own anymore, and if the home-help had taken her out, she would have locked up. He pushed open the rear door and went out onto the stoop, maybe she’d be back soon.
He spotted a black woman laid face down in the yard. “What the hell?” He marched over to the elderly woman. “What in god’s name do you think you are doing in my Mama’s house?”
She grabbed the cuff of his uniform pants, repulsing him. “Get off me, nigger. What the fuck have you done with my mama?” He kicked her hand away, crouched on his haunches and rolled her over. “Tell me, where is she? I demand to know!”
“Stanley it’s me…” she croaked.
He shivered in fright and crabbed backward across the yard, he fixated on her pox-ridden face, as she struggled to open her eyes. And when Stanley saw her baby-blues that he’d known so well for the first time in his life he wet himself.
10:45 PM
Jenkins Forest or prisoner 850416 to give him his official title, fiddled with the faucet of the metal sink, but once again no water came out.
“Goddamnit!” he said. What was wrong with this picture? How in the name of all that’s holy had this happened? He gagged for a drink. His dried, parched throat ached. He been on the john most of the night with the runs and was severely dehydrated. He marched over to the front of the cell that took him all of four paces, and banged against the bars of his cell. “Hey, there’s a man dying of thirst in here!” His voice echoed up and down the sixth floor of cellblock E.
The E block was for category A offenders, the habitual murderers and other life sentence prisoners with no hope of release. The sixth floor housed the worst of the worst, the uncontrollable, the scum of the earth. Proudly at the apex of this mound of human filth was Jenkins Forest, boasting that he was the king of the block, as if it afforded him some kudos amongst his fellow prisoners. Jenkins had been in and out of correctional facilities his entire life, first time as a mere boy in juvenile hall, where he killed another kid in an argument over a game of pool.
He had cheated though, Jenkins thought, justifying the slaying. He rarely thought of the game that had cost a boy his life and him his freedom. He’d never had much time for dwelling on his incarceration. He was like a shark, he had to keep moving forward, looking for something to eat and to survive another day.
Jenkins had killed many a man, mostly for money, sometimes for fun. It had no meaning to him, he’d snuff out a person for the most insignificant slight, as he’d done over the pool game all those years ago. Now incarcerated for life, having received four life sentences to run concurrently, totaling eight hundred years. You’ve got to love the Southern judges and their whacky sentencing. Eight hundred years, why he could be out in five hundred years with good behavior he thought with a smile. Not that good behavior was in his DNA. He’d killed at least three inmates since his last and final incarceration, and had the tattoos to prove it. Teardrop prison tatts dripping down from the corners of his eyes like tears, one for each verified death. The slaying needed witnessing by a reliable source though; you couldn’t go around having teardrop tattoos all willy-nilly trying to boost your standing in the jailhouse community. No, you had to have some sorta code.