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  The donuts on the way to work were old hat for Steve Branch. He had been a homicide detective at the seventh precinct for sixteen scruffy police years. Morning donuts were a part of his turf. For sure, he was jaded. He wanted out, but he had nowhere else to go. Steve’s disheveled and crumb dotted suit betrayed his slovenly attitude about anything and everything that his life as a cop had amounted to. His life was merely a dance of angry citizens, endless reports, boxes of donuts, and coffee. Nonetheless, Steve persisted for many years in his job of being a completely approved and licensed police officer. In fact, playing dick was his only stock and trade. His dad had been a homicide cop, and Steve Branch was a chip off his old man’s block right down to his endless sips of java and the eternal wetness of so many wayward and very horny women. These girls had always been part and parcel of his family’s forensic repertoire.

  Kevin Richter, his partner, was a lean thirty-five year old stud, because he hadn’t gotten fat yet. Detective Branch hated him for that. Branch had traded in his furtive youth for a puffy adult body whose thousands of donuts dumped on the pounds and escorted him directly into the onset of his advancing obesity. Richter was still thin. He was also somewhat naive about women, kids, and marriage. He persisted in believing in the sanctity of his wedding vows even though he fucked women police officers in the restrooms of restaurants when off-duty. It was all the same to him, and, besides, his stupid Irish Catholicism covered all of his sins with the savior’s blood right down to the gooey stains that graced both sides of his zipper. No matter what he did, Mr. Richter firmly believed that Jesus would save his muscular seven percent fat ass. But that was beside the point. To Officer Kevin Richter, life and crimes were a daily blast. He couldn’t get enough of them.

  “How’s the wife, Kevin?” Steve asked. He really wanted to know. He was close buds with Kevin, his wife, and kids. Steve considered them his family, because they were all he had to hang onto.

  “I’m okay,” Kevin said. “As for them? They’re good, too.”

  Steve nodded.

  At that point, the precinct commander, Grant Holland, came rushing in.

  “Heads up, everyone!” he shouted into the room from his dingy office door, “We have a multiple code one-eighty-seven over at Small’s European and American Cuisine. For you McDonald’s fans, Small’s is an expensive dining room that serves steaks. All of the big wigs eat there. Get on it now! Full sirens! They already know we’re coming!”

  The police cars gyrated around corners. Their cars’ stylishly flat and flashing eyeslits sparkled with red, silver, and blue lights in a garish horizon of oozing sunbeams that exploded against the streets and buildings they rushed past, brighter than bombs in a battle. These police cars had become surreal seas of spinning tires that moved so fast that they barely grounded their rubber coated wheels against the cobblestones. Their yapping loudspeakers barked their incessantly surreal siren scream through the night much the way that troubled girlie dogs whined in heat. Kevin and Steve twisted right and left inside each radical turn of their wheels, slamming the their bones against the well scratched vehicle’s doors, as they swirled past paused cars and stoplights. On both sides of their racing police car, Steve and Kevin watched the glaring glass faces of the passing city buildings whose glass windows reflected whatever shreds of their hurling image anyone could fathom as the policemen sped forward in their totally indecent blur of blue, red, and white.

  When they peeled off onto the scene, the fun had already started. Police cars were pegged sideways and the guys were shooting it out with a weirdo who had already flourished his gun at the frightened cops who hid behind their cars for protection. Steve stopped his police car and took position behind its partially armored door. He pointed at the perp who pointed back with his tiny gun and dared him to shoot, so the detective did what the perp wanted. He pressed off a shot, and watched him receive a full fuselage of fresh lead from his own gun and those of the other officers who suddenly fired as well. This time, their bullets hit him head on and opened him inside out like a shotgunned can of tomato sauce. Blood was everywhere and still gushing from the volcanic peep holes in his exhausted body. Steve and Kevin smiled when the man’s body jiggled with each connecting hit. To Detective Steve Branch, the guy looked to all the world at that moment like a tiny paper doll glued by its foot to a woman’s pussy vibrator. Why he thought that, he wasn't really sure.

  Kevin approached the suspect, bent down, and felt his neck for a pulse.

  “Clear! Suspect dead!”

  Steve surveyed the body, noted what he assumed was the expired perp’s 9mm Glock on the pavement next to him, and shook his head.

  “What a mess,” Steve said.

  “How’s he doing?” his side kick Kevin Richter asked.

  “The guy is just waiting for the coroner,” Steve told him. “His body has been shot up so much, he looks like gourmet cheese embedded with red peppers.”

  Steve donned his detective’s latex gloves and retrieved the man’s wallet. He read the name Yancy Stokes, took a picture of his driver’s license with his cell phone camera and sent it on to headquarters with a text message that read, “Check this perp’s records and get back to me fast. — Det. Steve Branch.” He checked the inside of the guy’s wallet as thoroughly as he could, but found little to go on, only a few bills and nothing else of note. There were no telephone numbers, only a card with an appointment for his doctor dated just a few hours before. He dialed the number and slid the wallet into an evidence envelope.

  “Dr. Sumac’s office,” a nurse answered.

  “This is Detective Steve Branch. We have a homicide here for a man named Yancy Stokes whose wallet contains an appointment card in your office for several hours ago. I need to know what happened there.”

  “Confidentiality,” she said.

  “Don’t give me no confidentiality bull shit, lady. The man’s dead. He has no rights, anymore. Got it? Now listen well. This guy has committed several homicides. Get me the doctor he saw, and do it now.”

  “He’s with a patient.”

  “I don’t care if he’s fucking a whore. This is a murder scene. Get the cocksucker on the line.”

  “Yes, detective.”

  The line clicked. In less than a minute, a man calling himself Dr. Lawrence Sumac was on the phone.

  “Was Yancy murdered?” Dr. Sumac asked.

  “No, doc. It seems to be the other way around. Mr. Stokes went nuts and took out dozens of citizens with a nine millimeter Glock pistol. Did anything happen at your office that might help explain this?”

  Dr. Sumac almost trembled. He had never had anything like this happen in his entire professional career.

  “I told him he was terminally ill and that his affordable health care act insurance didn’t allow me to operate to save him.”

  “How did he react?”

  “He seemed okay.”

  “I guess he changed his mind, doc,” Steve said as he walked through Yancy’s killing field. “I’m looking at a half burned restaurant with blood oozing out of bodies everywhere, and I see families and kids with skulls blown apart. Get a clue.”

  “Oh, my goodness,” the doctor said.

  “He used the police to commit suicide,” Detective Branch said. “I don’t think you’ll be billing him any more. He’s dead as a door nail. You’re going to need another patient to work with.”

  The doctor hung up. He sat back in his chair, happy that Yancy Stokes was dead, because it meant he wouldn’t be coming to the office and killing the doctor and his hot secretary with the plump breast tissue pushing up behind her tight shirt.

  The crime scene was a mess.

  “I’ve never seen anything this big,” Steve said. “The guy went nuts.”

  “Why?” Kevin asked.

  “I just talked with his doctor. A few hours ago the doc gave him the bad news that he was dying, that a year ago he could have been saved, but the government’s new insurance scam wouldn’t cover the cure because of his a
ge. I’d say Mr. Yancy Stokes was clearly pissed off. Look at this bullshit. Where do we even fucking begin?”

  The scene looked like a classic painting of a battle’s aftermath. Bodies lay absentmindedly here and there throughout what was left of the smoldering hulk of what had been a five star restaurant transformed into a butcher’s shooting gallery. Before the count was over, the guy had murdered one hundred and eighty seven citizens, most of them celebrating their birthdays and wedding anniversaries in the wrong spot at the wrong time. It seemed that just being in here was the only reason they were dead. By now, the press had arrived. The had gathered themselves just a few feet outside the crime perimeter and their first amendment cameras were interjecting themselves into the virginal cortex of the murder scene’s first stages of post menstrual climax. Nothing could be worse. Steve’s phone rang. There were no priors on the perpetrator, Yancy Stokes, but it followed a pattern that had been emerging for weeks where a patient was told he or she was going to die because the government didn’t give a fuck. Like Yancy, the others had shot up a hospital or a theater or some other public venue that articulated their displeasures inside some sweet little killing field of their choice. With the details surfacing on the scandalous health care act’s refusal to treat people who were ill when just the opposite had been promised when the law was being passed, detective Branch figured this might well be just the tip of the iceberg. He also deduced that he’d be seeing even more of it in the near future. The world as he knew it had entered a sea change. Small’s was just another long eternal shoreline where it all began.

  Reporter Brenda Gardner, a recent graduate of some candy assed college that detective Branch was trying to remember but couldn’t, was performing before the cameras. He watched her firm titties pointing directly at his eyes as her lips moved persistently in front of the ever present lens. Detective Branch figured she was having her fifteen minutes of fame at the police department’s expense. Now, everyone and their moms would be up in arms about the poor police work that had just allowed another elderly gimp to take out half a small town right in front of Detective Branch’s donut gobbling pie hole, and how absolutely nothing at all was going to be done about it.

  Gardner stuck her microphone in front of Detective Branch’s mouth, demanding immediate answers to the present situation.

  “How did the man get the gun to do this?” she asked. “Isn’t it time we stopped conceal carry laws, detective?”

  “I think this sadistic crime scene is a good case for everyone carrying a gun,” Detective Branch told her, “because if only one other citizen had carried a gun in there for his daughter’s birthday party, then she might be alive right now, and the perpetrator would have been shot after the first round instead of continuing unabated until the man shot everyone in there. But I know you don’t want to hear the God’s honest truth of what I just said.”

  “So, you suggest arming the citizenry, detective?”

  “It makes a lot more sense than all of these cold dead bodies, Ms. Gardner. You don’t go to a gun fight totally unarmed, if you want to win. No more questions. With all due respect to the media and the first amendment which I personally believe in to the fullest degree, you need to get back, Brenda, because this is a working crime scene, and we need room for medical and law enforcement to gain easy access to the crime scene. Some of the people in there might still be saved, mam. Please cooperate by moving back across the street as I instruct our officers to place police tape showing the borders you are to observe.”

  “Thank you, Detective Branch, for speaking with me. We have just been speaking with Detective Branch of the Homicide Division who has just told us that only by having a citizenry who are armed to the teeth can this type of vicious mad dog murder scene be avoided, and from the looks of things inside that restaurant, I’d have to admit, uncomfortable as it seems to me, that Mr. Branch is probably correct. The question is whether or not we will arm ourselves for our own protection or just willingly go to the same slaughter as these unarmed and innocent folks just experienced right here in our town. What do you think out there? Do you want to carry a gun so that you can protect your family from this sort of thing? Twitter us @newsteam4 with your thoughts. I will tell you one thing out there in our audience. It’s going to be a long night for law enforcement as well as for the families of these victims.”

  Detective Branch turned away. Brenda was okay with him. She had always been fair to the police, including himself. However, as far as he was concerned the media could wipe his sweet ass. There was work to be done. All the reporters wanted was a good line to stir up mass shit and make a name for themselves as an Emmy laden news guru who brought the community’s awareness to a new state of descending madness. The entire world was a fruit basket filled with poisonous mushrooms like Brenda Gardner, star reporter, and another deadly mushroom or two out there in the city who were just like her might attract other news addicted copy cats to their mindless deaths. The news was just more poison in a sea of it, and the citizens were choking to death on the sweet pungent smells of fresh deaths, and that was exactly the way they liked it. People loved the feel of an exploding jugular inside their neck as long as they could feel it giving way by reading about someone else’s misfortune and not their own. Let the toxic splatter on the news media fly where it may as long as the Sarah Lee pastry freezer at the supermarkets remained full of the fattening glop they loved to stuff down their insular citizen pie holes as they waddled back and forth to the doctor’s office, the TV, and the refrigerator.

  As far as Detective Branch was concerned the entire world could just die and go to hell.

  As a matter of fact, he wished it would.