A compassionate borough commander, Todd Emerson, now retired, had a sense of what was going on. He arranged for Thomlinson to be transferred from Narcotics to Homicide. New surroundings would do him good, Emerson reasoned. There, Thomlinson would report to Lieutenant John Driscoll, a man with a reputation for fairness. But Driscoll was a keen observer as well. It wasn’t long before the Lieutenant recognized Thomlinson for what he was. A drunk. He tried reasoning with Thomlinson but couldn’t promote change in a man unwilling to own up to his addiction. Driscoll was faced with a dilemma: What to do with this newly assigned detective, a liability to both the job and to himself? Thomlinson was heading for a serious breakdown, the consequences of which could directly affect not only the new homicide detective but the Homicide squad itself.
Driscoll was forced to make a move that might have ruined Thomlinson’s career but that may have saved his life. He placed a call to the representative at the Detectives Union and had the detective “farmed.” Thomlinson was stripped of his gun and shield and spent the next six weeks in a recovery program at a retreat house in the secluded woods of Delaware County-“The Farm.” Thomlinson had little choice. If he refused to complete the program conducted by a group of certified alcohol and substance abuse counselors, he’d be fired.
Thomlinson acquiesced and was eventually returned to active duty.
Yet, here he was, back in the program. Again.
Father O’Connor took a seat next to Thomlinson. “You stayin’ out of trouble?” he asked.
Thomlinson nodded.
“How’s she doing?”
The priest was asking about a teenager, the reason the detective was back.
“She’s a fighter,” said Thomlinson.
“You’re a fighter, too,” said the priest. “It takes stamina to keep the sleeping tiger at bay.”
In the course of a prior investigation, the detective had been ordered to drive to the young lady’s house, pick her up, and bring her to Driscoll’s office, where she was to provide a helpful statement. It was a routine assignment. On his way, though, he stopped to buy a Lotto ticket. While he was standing in line, waiting to purchase what he hoped would be a ticket back to the islands, the young girl was abducted. In an attempt to silence the voices of condemnation that riddled his brain, Thomlinson turned, again, to alcohol.
In this man’s police department, very few get a second chance. He had Driscoll to thank for that, and he silently voiced his appreciation during the communal Lord’s Prayer that ended the meeting. After that, Thomlinson walked out into the brisk night air, made his way to his cruiser, slipped in behind the steering wheel, and repeated the prayer. This was, after all, his second go-round.
Chapter 19
Another hot and steamy Sunday morning in July greeted the first visitors to the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum. Among them was a wiry-haired man with his six-year-old son.
“Permission for me and my son to come aboard, sir?” The man was addressing the sailor who was guarding the gang-way to the museum’s main attraction: the Intrepid’s flight deck.
“Permission granted,” the sailor replied, firing a rigid salute to the little freckled-faced boy flaunting a white ensign’s cap inscribed
USS IOWA.
“Let’s go, Daddy!” the boy said.
Scurrying up the steel-studded steps, they reached the carrier’s upper deck. It was immense. Gutted warplanes stood silent under a blistering sun. A semicircle of onlookers had formed around the exhibit’s newest acquisition: a Russian MiG-21.
The boy’s attention was diverted to a loud commotion erupting behind an F-14 Tomcat. Filled with curiosity, he bolted behind the aircraft. A bare-chested youth, his wrists in handcuffs, was yelling at his girlfriend. Provoked, the girl lunged forward, striking her restrained Romeo on the side of his head with the heel of her shoe.
“See that? See that? Why ain’t ya handcuffing her?” the youth screamed. “Ain’t that assault with a deadly weapon?”
“Any more out of you, young lady, and you’ll be riding in the wagon, too,” the military guard warned. He barked orders into his handheld radio. “Reilly, here! We got ourselves a situation on the flight deck. Get a transport ready.”
“What exactly we lookin’ at?” the dispatcher’s voice crackled back.
“A domestic quarrel…with injuries. I cuffed the agitator after he slapped his girlfriend in the face. While I had him immobilized, she hauls off and tattoos him on the side of the head with her shoe.”
The guard positioned himself between the two combatants to block another blow from the irate girlfriend.
“Look, Jack! Over there! That’s a Fighting Falcon! Let’s get a closer look,” the father urged, hoping to distract his son from the fracas.
“D-a-a-a-d. This is getting g-o-o-d.”
“We came to see the planes, remember?”
“But, D-a-a-a-d.”
The father steered his son to the steps that led to the exhibits featured below.
“Why was that lady hitting that man?” the boy asked, descending the steps ahead of his father.
“I don’t know, son. The man must have done something bad.”
“Was the policeman gonna take him to jail?”
“Sure looked that way to me.”
As the boy and his father were nearing the bottom of the steps, a prerecorded voice sounded from a loudspeaker: “Ladies and gentlemen, the USS Intrepid was used by NASA as the primary recovery vessel for the Mercury and Gemini space programs. Just imagine yourself returning to Earth and the first people you see are the sailors aboard this floating airport…”
Reaching the hangar deck, the man led his son to the exhibit marked “Aircrafts of the Pacific.” He pointed at the Grumman F6F Hellcat, which was painted in the navy’s tri-color camouflage: sea blue, intermediate blue, and insignia white. He then read aloud from the aircraft’s polished plaque: “The Hellcat’s most successful day in combat came on June 19, 1944, during operations in the Mariana Islands. During this air battle, which became known as ‘The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot,’ the Japanese lost over three hundred seventy-five planes. Eighty were lost by the United States… Wow! Pretty impressive, eh, Jack?”
“Sure is,” the wide-eyed youth said, stroking the underside of the plane’s sleek fuselage. “Look! Over there! What’s that one?”
A larger aircraft had caught the boy’s attention.
“Let’s go have a look,” said his dad.
They headed toward the next exhibit. The father depressed its red button, activating its tape.
A prerecorded voice began its narration: “The three-seat TBM 3-E Avenger, with a wingspan of over fifty-four feet and an overall length of forty feet, was the country’s primary torpedo bomber during World War II. Loaded with two thousand pounds of bombs and armed with three manually aimed fifty-caliber machine guns, the Avenger had a maximum speed of two hundred seventy-six miles per hour and could climb over one thousand feet per minute.”
“Wow! That’s almost as fast as Mommy when she’s out shopping, eh, Jack?…Jack?…Jack?”
“I’m under here, Dad.” The boy had made his way below the fuselage of the plane. “Looks like this one sprung a leak,” said the boy pointing to a puddle that had formed under the belly of the plane.
“That’s odd!” said the father. “These models have no engines…and that looks too dark to be fuel.” Bending down, he palpated the goo between his fingers, then brought the smear to his nose.
As his father stood in confusion, Jack climbed the steel staircase to the plane’s cockpit.
“What the hell is going on?” the man exclaimed, suddenly realizing what it was his son had found. “This plane is bleeding!”
“Daddy!” the boy cried out. “This one’s got a pilot!”