Redneck Trailer Park - 1. Chapter 1

Redneck Trailer Park

The bars closed at 2:00 AM. A few of the drunks went to the Waffle House and tried to suck in enough coffee to sober up. It never worked, and any cop who needed to pump up his arrest record only had to hang out near the Waffle House. By 3:00 AM, though, things usually got quiet.

The city police department had a joint-support agreement with the county sheriff, so I wasn’t surprised to get a call to the trailer park behind the Plaza Shopping Center. I’d been there often enough. Usually it was a domestic problem; once, it had been a meth lab, and we’d had to call in Hazmat to clean up the place, and us, after we’d made the arrests. The perps were in bad shape from messing with chemicals; one didn’t live long enough to be arraigned. No loss, in my book.

This call was domestic, but there was something in the dispatcher’s voice that told me it was a little more than that. I shut down the siren when I turned off the highway.

The sheriff’s people were there when I arrived … one of them, anyway. It was a guy I knew. I parked so that I wouldn’t block him, and got out of the car.

“Hey, Charlie, what’s up?”

“Glad it’s you, Bobby” he said. “Someone reported a cat in heat—and making a lot of noise. Wouldn’t be put off. Started quoting county ordinances about pets and pests to the dispatcher, so they sent me.

“Isn’t a pet. It’s someone in that trailer. I called for backup.”

It wasn’t three seconds before I heard what sounded like cats fucking, but it was a human voice, and it came from the trailer behind Charlie’s car.

“Come on,” I said. “Some woman’s getting the shit beat out of her … ”

Charlie took the lead, and pounded on the door. “Sheriff’s department—armed deputies. Open up,” he called. Something told me this was going to be a problem, and I pulled my Sig-Sauer 9mm and shoveled a round in the chamber. Charlie heard it. We’d been on too many calls together for him to ignore that. He pulled his own service weapon. The sound of the slide was loud in the night.

Charlie beat on the door once more. The cries still came from one of those stupid little windows they put high in the walls of cheap trailers. “Break it in, Charlie,” I said. He pulled a breaker bar from his belt and jammed it between the door and the frame. The cheap lock snapped. Charlie stepped back to let the door open.

I was ready, and had stepped to the side. A man stood in the doorway. He had a shotgun in his hand. He raised it toward Charlie. No questions in my mind. I fired three shots in less than a second, putting them all within four inches of his heart. He dropped. So did the shotgun.

“Thanks, man,” Charlie said. Cries came from within. Charlie jumped over the man’s body. I was a second or two behind.

Charlie and I had both been on the force for two years. We’d seen some things, but nothing like this. The mattress was black with blood. A naked boy lay face down. He was tied—hand and foot—with clothesline, anchored to eyehooks set in the wall and floor. This was not a casual thing; it was planned, and probably repeated. I felt a lot less bad about shooting the perp.

Charlie was a professional. That meant he ran to the front door and threw up on the lawn, and not on the crime scene. I snapped open my pocket knife, and started sawing at the boy’s bonds. I heard Charlie retching, and then calling for EMS and the coroner.

By the time EMS arrived, I had the boy untied—rather, cut from the ropes—and turned over so that he was lying on his back. He was bruised and lacerated, but nothing was bleeding seriously, not even his anus, which was where most of the blood had come from. If the only problem were external, he had a chance. If the perp had torn the boy inside, he might already be dead from peritonitis. I told that to the EMS guy, who got attitude.

“I’m the medic, here; I’ll decide what needs to be done,” he said. “Bring in a stretcher,” he said to the young assistant who had followed him into the room, and who was looking like he wanted to puke.

“You be sure to tell them that he was raped … and to check for internal damage,” I said.

The guy stood by the bed, like he was at attention or something. “I said, I’m the medic and I’ll say what needs to be done,” he said. “Now, unless you’ve got medical quals, shouldn’t you’d be dusting for fingerprints or something.”

I’m normally an easygoing guy, and I know that cops and EMS need to cooperate. I didn’t know this guy … never seen him before … so I didn’t have any background of trust.

“I do have medical quals,” I said. “Corpsman, US Navy, with two years in Afghanistan. I’ll be at the hospital no less than 20 minutes after you get there, and I’ll be talking to the people in charge of the ER. If you don’t do what I said, I’ll have your job and your ass, and not necessarily in that order. You understand me, medic?”

The youngster who was the second on the team had walked into the room with the stretcher in time to hear me. The grin on his face, quickly erased, told me more than I wanted to know. This guy really is an asshole, I thought.

Calling this guy out might not have been the smartest thing I did that night. Especially since he realized that his junior partner had heard it. I hoped I hadn’t gotten his back up. The kid on the team must have figured out what I was worried about. He looked at me, winked, and gave me a thumbs up when he knew his partner wasn’t looking. I nodded, and smiled. I hope he got the message.

I didn’t make the 20 minute deadline I’d promised the so-called medic, and, when I did, it was without my gun or badge. The Internal Affairs guys told me they were sure it was a righteous killing, but they had to play by the rules. I was still in uniform, though, and that counted for something at the ER.

The medic—or his assistant—had done his job, and the boy had been examined by a proctologist. There was no internal damage, and except for putting him on a low-bulk, soft food diet while the external tear healed, the boy was in pretty good shape, medically. Emotionally? That was another story.

“He won’t let a male doctor near him without having a fit. Fortunately, we had a female pediatrician on call, and she … ”

“Pediatrician?” I asked. “How old is he?”

“Fifteen,” the ER nurse said. “Looks younger because of chronic malnutrition. Anyway,” she stared at me and pursed her lips. I took the hint and let her talk. “Anyway, she was able to get some information out of him. Runaway from Atlanta. Hitched here with a pilot who was coming home from the airport. Pilot let him out at the shopping center where he was picked up maybe a week ago by the creep who raped him.”

The nurse paused. “Understand you shot the creep?”

I nodded.

“Dead?” she asked.

I nodded again. The nurse smiled. “That’s the best thing I’ve heard since I learned about penicillin in nursing school.”

She continued. “The creep tied him up, beat him, repeatedly raped him. The boy thinks he would have been killed, soon, if you hadn’t rescued him.

“He’s asked for the policeman who rescued him … don’t know what will happen when he sees you … he doesn’t seem to like adult men.”

The nurse led me into the room. The only light came from the LEDs and screens on the machines: a BP monitor, something that measured blood oxygen, and a couple that I’d not seen, before.

“Timmy? You asked about the policeman. He’s here. Are you sure you want to see him?”

“Uh huh,” the boy said.

The nurse gestured to me. I stepped into the room.

“I’ll wait here,” the nurse said.

“It’s okay,” the boy said. “I’m sorry I was so scared of the proc … proc kinda doctor.”

“Proctologist,” the nurse said. She stifled a laugh, not quite successfully. “It’s okay. I’m kinda scared of him, myself.”

The nurse had closed the door behind herself. I was alone with a broken boy.

“Timmy, my name is Bobby. I’m one of the policemen who found you.”

“You’re the one who cut me loose,” the boy said. “The nurse said one of you … shot the guy … ”

“Yeah,” I said. “That was me. We didn’t know about you, then. The creep was about to shoot my buddy,” I said. “The creep’s dead, now.”

“You saved my life,” Timmy said. “Thanks, Bobby. Um, Bobby’s not a man’s name … it’s a kid’s name … ”

I laughed. Timmy’s face froze. He thought I was laughing at him. “Sorry, Timmy, I wasn’t laughing at you. It’s just … well, my parents were LOTR fans. They named me, Bilbo.”

The fear on the boy’s face was replaced with puzzlement. “Ell-oh-tee-are?”

“Lord of the Rings,” I said. “And Bilbo Baggins? Haven’t you ever seen the movie … ?” Something in his eyes stopped me.

“No … we couldn’t … movies are the tools of Satan,” he whispered.

Who told you that? was on the tip of my tongue; I managed to hold it back.

“Anyway,” I said, mostly to stop him from thinking about whatever it was that was filling his eyes with fears and tears, “Bilbo isn’t a real common name, and it sort of rhymes with dildo, which is definitely not a good thing, so I called myself Bobby in school. When I enlisted in the Navy, I wrote it on the forms… kind of automatically. It stuck, and now it’s my legal name. Silly, huh? I guess when I get to be an old man, I’ll have to change it. Should I change it back to Bilbo?”

The boy wasn’t exactly smiling, but at least he wasn’t crying.

I was trying to find a way to start questioning him when the door opened. What I saw instantly raised my hackles. Edgar Proctor was the stereotypical, bureaucratic Family Services hack. He measured success by the “NKP” method. The “Number of Kids Placed” was all that counted. If the placement matched the kids’ needs, well and good. If it didn’t, too bad for the kid and the foster family.

“What are you doing here?” Edgar asked. There was no love between us, and the tone of his voice showed that he knew that.

I took the high road. “Waiting for you, Edgar, before beginning a police investigation. Why don’t you have a seat?”

Edgar looked at me from the corner of his eye, but took the second visitor’s chair. He held out a business card to the boy, who looked at it as if it were a snake. “Well, take it, boy. I’m your case worker. Whoever fosters you will need to know how to contact me.” Timmy winced when he reached for the card. Edgar didn’t seem to notice, but began his spiel.

I’d heard it, before. It was always the same. Abandoned, run-away, orphan … any child who came into the clutches of Edgar would be placed temporarily in the care of a foster family pending final placement. Final placement would be made based on a thorough investigation of the child’s background, natural parents and living relatives, … Edgar’s voice droned on. Thorough investigation … five minutes at a computer screen with the Google search engine, most likely, I thought.

I pulled my attention back to the room in time to hear Edgar’s wrap-up. He stood, and said, “You’ll be notified.”

“Won’t you stay for my questions?” I asked, hoping (and, frankly, expecting) that he would not.

Edgar sneered. Perhaps, he thought he was smiling. “Not necessary. You are an officer of the court, after all.” He left. Timmy was crying again.

“Hey, lil’ buddy, what’s wrong?” I asked.

“I don’t want to go back to foster care,” he said.

Not an uncommon reaction, and one I’d heard before. Still, I was never prepared with a pat answer, and didn’t want to lie to the boy. “Tell you what, Timmy, if you’ll work with me … I need to ask you a bunch of questions … some of them may be hurtful or frightening … but I have to ask them. If you’ll answer truthfully, I will do everything I can to make sure that if you do have to go to a foster home, it’s one where you will be cared for and not hurt.”

Timmy’s reaction wasn’t what I’d hoped for. He shut his eyes and turned his head away.

“Lil’ buddy, that’s all I can promise, but I promise that with all my heart. Timmy? Please look at me?”

He turned his head back toward me and squeezed a couple more tears out of his eyes. “Pinky swear?” he asked.

I reached out, little finger extended. “Pinky swear,” I said. Timmy winced again, but his grip was strong.

It took two hours to get the whole story. The nurse came in every 15 minutes to chart vitals, and to caution me not to tire him. I didn’t. We took it easy, and stopped when it looked like he was about to cry.

His story was like others I’d heard. They’re all the same. It’s like you took one item from Column A, one from Column B, and so on. Column A, mother or father dead; Column B, mother a crack whore or a drunk, or father missing or a drunk; Column C, boy removed by Atlanta Family Services and placed in a foster home. Column D … at this point, Timmy’s story deviated a little. The foster parents were members of a fundamentalist, soi-disant Christian cult. Yeah, I know exactly what all those words mean.

The children—there were four fostered in this home—received barely enough food to keep them alive. They were home-schooled, but that consisted primarily of lessons from the Bible and tracts that “proved” that science was evil, that movies were evil, that dinosaurs had roamed the Garden of Eden, that the stars were tiny lights on something called the firmament, and that the Earth was the center of the universe. About the only thing they weren’t taught was that the world was flat. Maybe that was in the advanced courses.

They were punished by beatings if they didn’t recite their lessons properly, if they didn’t do their chores satisfactorily, or if either of the adults were angry for any reason. About the only indignity they didn’t suffer was sexual abuse. Wow! Score one for the home team.

Timmy was about to fall asleep, when Charlie came in. He handed me a paper bag … my badge and Sig were in it. I raised my eyebrow.

“Your chief ordered IA to wrap up the investigation. Said there was no damn reason to drag it out just so the IA guys could sit on their assess for a few days pretending to read precedents.”

There was more Charlie wasn’t telling me, but I figured it was something he didn’t want the boy to hear. I nodded. “Timmy, this is Charlie. He’s the other cop who rescued you. We’re going to go—”

“No!” Timmy nearly screamed. I was afraid the nurse would think I was hurting him.

“Just outside!” I said. “Just outside, so you can get some sleep. One of us or one of our buddies will be here, and I’ll be back as soon as you’ve had a nap, okay?”

Timmy nodded, and was asleep before the door closed behind us.

“What’s up?” I asked Charlie.

“The guy had a record … a long record. Sexual predator, warrants in four jurisdictions. And, they found the body of another boy in a chest freezer in the shed. Your chief said he couldn’t give you a medal, but the least he could do was to put you back on the job.”

I nodded. “Thanks, Charlie. I’m glad it was you who brought the news.”

Charlie raised his eyebrows.

“I’ve got a problem,” I said, “and I need your help … and likely the chief’s and maybe … well, I don’t know who to turn to.”

Now it was Charlie’s turn. “What’s up?”

“Timmy doesn’t want to go back into foster care, but Edgar Proctor’s already been here. He’s faster behind an ambulance than a cheap lawyer. You know how he operates?”

Charlie nodded.

“Well, I managed to promise Timmy that I’d make sure wherever he was placed would be a good, loving, caring place. I’m not sure I can keep that promise.”

“You’ve come to the right guy,” Charlie. “You just let Uncle Charlie take care of Edgar.”

I must have looked stunned. Charlie grinned. “What’s the name of the family court judge for this county?”

“Judge Llewellyn,” I said.

“And what’s my wife’s maiden name?” Charlie asked.

“Llewellyn,” I said. “You’re related?”

“Father-in-law. I always knew your had more than one brain cell,” Charlie said. He pulled out his cell phone and started punching buttons.

It would be nice to say, and they all lived happily after. Real life isn’t that clean and simple. Timmy developed septicemia that nearly killed him. On the other hand, it kept him in the hospital for an extra month, which gave the judge and the rest of us time to maneuver. Nothing overt, but by the time Timmy’s case was ready for presentation, Charlie and his wife had been qualified as foster parents. The home Timmy had run away from had been investigated by the Atlanta PD … after a call from my chief to theirs … and the children removed. After a call from the judge, one of the county public defenders had offered pro bono representation to Timmy. The lawyer had filed on Timmy’s behalf a petition to be placed with Charlie and his wife. Edgar didn’t like it, but the judge told Edgar that he had to show that his proposed placement was better. Naturally, Edgar couldn’t do that.

Then, they really did live happily ever after.