“Move on, pal,” O’Connor growled.
Normally, the patrolman wouldn’t slum it like this, brown-bagging it in a public place, but he was flat broke after losing big on the Eagles the night before. He was Catholic, but hadn’t been to church since his wedding. Lapsed as his beliefs were at this point in his downward spiral, he should’ve recognized that losing by a safety in the final ten seconds of overtime was a sign from above to change.
He thought this modest venue did have advantages.
A little whiskey in your coffee? Don’t mind if I do, O’Connor said to himself as he emptied what remained of his flask into his take-out cup. The wife moved out long ago, and he never got the hang of cooking. Today’s special was bologna on white bread. Not bad, but the mustard ran out before reaching his preferred level of saturation.
He finished the last of the popcorn he’d microwaved before his shift and was eyeballing the hot librarian when the drama began.
A teenager walked up to the desk with a book in one hand, and a cell phone in the other. He set the book down on the counter in front of the librarian.
“This may be a little late,” the kid said, already walking away.
“Excuse me, sir,” the librarian said. “There’s a fine.”
The kid either didn’t hear her, or chose to ignore the part about the ten-cents-a-day penalty for overdue books.
The librarian was about to tell him he could pay the forty cents on his next visit when the cop jumped into action. He sprang to his feet, pulled his service revolver, and pointed it at the kid’s back.
“Freeze, asshole!” O’Connor shouted in his very outside voice.
The kid wasn’t sure the warning was for him, but he stopped along with everyone else in the Moristown Public Library.
“Turn around slowly, with your hands over your head”
Now the kid realized that the cop he’d noticed eating his lunch when he came in was talking to him. As ordered, he started to turn around slowly, raising his hands, one of them clutching the phone.
The cop saw the object in the kid’s hand.
“Gun!” he screamed.
He emptied the six rounds from his revolver at point blank, only one of them managing to hit its intended target. The kid fell to the floor holding his forearm, barely scratched. O’Connor frantically worked to reload his weapon, making a mess of it, the spare ammo and the spent cartridges dropping to the floor, rolling in different directions.
The librarian finally recovered her wits and jumped from behind the counter.
“He’s thirteen years old. It was an overdue book, for heaven’s sake!”
The cop was floundering on the floor, trying to recover his ammo to finish what he started, then noticed the object in the kid’s hand was a mobile phone, not a lethal firearm. O’Connor had fifteen years in uniform and a lifetime watching bad TV shows about the police; experience guided him about what to do next.
He reached into his sock, pulled out his “drop gun,” and tossed it towards the kid on the floor.
The kid raised his head and saw the cop struggling to reload.
“Can I help you with that?” the kid asked in his library voice.
“I said freeze,” the cop said, this time the command came out with considerably less conviction, practically a whimper.
He managed to load two rounds into the revolver, closed the wheel, and fired both in the general direction of the kid still lying on his back. O’Connor was totally off-balance and fell backwards as he fired, shattering the glass on the framed portrait on the wall of the disgraced 47th president.
The librarian helped the cop to his feet as she took the revolver from his hand.
“Don’t worry about the portrait; we’ve been meaning to throw that thing out.”
