~ Spotlight ~
In this book you will find: Good Cops gone bad; Bad Cops gone worse; Police in the city; Sheriffs on the hunt; Cops on the beach; Cops on the take; Fights to the death; Ninjas and nunchuckas; Hookers and dealers; Good guys and bad guys And the Devil's own cop. featuring the talents of: - James Chambers - Gary Lovisi - O'Neil De Noux - Quintin Peterson - C. J. Henderson - Michael A. Black - Ron Fortier - Patrick Thomas - Michael Berish - Vincent H. O'Neil - Austin S. Camacho - Wayne D. Dundee - John L. French - Art Monterastelli - James Grady "A ride-around with some of the best cops and best cop writing in the business!" -David Black, author of The Extinction Event & writer for CSI Miami & Law & Order. "Bad Cop, No Donut includes some of the most riveting stories I have read to date. It's a top-notch crime fiction anthology." - Donald Bain, author of the "Murder, She Wrote" series |
-- Excerpt --
“You been reading that book,” he said, “but do you want to know what really happened that day in Contention City?”
“Sure,” I said.
He held out the bottle and filled our cups again, then he settled back against the wall and got a distant look in his eyes.
“Sheriff Dan Brayton was probably the most dishonorable man that ever lived,” he said. “He never faced down a man in his life that he didn’t have covered every which way to Sunday. And most of them that he killed was shot in the back. How do you think he got that fancy job as assistant to the territorial governor after the Contention City shoot-out?”
I sipped my whiskey and listened to him ramble. His speech seemed pretty much unaffected by the booze, and he reached out several times to refill my cup, then his own.
“Dutch Bascum was an outlaw, sure enough,” he said. “Rode with Quantrill after the War Between the States, then the James Boys and the Youngers when they robbed all them banks. But things was different in them days. Dutch started his own gang once all of them sorta fell to the wayside. But by then the West was changin’.” He reached out with the bottle again. The fire had all but disappeared as I swallowed. “Too many lawmen, too many posses, too many railroad detectives... Lots of them outlaws got tracked down and killed. At that time a lot of the territories were trying for Statehood, so they didn’t want folks back in Washington hearing tales of how wild things was. Offered up amnesty to a lot of them boys, if they’d turn themselves in and promise to be good citizens.” He smiled and tilted the cup to his lips. “Dutch Bascum and his boys were on the way to Contention to get their amnesty papers. It’d been all set up. But that back-shooting Brayton dry-gulched ‘em as they rode into town.” His eyes looked moist and he stared at the dusty floor.
“But I thought that the Bascum gang shot it out with Brayton because they were against the amnesty program?” I said.
Whitey just snorted derisively. “Brayton let the first member of the gang ride in and get his papers,” he said. “But it was just a ruse to draw in the others. After that first rider left, and the others came in…”
“How do you know all this?” I asked.
He looked at me. “Cause I was there,” he said.
from “For Courage and Honor” – Michael A. Black
~~~~~
“First time I went out with Boyd, we caught a drug-killing. Piece of shit case, except we had a witness, a woman, high as a kite, locked herself in the bathroom because she’s terrified of being busted for possession. Wouldn’t come out, said she’d kill herself if we went in. The uniforms were talking to her through the door, getting nowhere. So we show up and Boyd goes up to the door, knocks, introduces himself, and says, ‘Ma’am, I’m a homicide cop. I solve murders. Now I got a dead man out here, and I want to find out who killed him, and I don’t give a rat’s ass what you’ve got on your person, in your person, or what you might put on or in your person tomorrow, because that’s narcotics and those guys are a bunch of tight-assed pricks who screwed up my crime scene at the last drug-related killing I worked. So, let’s you and me make a deal. You come out of there, close the door behind you, and talk to me, and I promise no one here will open that door or look inside until after you’ve left.’”
“What happened?”
“She came out. Closed the door behind her. Gave us three names. We picked them up before midnight, and two confessed. The case went down in less than a week. And no one opened that bathroom door until after the woman left.”
from “Henkin’s Last Lies” – James Chambers
~~~~~
While waiting for the U.S. marshal out of Deadwood to arrive and haul Whitley away for trial, Ben had determined that the robber’s purpose in coming to Flatrock Crossing was to hit the bank there before it transferred over the big payroll it was holding for the railroad crew building a bridge across the South Platte River west of town. Whitley claimed he had a whole gang who would be showing up soon to bust him out and help him still finish the job, but Ben took that for a bluff. Nevertheless, as a precaution, he deputized more men and posted a round-the-clock guard on the jail. Ben took the overnight watch himself. On the second night Whitley was in custody, things went wrong. Somehow the prisoner managed to pick the lock on his cell. He slipped out in the middle of the night, cold-cocked and hog-tied Ben in his bunk, then broke into the bank and blew the vault with dynamite he must have hidden somewhere close by. Went tearing out of town as the handful of citizens who’d been awakened by the explosion were still rubbing sleep out of their eyes and trying to figure out what all the commotion was about.
Ben, cracked skull and all, had formed his posse and ridden in pursuit the next morning at first light. But the rain and intermittent snow had made tracking the fugitive robber all but impossible and now, after two days of being out on the trail, the pursuers were wet and cold and weary and without any clear idea whether or not they’d gained any ground on their quarry.
from “This Old Star” – Wayne D. Dundee
~~~~~
It was the convention that the Ocean City town officials feared the most. Sure, it brought in lots of money and filled every vacant room from the Inlet to the Delaware line, but the general idea of it was frightening. A city filled with conventioneers is one thing, but most of these conventioneers were armed, and did not fear the law because they were the law.
It was not that the FOP convention caused more trouble than any other, it was the nature of that trouble that bothered the Town Council. This year, for instance, there had been an impromptu shooting match on the beach between officers from Anne Arundel County and those from Montgomery County. Tired of arguing over which semi-automatic pistol was the more accurate, the officers, at 1:30 in the morning, decided to settle the matter on the sand. Using chemical light sticks as skeet targets, one cop would yell “Pull!”, another would throw the light stick toward the ocean and a third would empty a clip in its direction. Since all of the participants had had a little too much to drink, most of the light sticks floated back to shore undamaged, to be used over and over until the cops ran out of ammunition.
The Ocean City police, seeing that their fellow officers were shooting over the water, wisely waited until all the firing had stopped. Then they stepped in and offered their comrades in arms rides back to their lodgings, making sure to get the names of the would-be marksmen to report to their respective commands. For weeks later, old men walking the beach with their metal detectors would be digging up cartridge cases, wondering why news of the obvious shootout had not made the papers or TV.
The next night, a fight almost demolished the popular nightspot Big’uns. A Maryland State Trooper had been droning on and on about the rigors of the training that the Maryland State Police gave its cadets. After letting him talk for a good twenty minutes, a civilian assigned to the Baltimore City Police Crime Lab quietly said, “Gee, that’s sure a lot of work for twenty years of writing speeding tickets.” The trooper punched the crime scene tech in the mouth.
Members of the BPD who witnessed this of course felt obligated to defend one of their own, however stupid and ill-timed his remarks were. The trooper’s buddies joined in, as did most of the other cops present, and a good time was had by all. When the fighting was over, there was hardly an unbroken table in Big’uns, the crime lab tech had been hospitalized, and every uniformed member of the BPD and the MSP agreed that, no matter how useful they were on a crime scene, civilians had no place in a cop bar.
from “The Last Convention” – John L. French
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