One Department Read online

  Henry The Superintendent was indeed on his way to pay a visit that day, and there was more on his mind than just the issue of Randy working them out of a job. During the spring of that year there had been an episode of an aggressive panhandler wandering onto the construction site. “Aggressive” being defined as reaching-in-his-pockets-for-sharp-bladed-objects-when-told-to-leave. The police had been called, and it had all been handled without bloodshed, but it was looking pretty dicey for a few minutes and Scott had reached for his own weapon. His weapon was a Kel-Tec P3AT, which was one of the new breed of micro-sized .380 caliber pocket pistols, that he kept in a wallet holster. He never even pointed it at Senor Panhandler, he merely held it half-hidden behind his leg. But its presence had quieted things until police arrived to cart the man away.

  That had only been the beginning of the issue though. The subject of firearms on the job site had never come up before, but upon hearing about this incident some of the company heads had thrown a fit. Some of them wanted to fire Scott, but they ran into trouble when it was pointed out there was no company policy on the issue. Then they hired a safety analysis outfit to make a recommendation, and their recommendation of course had been a complete firearm ban on company premises. Randy was fighting this change every step of the way. And when the higher-ups had told him to make sure no one carried a weapon on the job in the meantime, he had told them he wasn’t enforcing a company policy that didn’t exist. It was still up in the air who was going to come out on top of this, but in the meantime, Scott’s little pistol remained in his back pocket.

  Henry himself sat firmly on the fence, not caring enough one way or the other to get involved. Having to hear about it from both sides was a big source of irritation for him though. If Randy won on the issue, he was fine with that. But if Randy was ruled against, he’d enforce the company ruling.

  Scott was first to bring the subject up again. “What’s the latest on the gun issue?”

  “There’s a meeting coming up with all the company heads. I’ll be there, and you should too, because it’s probably getting decided then.”

  “Do they even give a shit about the fact we could have been stabbed?” Eric inquired. He had been the first one to get the panhandler’s knife pointed in his direction, so the issue was a bit personal to him.

  Randy shook his head with a bit of cynicism, the sort that develops after too many years of butting heads with people higher up the food chain than you are. “What people in higher positions love most is handing down pronouncements,” he replied. “Our safety is on their priority list somewhere, but if we’re going to win this, we have to make them want to do their pronouncing in our direction.”

  Another one of the workers named Todd glanced out the window just as a white company truck pulled up. “Hey, look who,” he said.

  * * *

  A few minutes later, Randy and Henry were standing out next to the crane, surveying the project. As predicted, Henry wasn’t thrilled. “This part wasn’t supposed to be done till Friday. There’s a reason we schedule things like we do.”

  “I know there is,” Randy replied. “You have to burn up all the money you get so you can justify it all.”

  Henry had little appreciation for sarcasm, whether or not Randy considered it to be such. “That’s not the only thing,” he said. “We won’t even have your next components ready until next week, so what are you going to do until then?”

  “Ooh, that’s a tough one…” Randy said as he put his hand to his chin and became immersed in thought. “I know, how about we take a couple days off?” he asked. Henry gave Randy his sarcastic smile, to again express his lack of appreciation for sarcasm. “I know there’s something to be said for milking the job,” Randy went on, “but wasting other people’s money just isn’t something I do. And that, by the way, is why your customers keep requesting me as their project foreman.”

  “All right, you’ve got a point there,” Henry acquiesced, “but we’ve got another order of business to talk about. I need to know, Randy, why this gun issue is such a bee in your bonnet.”

  Randy felt his temples begin to throb. He’d been having this argument with people for a very long time, and he knew all the minutia of the issue, yet it was the easy stupid questions that stumped him. It was tough explaining the issue to someone who has no handle on the issue at all. “Henry, remember the Northlake Shipyard shooting?” Randy was referring to a workplace office shooting that happened at a Seattle shipyard in 1999.

  “Sure…”

  “Remember how two people died there?”

  “That was unfortunate, but –“

  “It was damned unfortunate, and damned unnecessary,” Randy said. “Nobody expects their office to be the target of an attack because the odds are so small. But they lost that lottery, and thanks to their company rules they had no right to be prepared.”

  “That’s being just a little hard on their company, don’t you think?”

  “Not at all. Safety is just the excuse that companies hide behind, and now our company is getting ready to do the same thing. What it’s really about is keeping their monopoly on power.”

  Henry was clearly having a hard time with this. He shook his head and looked at Randy like he was getting ready to check underneath his hardhat for tinfoil. “Come on Randy, what monopoly on power are you talking about?”

  “Henry, company heads are just like public officials in this regard. They don’t like to share power with the little people. If we take care of our own protection down here on the jobsite, they see it as us usurping their power, because the job got done without them. It’s the same reason that colleges won’t let their students protect themselves from people like Seung Hui Cho, even when threats are pouring in. They can’t stand the idea of something getting taken care of that either the people in charge or their agents in uniform didn’t take care of themselves.”

  “What if the company hired a security guard?”

  “I’m sure they’d like that idea better, because that would involve them taking action instead of us. But let’s just say that I don’t trust an underpaid rent-a-cop to be in the right place when something happens, or to do a good enough job of keeping my ass alive even if he is. I put a lot more trust in us to keep our own asses alive.”

  Henry could empathize with his points, but he still had some problems with this. “What if one of your guys went off the deep end with the gun you let him carry?” he asked.

  “That’s not the way those things happen. When somebody goes postal, they don’t do it with a little pocket gun, they go home and get bigger weapons. And either way, if there’s one thing mass shooters don’t like, it’s being shot back at. That’s the reason they go for the soft targets where people can’t protect themselves.” Henry nodded. “A soft target is exactly what the company is trying to make this place into right now. And it’s not about our safety, it’s about their comfort level. Do you see my problem with that?”

  “I suppose so. It’s just hard for me to understand the need for packing guns on a jobsite like this with all the safety issues it creates.”

  “Henry, this is downtown Seattle. Bad shit happens here. A few months ago one of our guys nearly got skewered, and it was a little pocket gun that stopped it. A knife wound in the wrong place, and you could have had a fatality here on your jobsite. Does that not sound like a safety issue to you?” Henry nodded slowly. “I know not everyone sees it this way, but it’s not about the numbers or the odds, it’s about our right to protect our lives. My worker’s lives are worth protecting to me, so it would really help us out a lot if you were backing us up in that meeting next month.”

  Henry thought it over.

  * * *

  Will Stendahl was a black-haired young man in his twenties, who loved being out and about with his wife and young son. That’s what he was doing when things went bad.

  Will and his wife both did the 8 to 5 thing during the week, and nearly always had weekends off. That was family time. Their son
was three and had yet to face the rigors of kindergarten, which made them a pretty care-free lot. At that moment they were headed into one of the city’s parks, the one that had a real kid’s playground they could turn their son loose in. His wife was on his left arm, his son being carried in his right, and his Beretta was stationed on his hip. Will was an open-carrier.

  The open-carry movement had a strong presence in Washington State, which Will happened to be a member of. They were a web-based national group, and each state had its own chapter. Their motto was, “A right not exercised is a right lost.” And the particular right they were concerned with was, of course, the right to openly carry a pistol.

  The issue raised more than a small amount of public discourse. It’s a fact of life that some people are just scared by the sight of guns, so they had that to contend with. But as time went on and awareness of the issue grew, the gaping stares of horror dwindled to almost nothing. They also had to contend with people on the pro-gun side of the debate who felt that they were antagonizing the public with their in-your-face approach, so they couldn’t always count on support from that side either. However people felt about it though, the law was on their side. One could point to dictionaries from the time periods when the Federal and State constitutions were ratified, and plainly see that the protected right to “bear” arms was meant in the military sense, and where sidearms were concerned, that meant a pistol carried openly in a holster.

  There was one social subset however that had a bigger grudge against them than every other group combined. That’s the one that Will and his family were about to run into trouble with.

  Only minutes before their arrival at the park, they had stopped into the nearby Zongo’s Ice Cream (named after their seagull mascot, which most folks found ridiculous, but it brought the kids in) and now were headed into the park with their assorted cones. It had slipped Will’s mind that this ice cream place was listed on their web forum as not being friendly to open-carriers. While making their purchases, one of the girls behind the counter had been so distracted by the visible presence of A GUN!!! (dramatic music here) that Will had to get her attention and remind her what they had ordered so she didn’t get them all wrong.

  The manager, who sat back in his office observing, had elected to say nothing to Will about his policy during all of this. Instead, after they had left, he called 911 and reported a man with a gun behaving in a threatening manner.

  Will and crew were still well away from the kid’s playground when the first patrol car parked on the street nearby. He didn’t think anything of it, but he kept one eye on it just in case. When three more cruisers showed up soon afterward however, that’s when he knew they were in for trouble.

  Four cops exited their cars and walked toward them. Will put his arm around his wife and smiled as they approached. He said, “Good day, gentlemen,” and the cops responded by pulling their guns and charging them, screaming at them not to move.

  As the cops moved in, Will’s frightened wife moved behind his shoulder for protection, and the cop on their right began screaming, “She’s going for his weapon!” He ran in close, put his gun right to her head. “Hands up, get on the ground, now!”

  Will and his panicked wife were thrown to the ground and cuffed. Their son was seized from them, and his gun was taken from its holster and held up like a war prize. Then they were pulled up to their knees, while stunned people from around the park began to gather to see what was going on.

  “What in the hell is this about…” Will began.

  Sergeant Jack Hayward, the cop who had just stuck his gun in the face of Will’s wife’s, was the first to reply. “We got a report of a man with a gun who was behaving in a manner that warranted alarm. Would that be you?” Hayward was a big man, a bit soft in the middle but menacing. Will didn’t remember him right off, but he’d be quite disturbed later to be reminded that Jack Hayward already had a fatality to his credit.

  “You know better than to take people down like this,” Will responded. “Who ordered this?”

  “I ordered this,” came the reply, as a fifth cop appeared from behind the others and stepped to the front. Will had seen and heard plenty about him before, but had never actually seen him in person. But he saw the man’s face and quickly recognized the Forest Hill Police Chief.

  “Burt Grandstone, what an honor to meet you,” Will said.

  Burt had aged quite a bit since the time when Randy had first met him as a boy. His black hair had gone half gray, and part of his moustache as well, but his black rim glasses and smarmy grin were perpetual.

  “You know I’m not breaking any laws,” Will went on.

  Burt pointed at the ice cream cones that had all been knocked to the ground. “You were just in the ice cream place up the road, correct?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “What happened in there?”

  “Um… we bought ice cream?”

  “The manager of the place tells us there was a bit of a disagreement.”

  Will began to be surprised, and then reminded himself that he knew better than to be surprised. “That’s not what happened. The chick was screwing up our order, so I had to tell her so she’d get it right.”

  “Did you raise your voice at her?”

  “It’s a little bit crowded, and a little bit noisy in there today.”

  “I see.” Burt glanced around and noticed that the crowd of onlookers had begun to grow. Some of them didn’t look very happy at what they were seeing. He also noticed that his officers were blocking the crowd’s view, so he turned to them momentarily and motioned them to move to the flanks. This whole show was for the benefit of the crowd, so they needed a good view.

  “Exactly what the law says,” Burt said as he turned his attention back to Will, “is that you shall not display your weapon in a manner that warrants alarm. Shouting at someone while wearing a gun that is plain for everyone to see tends to warrant alarm.”

  Will couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “What a load of shit…” he said.

  “Now I recognize that under current law, you have a right to carry as you do,” Burt went on. “Do you recognize that flaunting weapons like this can lead to misunderstandings, or things even worse than that?”

  “Like what exactly?”

  “Like when Sergeant Hayward saw your wife make a move in the direction of your gun just now. If he had thought she was reaching for it, that could have led to something tragic.”

  Will’s wife heard that and her heart stopped all over again. “So you’re telling me that she could be killed for being scared shitless by a bunch of screaming maniacs with guns?” Will demanded.

  “I’m saying that situations escalate, and where firearms are involved, they tend to escalate very quickly. Is that your idea of protecting your family?” Will glanced at his wife, now on the verge of tears. He looked at his frightened young son, who was being held by one of the cops as though he were being protected from his own parents. “When guns are present, we train our officers to always assume there’s a threat, and to take the highest precautions for officer safety,” Burt continued. “Just because something is legal doesn’t make it a good idea. And one thing that’s always a bad idea is giving a police officer cause to feel his safety is threatened. See where I’m coming from?”

  When Burt felt satisfied he had made his point, he ordered Will’s son handed to his mother, and his firearm returned to him. The pistol was unloaded and the rounds had all been popped out of the magazine, and it was all dumped on the ground in front of him. Rather than reload everything in front of all those people, he put the rounds in his pocket to take care of later.

  Burt watched as the cops retreated toward their cars. Then to cap off this episode, he gave them what had to be the ultimate in sarcasm. “Thanks for your cooperation, you’re free to go,” he said. Then he left.

  As the onlookers began to filter away, Will’s wife burst into tears.

  * * *

  The Forza coffe shop was situate
d in the only big strip mall the town of Forest Hill had, and it was a favorite hangout for the city cops. This day being no exception to that rule, it was less than an hour after the incident in the park that the same four cops plus the Chief walked in and claimed their favorite table by the big window. The four officers sat in the booth and the Chief grabbed a stool and sat at the end. “It’s been too long since I got to do that,” he said. “I need to get out of the office more. Besides which, I’ve been waiting for one of those pistol-packing pricks to screw up, and I need to be there when that happens.”

  As they got comfortable, Cindy, the perky blonde barista who worked the afternoon shift, came to the table. “Hey guys,” she said, then she noticed with a bit of surprise that Burt was among them. “Chief! We don’t get to see you here very often!”

  “We were just talking about my need to get out more,” he replied.

  “Well I hope you do,” she replied. “I always feel safe when you guys show up, now I feel extra safe! What’ll you have?” Cindy took their orders and then walked away to the counter, showing them some backside that was really hard not to stare at.

  Preston Mintz was the cop seated in the back corner. Though relatively new to the force, he was in his early forties, with brown hair and thick brown moustache. “I thought we kind of overdid it myself,” he said. “I mean, it’s not like they were really out scaring people.”

  Sergeant Sylvester Frawley was the cop seated next to him. “I know you’re still a little green,” he said, “but you don’t really think that was the point, do you?”

  “I just don’t think this was very good PR for us,” Preston replied.

  “It’s exactly the kind of PR we’re looking for,” Burt interjected. “If there’s one thing the public needs to be aware of, it’s that just because they have rights doesn’t mean that we can’t kick their ass.”

  Sergeant Byron Palmer was the cop sitting across from Preston. “No matter what anyone tells you, it’s us against them out there,” he said. “Either we’re on top, or they’re on top.”