Got Your Six

Chapter 2

Calvin

"Dispatch, this is officer Jenkins, I've got a black sedan stopped on East Pleasant Street adjacent to Center Street. Reason for stop is running a stop sign. I've got the license plate for you when you're ready," there's a little static from the radio as I let go of the button. Another beat up car blowing stop signs in the middle of the night. The thing looks like it could break down at any second. It always seems to be the cars that look the most rundown that decide the traffic laws don't apply to them. Although, this isn't the nicest part of town so it's to be expected. I feel like I am frequently making stops around this street with it being just down the road from the downtown bar scene.
There's more static from my ear piece before a female voice comes through. "Go ahead with the license plate," the woman says in a voice that makes it clear she'd rather be in her bed and not at work at this time of night.
My radio beeps as I click the button, letting me know it's ready for me to speak. "Minnesota license plate reads: 5–4–8, Delta—Papa—Oscar," I say through the radio, and then repeat it once more before letting go of the button.
I watch the driver through my windshield as I wait for the tired woman to give me more information about the vehicle. The bright lights from my car light up the dark street. There's so many large trees around us that the moonlight is unable to break through. I begin to wonder if my lights have woken anyone up in the surrounding houses. I don't see any house lights on so I dismiss the thought and turn my attention back to the driver who is looking back in his seat, awaiting my arrival.
More static from the radio, and then the same sleepy voice. "Okay, sir. The plate comes back to a 2007 black Monte Carlo, owned by a Gavin Murphy. It's showing a valid registration and insured with State Farm."
After a brief moment of silence, the drivers information pops up on the computer screen beside me. My computer informs me that the owner has a few tickets for speeding within the last year but no other charges. Feeling satisfied with the amount of information I know, I unclip my seatbelt and step out into the brisk night air.
The man already has his window rolled down when I reach his door. I clicked on my flashlight about halfway between my vehicle and his and now have it shinning into his vehicle. He's alone in the car and besides the empty carseat in the back seat, the vehicle seems pretty clean on the inside. His clothes are all black and he's wearing a beanie to cover his head, even though I don't feel like it's cold enough to be wearing one.
The man greets me with a friendly smile as he hands over his drivers license. "Evening officer," his smile is almost just a bit too friendly for this late at night.
It's nearly one in the morning and there haven't been to many cars driving around within the last hour, despite it being the weekend. I glance down at his license just to match the name with the one the dispatcher gave me. "What are you up to this late, Gavin? Out drinking with some friends?" I say in a way that makes it sound like friendly conversation.
He seems a little surprised that I used his name when talking to him, but to be fair, he did hand me his ID. "No drinks tonight," Gavin says with the same friendly smile that I can't help but find slightly suspicious. "The guys made me the DD tonight. I just finished dropping off the last one and now I'm heading home myself."
"You live close by?" I ask, trying to keep him talking for a bit to see if he slurs his words or not. Every night I'm on patrol, I'm always looking to bust another drunk driver and it's been a couple weeks since I got my last one. Needless to say, I'm eager to find another.
"Just a couple blocks away," Gavin says with a completely sober sounding voice.
I take a moment, checking his backseat for anything suspicious, but finding the same clean seats as before. I lift the flashlight a few inches to find out if anything could be hidden in the carseat. A slight feeling of defeat hits me as I give Gavin his drivers license back and wish him a good night. "Just make sure you watch for them stop signs," I remind him as I begin to take a few steps back from his vehicle. He hits me with another friendly grin, nods his head, and then rolls up his window.
It's not very cold tonight but the heat in my car still feels nice. I radio up to dispatch and let them know I let Gavin off with a verbal warning as I watch his car shift into gear and drive away in front of me. I switch off my emergency lights, giving all the houses around me some relief in case someone did wake up from it, then I enter a few notes into my computer and get on with my night.
For the next hour, I try to keep myself around the streets surrounding the bars, knowing they close at two and everyone will be forced to go home. I get a couple more stops in the meantime, but still have no luck finding any drunk drivers. Judging by how quiet the radio has been recently, the other patrols must be having a boring night as well. Just as I'm about to find a place to park and eat a snack, the radio is filled with brief static and then the female dispatcher voice. Only this time, she seems a lot more awake.
"Officer Jenkins and Gonzales, I need you both to respond to 633 Park Lane. We have an unresponsive male. Medical is already on the way," the woman's voice seems rushed, as if she's just finished three cups of coffee in the last hour.
I waste no time at all flipping on my emergency lights and blaring the sirens as I barrel down the street towards the address on my computer. Gonzales has been on the force for about a year longer than I have so I fully expect him to take the lead when we get there. As I get closer to the address, I kill my sirens to avoid waking anyone up and getting complaints called into the station. I glance around at the street signs but ultimately, I'm forced to rely on my computer to guide me. Even though I grew up here, there's just no way I can memorize every street in a town of over fifty-thousand people. Luckily, my computer leads me straight to the front door.
Gonzales must have been closer than I was because he's already walking up to the small blue house as I park my vehicle and hop out. I can see the ambulance turn onto the street as I catch up to Gonzales just as he reaches the front door. He doesn't even have to knock because a short, brown haired woman swings open the door right as Gonzales steps foot on the small wooden staircase in front of the door. I guess it wouldn't be too hard to see all the flashing lights if she had the curtains open.
"He's on the couch," the woman says worried while she takes off into the house.
Gonzales and I don't hesitate to follow her into the house, trying to keep up. The house is very small, making it easy to find the woman as soon as we step foot inside. We rush through the small porch and through a second door that opens up into the cramped living room. There's a staircase on the right, leading down to the basement, and a banister around it taking up nearly half the space of the living room. There's a decent sized TV sitting on a cheap table right behind the banister and a coffee table sitting in-between the TV and the couch that is clearly too big for this space. A doorway is located about two feet behind the couch that looks like it leads to a small but modernized kitchen. 
The young woman is sitting on the couch next to a man, around the same age as her, that appears to be passed out drunk. "Please help him," the woman mumbles through her tears but Gonzales is already at the man's side, checking for a pulse.
He looks back towards me and shakes his head. Without any words being said, I know exactly what he means, no pulse. I maneuver around the tight furniture situation and ask the young lady to move as Gonzales and I lift the man off the couch and lay him on the floor. I'm forced to slide the coffee table out of the way just to make enough room. Just as Gonzales gets ready to begin CPR, a two person medical team rushes through the door with their bag of life saving equipment.
"What's the status?" Asks one of the two male paramedics.
"Unresponsive white male, no pulse," I inform them as Gonzales moves to make room for them.
The young woman, who I assume to be the man's girlfriend, starts crying harder at the words no pulse. The paramedics begin their routine as I begin asking questions to try and figure out what led to this situation.
"Ma'am, can you tell me what happened before we got here?" I ask the woman and she looks over to be, breathing heavily and trying unsuccessfully to keep herself together.
"I—I don't know," she begins, weeping between words. "We were just hanging out, watching a movie and having a few drinks. He went to the bathroom and then came back a couple minutes later," she's forced to take a short break from talking because her breathing is getting out of control.
"Deep breaths, ma'am," I tell her, knowing that nothing I say will be able to calm her when her boyfriend is not breathing on the floor. "What happened next?"
"He came back from the bathroom and... and a few minutes later he was... he was passed out on the couch," she's barely able to finish her sentence before she bursts into tears again.
I look over to the medical team and watch as they finish spraying something into the man's nose and continue to give him mouth-to-mouth. "Did he have anything besides his drinks? Or maybe put something in his drinks that you know of?" I ask, turning my attention back to the sobbing woman.
"I—I don't know. He could've taken something in the bathroom I guess... he was in there for a few minutes," the woman tells me. Then her words become too hard to understand as her crying intensifies.
Gonzales and I lock eyes and he gives me a nod and then looks at the woman. "You mind if I look around the bathroom?" He asks her and she gives him a nod accompanied by a few more crying noises.
He slips into the hallway behind him and I look around the room for any other clues we might've missed. The only things in the room are a bag of chips and two empty beer bottles on the coffee table that I slid out of the way earlier. The paramedics spray another round of narcan into the man's nose right before Gonzales returns to the living room. I look to him for any type of signal that he found something but he just shakes his head in my direction.
Everyone's attention is shifted to the center of the room as the young man's eyes shoot open and he inhales a large breath of air.
"Hey, welcome back, bud," Gonzales says eagerly as he moves himself closer.
The woman wastes no time shoving her way past everyone to hug the man, still lying on the floor. The medics only give her a brief second before ushering her off of him in order to help the young man to a sitting position on the couch. The man's eyes are wide as he looks around the room at all of the strange people in his house.
"Just sit still and take a few deep breaths," one of the paramedics advises him. "You just overdosed, but you're going to be okay."
The man stares down at the floor with wide eyes as he takes in one deep breath after another. The other paramedic straps a heart rate monitor onto his wrist and tells him told hold it up against his chest.
"Hey, what do you remember about what happened tonight?" I ask the young man, taking a few steps toward him.
He looks up to me with fear in his eyes. His body is shaking and he's still breathing heavily.
"Just calm down. You're not in trouble. We just want to know what happened," I say with the calmest voice I can. Telling him he's not in trouble is not a lie, because of the Good Samaritan Law, he can't be charged with anything this time around. "Why don't you just start with telling us your name?"
The man hesitates for a moment before saying, "Lucas," in a shaky voice.
"Okay, Lucas, what can you tell me about tonight?" I ask as he looks up at me with watery eyes.
"I was just trying to get a quick high," he says, his lip quivering as the tears fall down his cheeks. His girlfriend is now sitting beside him on the couch, holding him against her.
"Well, what did you take?" I ask, readying my notepad. I'll need these important details for my report I'm bound to have to write later.
"I—I don't know," his voice is still shaky but he starts to talk faster. "It was just a few blue pills, the guy said they would give me a quick high, like some shit I've never felt before. I've never had them before, I was just trying to have a good time. I didn't know they'd be so strong," Lucas is talking so fast it seems like he's going to fall into a panic attack.
"Hold on, Lucas, hold on," I repeat myself until he finally stops blabbering and looks at me again. "What guy?"
"The guy I got the pills from. We used to work together," Lucas says after taking a few deep breaths to calm himself.
"What's his name? We need a name so we can stop this from happening to other people."
"Gavin, his name is Gavin."
"Tell me what he looks like." At this point I'm not asking anymore, I need as much information to take back to the captain. The station has been trying to take down the drug ring in town for too long for us to let this lead slip away.
"He's a scrawny African American," Lucas begins, scrunching his eyebrows as if he's thinking as hard as he can. "He's probably a few inches shorter than you, wears dark clothes most of the time and he's always wearing a beanie no matter the temperature."
I space out whatever he says after the beanie because I suddenly know exactly who he's talking about. The same man I had stopped a few hours ago for running a simple stop sign.
"He was just here a few hours ago," Lucas says, immediately grabbing my attention again.
Gavin had told me he was out dropping off his friends before heading home, now it's up to me to see how true that story was. "Why was he here?"
"He was dropping off the pills. You guys can have the rest of them. I don't want them, not after tonight, please just take them. They're in a baggie in my nightstand," Lucas admits, his words are coming out so fast they almost blend together.
"Okay, slow down, man," I tell him and he takes another deep breath. Gonzales slips into the hallway again and I can hear him opening a door. "You didn't go anywhere with him tonight?"
"No," Lucas responds. "I was here all night. We were watching a movie, I never left the house."
"Did he have anyone with him?"
"I met him at the door. I don't remember seeing anyone in his car but it was dark out."
Gonzales returns to the room holding a ziplock bag with no more than ten pills inside. He has on a pair of latex gloves in order to preserve the evidence. The paramedics meet him in the center of the room to take a look at the pills.
"Looks like fentanyl," one of the medics says. "We've seen this stuff making its way around town."
"Pretty dangerous stuff," the other medic chimes in. "Especially when taken in to high of a dose or if your body just isn't used to it." He glances over at Lucas, "But I'm sure we all know that by now."
The paramedics finish packing up their equipment, inform Lucas that he'll be just fine as long as he keeps that stuff out of his system, and then leave the house.
"You said you used to work with him, where at?" I ask, jumping straight back into the questions.
"It was a foundry, uhh, the Little Giant Iron Foundry," Lucas informs me as I jot down his answer on my notepad.
I used to work at the same place before becoming an officer, but there was no reason to inform Lucas of that. However, my brother and Dad still work there and I had every intention of finding out how much they knew about this Gavin guy. I pull up my left sleeve a few inches and check my watch, 3:17am. There's still a couple hours until they would be heading to work, which gives me some time to get started on my report.
"We're going to be taking the rest of the pills," I begin to inform Lucas.
"Please," he blurts out in the middle of my sentence, as if relieved that they'll be out of his possession.
"You keep yourself clean from here on out and you won't have to go through a scare like tonight again," I tell him, closing up my notepad and slipping it back in my vest.
"Yes, sir," Lucas says, clearly relieved that he's not getting in trouble for the illegal drugs he just consumed.
"Oh, and one more thing," I say just before reaching the front door. "It'd be in your best interest to not mention to anyone that you just sold out your friend, Gavin. We don't need him coming after you."
"Of course," I hear Lucas say as Gonzales follows me out of the house.
"I'll get this shit turned into the evidence locker and then get started on my part of the report," Gonzales informs me as we walk towards our respective vehicles.
"Sounds good," I say before hopping into my cruiser and heading back to the station.
Besides a few officers calling in traffic stops, the radio stayed quiet for the next hour and a half while I wrote up my report. Gonzales eventually met me at my desk with his half of the report and I promptly slipped it into the file. A few minutes after 5am, I pulled out my phone and sent my brother, Cameron, a text.
You going into work today?
His reply didn't take long at all, letting me know he was in fact working today, even though it was Saturday. I scrolled through my contacts and clicked on his name. The phone began ringing as I entered the last few details into my report.

Cameron had been helpful after I met up with him at his work, letting me know a bit more about the supposed drug dealer. Although, that new supervisor James was a bit more help than Cameron. After getting to talk to him privately in the office, he told me about a few of the complaints he had gotten while working there. He had a few for asking his coworkers to buy drugs from him and a couple for violating some safety rules. James also told me that Gavin tried acting like a supervisor to his coworkers, bossing them around, telling them what to do, and even trying to send people home early when they wouldn't listen to him.
I didn't want to take up too much of James' time because I know he had a job to do and my shift was just about over too. That's when I headed back to the station.
"Hey Cap," I said, standing in the doorway of the captains office. He didn't really mind the nickname, or if he did, he didn't acknowledge it. "I wanted to talk to you about a guy I came in contact with tonight."
"Yeah? What about him? Who is he?" Captain Bennett asks me, but continues to type something up on his computer.
Captain Bennett is an intimidating man, at least until you get to know him. He was fairly tough on me for my first few weeks until I was able to prove to him I knew what I was doing. He's a muscular man nearing his fifties with a bald head and a full mustache and goatee that seems to get slightly grayer every day.
"Well, I have reason to believe he's a drug dealer in town. His name's Gavin Murphy," as soon as the name slips out of my mouth, Captain Bennett stops typing and looks up at me with full invested interest in what I have to say.
"You caught Gavin Murphy?" The Captain says eagerly.
"Well, no." I say hesitantly. "I got him on a traffic stop for running a stop sign. But I responded to a medical emergency and the victim told me he got his drugs from Gavin. Weirdly enough, Gavin used to work at the same place as my brother"
"You've got no idea who this guy actually is, do you?" Captain Bennett's voice is deep and serious, drawing my attention in close.
"Apparently not, I looked up his name in the system though. It comes up quite a bit but there's never been any charges," I say as I take a few steps into his office so that I'm positioned in front of him on the opposite side of his desk.
"Gavin Murphy is one of the biggest problems in this town," Bennett says, standing up from his chair.
"How so?" I ask, genuinely curious as to why this guy has the Captain so wound up.
"He might just look like a measly drug dealer, but he's been involved with so much more. His name comes up in the system a lot because people mention him, but we've never been able to prove his role in the drug ring."
"And what do you suspect his role is?"
"Let me just say, he's at the top of my personal wanted list because I think he's leading the whole town's drug ring."
I have to take a moment to process exactly what the Captain just said. If what he's thinking is true, then I just had the town's drug lord on a traffic stop and he got away. My thoughts begin to run wild but the Captain pulls me back to reality.
"You said your brother worked with Gavin?"
"Yes, sir," I say, shaking my head to clear my thoughts.
"I think he may just be able to help us take him down then."
The Captains words come as a shock to me. How could my brother possibly help take down the town's biggest drug leader? He's not on the police force, nor is he connected to Gavin in any way. Before I can even ask the Captain for more details, he begins talking again, cutting off any chance I had at finding out more.
"Look, your shift is over for the day. Just go home and rest and don't mention to your brother that we may want his help. I'll have to come up with a plan first."
Without another word, I make my way out of the Captain's office and head back to my own work station. I clean up my desk, secure my weapon and vest in my locker, and head out to the parking lot.
I hop into my red truck and sit in the chilly morning air for a few minutes, thinking about what I just learned from the Captain. Before cranking the ignition, I send Cameron a text to let him know what I've found out about Gavin. Reluctantly, I leave out the part where the Captain might want his help.