There were signs everywhere saying
no eating in the library, but who’s going to lecture a cop about breaking the
rules? A homeless man with a newspaper was about to sit down at the table
across from O’Connor, but got a bullet stared into his face.
“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.”
