Hero To Zero 2nd edition (3 page)

Tucker was pissed. He’d personally measured the knife, and it was too long. He told the prosecutor this and the prosecutor just shrugged and said, “The charges are dropped; they were ridiculous.” The black-and-white Tucker was furious.

I just said, “Sorry man.” Reality sometimes hurt like that for guys like Tucker.

I heard later on that he was dating one of the dispatchers. She’d made a point out of letting everyone know that she was interested in him. She pursued him like a lioness stalking her prey.

Every Samson has his Delilah.

He never knew what hit him. He was out of his element on the streets, but here with this lioness, he was truly prey. He was in deep shit. She reeled him in like a pro.

They were married soon after, following all the rules of his chosen religion, jumping through all the hoops, making everything legit. Tucker would have it no other way. He was that kind of guy, by the book, to the letter, every “T” crossed, every “I” dotted. His perfect life was intact. He married his perfect bride and continued in school.

The next time I saw Tucker, I’d already heard he was leaving the police department. He had an impeccable resume, and had applied to one of the government agencies with the three-letter acronyms. FBI, CIA, ATF, DEA, CIA—you get the picture. He was on his way off of the street and into the big time.

He was strutting around that last day I saw him, proud, as he should have been. His life was a movie poster, picture-perfect. He followed the rules, he went to church, and he never drank, smoked, or swore. He’d married the perfect girl. He was a “blue flamer,” on the fast track to success. Big blue flames were virtually shooting out of his ass on his way to the top. Big things were in store for him.

Tucker successfully graduated from the required federal law-enforcement academies, and was transferred to a neighboring state, to begin his federal law-enforcement career. He had all his ducks in a row, like usual.

The lieutenant who had mentored him bragged about his protégé, telling us that Tucker’s success was due in large part to the lieutenant’s influence and guidance. He continually updated us on Tucker’s success stories. He was living vicariously through Tucker’s success, I suppose. He got on my fucking nerves.

About a year later, I heard that Tucker was back in our state. He’d requested a transfer because his wife had a potentially fatal disease that could only be treated at a special medical facility that was located in our state. The agency he worked for had granted the transfer immediately. I really felt bad for the dude. This shit was heartbreaking. He had toed the line his whole life, and now his wife was really sick and might not survive.

My own life, meanwhile, was a constant train wreck, with divorce after divorce. I hated any authority figure, and I rarely did what I was supposed to. It was odd as hell how things worked out. I felt sick for him.

Tucker did what any man should do: he stood by his wife, supporting her. He was a rock. She was dying, and he showed nothing but kindness and support for her. I was extremely impressed. I could see the end of this saga: he’d stay at her side, doing whatever he could to make her comfortable. He would never leave her in this condition. It was not in him. He would not quit. He did not know how to quit. He would not leave her no matter what. For him, marriage was for eternity. Literally.

Time passed, and the family held fundraisers to help pay for the expensive treatments Tucker’s wife needed. The community reached out to them as well, and donations were made to a bank account; thousands of dollars were raised to pay for the cutting-edge medical tests and treatments that she required.

His mentoring lieutenant let us know how we could all donate to help pay for his wife’s care. Meanwhile, Tucker’s wife herself held up remarkably well. She hardly looked sick at all, and people remarked at her strength, and will to live. She was as strong and determined as he was to see this through. They were both inspiring people.

Then one day, a family member became suspicious. Tucker’s sick wife never looked sick, and she never received the treatments that were scheduled. Every time an appointment would be made for treatment, something would come up, and the treatment would be cancelled. The suspicious relative started to pry, and eventually the “dying wife” came clean.

She told the observant family member that she and Tucker had fabricated the story about her illness to manipulate Tucker’s employer into transferring them back to her hometown to be near her mother. She missed her mom, and she claimed Tucker knew all about the ruse from the beginning. They had fabricated a letter from a fictional doctor outlining her illness. There was no illness, ever.

The family member turned them both in for fraud.

Tucker’s wife ended up cutting a deal with the prosecutors and testifying against him. She claimed it was his idea to move, and that he had suggested the plan they followed. She helped fabricate the documents they’d used to dupe the agency he worked for into transferring him, but she claimed it was all his idea.

Tucker ended up losing everything. His career was over. He was a convicted felon several times over when she was done testifying against him. He was disgraced in the law-enforcement community and humiliated on the evening news.

I thought back on the squeaky-clean Tucker I knew on the streets and wondered if there were any way he could’ve done this. I don’t think there was. I think she lied to him and made everything up until he was in too deep to save the situation.

Tucker had one major flaw. He was loyal to a fault. He was raised to believe that the person you married was sent to you by God himself. You were preordained in heaven to marry this person. That was what he had been taught from the time he was a child. To abandon his wife, to turn her in for fraud, would have been an act against his God and meant that his entire life was a sham. He couldn’t do, accept, or believe that, and I think it destroyed him.

RAY FOSSUM WAS TRULY AN
amazing cop. He had an incredible knack for the streets. I first met him when we were both testing for different job openings at the various police departments in the area where I lived.

We would pass each other in the testing rooms, doing the head nod that guys do in silent acknowledgement, no words passed. Then if we both passed the test, we would compete in the PT tests. He could do more push-ups, and I could run faster. We competed against each other but also encouraged each other. Friendly rivals, competitors, each wanting the same thing.

In a few years we were both working for the same police department; he was hired about a year before I was. We had actually grown up on different sides of the same city, and we ended up working for the city’s PD. We both liked working nights, and ended up on opposing night shifts.

He was a constantly moving mass of nervous energy. One leg was always bouncing. He was always talking. When he laughed it was always a nervous, edgy, loud laugh. Watching him, I always wondered what made him tick.

I was raised in the central part of the city. He was raised on the east side by affluent parents. His dad was a professor at the local college; mine was a mechanic. We each had our reasons for wanting to be a cop in the city we’d grown up in. We each had our demons.

Ray had a picture-perfect career. He started in patrol working nights, like I did. He’d been working for about a year when he was selected for the most recent political hot potato: the Gang Task Force.

The gang problem was out of control in the city, and the new chief needed to at least appear to have taken some kind of action. Ray and two other guys were selected to augment the task force in a high-profile move to appease the city council and the media. They were given the impossible task of turning the gang problem around immediately.

They were in the paper almost nightly—press releases, news articles. Ray was right in the middle of it. He was making a difference, and attracting women like moths to a flame—two things that Ray excelled at.

One night Ray was sent to respond to a report of a drunken patron of a strip bar in the north end of the city. Most guys would have arrived, picked the guy up, and then taken him to jail for the quick slam dunk and get back on the streets.

Ray arrived and, as usual, he started to dig. He later told me that he just looked at the guy and he knew that something was wrong with him. He said the guy “felt all wrong.” Ray kept at it, digging, verifying information, and checking on small details that the guy told him about—where he had been and who he was. His identification was not in the databases, his social security did not match his name—things about him just looked wrong.

Ray had a sixth sense for this shit, and he was almost never wrong. He eventually discovered that the bald, nerdy, middle-aged and overweight drunk who had been getting loud and obnoxious at the strip club was wanted for multiple counts of rape in several neighboring states.

He was a serial rapist who would set up appointments with female real estate agents and then get them alone in vacant homes, rape them, tie them up, and then leave. He had been on the run for several years and was very successful at not getting caught.

Until he ran into Ray. Ray ended that cocksucker’s free ride in a few short minutes while giving a clinic on what it means to be an outstanding cop.

Ray bounced from one great assignment to another. He was the go-to guy for the brass. If they had a problem Ray was an easy, obvious choice. He was photogenic, politically correct (in public), and a mass of moving energy that could not be stopped.

He bounced from one special assignment to another. Anything that required total dedication and boundless energy Ray was plugged into until the next quick fix was needed, and then he was moved to the new problem. He was a rising star in the police department, surely headed to at least the rank of lieutenant—possibly assistant chief.

Watching Ray, though, you could see he had something deep and dark inside that haunted him. Like I said, he was constantly in motion.

I remember stopping to talk to him and one of the senior officers in a parking lot one slow night. The older guy was calm, seasoned. He was watching us both like a father watches his sons: seeing everything through the filter of experience, making very few comments, but always listening.

It was never more obvious to me than that night just how wound up Ray was. He was sitting in the driver’s seat of the patrol car. The car was stationary; Ray was not. He never stopped moving the entire time. He looked like a meth addict, constantly moving—twitching, leg bouncing, laughing too loud, talking too fast.

It really struck me then the amount of nervous energy that Ray constantly burned off. Obviously, something very deep bothered him a lot. Something he could barely contain.

Ray had one true passion aside from women. He loved sports. Any and all sports. He could talk sports, any sport, with the most rabid fan. He could talk at length about the most obscure stats of almost any player in almost any sport. I was amazed and mystified at what he found time to study and obsess over. He was a mystery to me.

I was working one of many part-time jobs in a department store when I ran into a girl who dated a friend of Ray’s. She started to tell me about their double dates. She said Ray had a different girl with him every single night and “lived fast.”

I said, “Yeah, Ray is the golden boy of the department.”

“Yeah…I guess if they knew what I knew, he’d be fired in a second!”

I stopped cold. There was something in her voice and eyes that told me she knew something about that deep, dark secret that Ray kept so tightly under wraps.

On the outside I appeared casual, but made a mental note. I started to listen to her very carefully. I wanted to know what she knew, and I knew it would only be a matter of time and earning her trust, and then she would spill it

Several months went by, and the woman split from Ray’s running buddy. She was heartbroken. Ray’s friend had left his wife and moved in with her, they had rented an apartment together, set up house and home. Then she came home from work one day to find that he had left her and moved back in with his wife.

Simple as that, he left her with a lease she could not afford, bills she could not pay. She was devastated. I listened as she poured out the last few months of their relationship: dates, drinking, parties.

She got really quiet and said, “Do you remember that day I mentioned to you about Ray and his secret?”