March 29, 2011; 5:45 PM:

“Ten-ninety at Citizens on West Main, ten-forty. Ten-ninety at Citizens on West Main, ten-forty. Ten-ninety at Citizens on West Main, ten-forty.” started blaring over the police radio just as Bill and I turned onto West Main from South Ninth West. We had been on regular patrol for the downtown area since early morning and all had been quiet until now. A “ten-ninety” is police code for a bank alarm, a “ten-forty” means respond quickly. Citizens Bank was the most major bank in town, seated at the corner opposite the courthouse at First and Main.

I picked up the radio and hit the speaker. “Ten-four. This is O’Meara. Ten-sixty-one.” I said as I simultaneously hit the lights and siren and Bill sped up to quickly get to the most major bank in town. A “ten-four” means message received, and “ten-sixty-one” means that personnel are in the vicinity. In other words, I was letting dispatch know we were already basically there.

Shortly after I released the radio, it squawked again, “Ten-four. This is O’Reilly. Ten-sixty-one.” O’Reilly and her partner were patrolling the Old West End; our patrols met but didn’t cross. Where our patrol ended at Ninth West, theirs started at Tenth West.

“Ten-four. This is dispatch. O’Meara, O’Reilly, ten-seventy-seven.” squawked the radio. Dispatch just asked us our estimated time to arrival at the scene.

“Ten-four. This is O’Meara. About one minute.” I responded.

“Ten-four. This is O’Reilly. About two minutes.” squawked the radio. I could hear O’Reilly’s sirens approaching as we pulled into the bank’s lot and blocked one of the exits.

“Ten-four. This is dispatch. O’Reilly and O’Meara you are to block the exits from the bank parking lot. Ten-twelve. Ten-nine. This is dispatch. O’Reilly and O’Meara you are to block the exits from the bank parking lot. Ten-twelve. SWAT is en route. Ten-seventy-seven ten minutes. Ten-nine. SWAT is en route. Ten-seventy-seven ten minutes.” began blaring from the police radio as O’Reilly’s patrol car took the other exit.

The time was now six pm. The bank had closed two hours ago, and there was only one vehicle in the parking lot. A white van with the emblem of the arch-angel Michael holding a glass vial in one hand and a perfume bottle in the other; “Michael’s Scents and Potions”, it proudly proclaimed. It had New York plates.

“Gofigga! One’o dem’ Yankee thieves turnin’ ta bank robbery!” Bill said, following my train of vision. “I always say dem’ Yanks’re bad folk.” We were small town cops in a town up north of Idaho Falls, in eastern Idaho. I was born and raised in the town, but Bill, he’d come up from the deep south, went to school in Idaho Falls for a little while, then dropped out and decided to go into law enforcement. He didn’t have enough to make it back home, and saw that we had openings on our force. He and I attended the academy together; I was just graduating when he joined up. I was his first training partner. Somehow, after he graduated, he conspired to be my rookie partner when it came time for trained officers to take the new crop under our collective wings. My old senior partner, Katrina O’Reilly, took on a new rookie, and I became senior partner to Bill Wilson. Called "Black Billy" by the few punk thugs we had in town, me, of course, they'd picked up on the other officer's calling me "Mara" and changed it to "Miss Mara" to be extra derogatory.

“Ten-nine. This is dispatch. O’Reilly and O’Meara you are to block the exits from the bank parking lot. Ten-twelve. Ten-nine. This is dispatch. SWAT is en route. Ten-seventy-seven five minutes.” blared again from the radio as a scrawny Caucasian male of indeterminate age led a group of bruisers carrying heavy bags out to the van.

“Mara, yuh seein’ wut I be seein’?” Bill asked. “I ain’t nevuh seen no big men listen ta no scrawny shit like da.” He was right. The bruisers were acting more like automatons than grown men.

“Ten-eighteen. This is O’Meara. Suspects left the building, loading into a white van. Scrawny Caucasian male, age unknown. Four heavyset men, thirties. Acting strange. New York plates Michael Irene Katherine Andrew Larry Eighty-Eight. The van appears to belong to a ‘Michael’s Scents and Potions.’”

“Ten-four. This is dispatch. O’Meara you are to continue to block the exit, do not attempt to engage suspects.”

“Why all ta fuss over a scrawny Yank’n a few bruisers?” Bill asked. “Mara, I got some bad vibes goin’ on tis’un.” As I mentioned in my foreword, Mara was a nickname all the other police officers used for me. They thought it was funny, and nothing I did was going to change that. Bill was right though... Something about this whole thing was completely off.

“Ten-nine. This is dispatch. O’Reilly and O’Meara you are to block the exits...” began blaring from the police radio again as simultaneously we began to hear the sirens of the approaching SWAT and a strange noxious looking green and brown gas began emanating from the Van. “...from the bank parking lot. Ten-twelve. Ten-nine. This is dispatch.” and then the world went dark.

This story naturally seems to want really short episodes. The knock-out gas has claimed our brave officers, what will happen to them while unconscious? SWAT is still five minutes away. Will the villains stick around to add insult to injury, or run while they can?

March 30, 2011; 3:00 AM:

“It looks like they’re starting to come to.” came a disembodied voice, as my groggy mind started to clear. I opened my eyes, and tried reaching for my service weapon, only it wasn’t there, and a searing pain shot through my head, sharpest at the two points at the ends of my optic nerves. I fell back... into a bed?

Previously on The Cop, The Villain, and The Wet Work:
Officer's Thom O'Meara and Bill Wilson were patrolling downtown when a bank alarm was tripped. They and Officer Katrina O'Reilly and her partner, who were patrolling the old west end, responded and were ordered to blockade the bank's parking lot. SWAT was still five minutes away when a scrawny white man and four bruisers left the bank and entered a vehicle belonging to "Michael's Scents and Potions". The sirens for the SWAT team were just becoming audible when a green-brown gas was emitted from the van, knocking O'Meara unconscious. Where is O'Meara awakening to?

“Settle down there, cowgirl! You’re safe, you’re in the hospital.”

Again with the girl crap. How many times do I have to tell people I’m not a girl! “I...” I started to croak out, then tried again, “I’m not...”

“Easy now!” the voice said, and then there was a small blip as an intercom was engaged. “Need a nurse in room 204. Bring water.”

“I’m... not... a girl...” I finally managed, just barely a whisper, and the “a” may as well have not been uttered it was so quiet.

“Nonsense, Mara, other than that nasty ass attempt at a beard you insist on trying to grow, your body screams girl. And a damned hot spitfire of a girl too, if I do say so myself.” the doctor said, his very voice grinning.

“D... Doc... Dr. Jameson?” I managed to squeak out.

“At your service.” he said, and even though I still couldn’t open my eyes, I could HEAR the mock bow. “Damned nasty business that poisonous gas you and Bill inhaled. Damned lucky it knocked you cold, or you’d both be seeing Jesus right about now.”

“K... Kat... rina?” I rasped out, just as the nurse finally got there and held the cup of water to my mouth and told me to sip it gently.

“I think it’d be best if you rest for now...” he said, with a quality to his voice which told me that I wasn’t going to like what I was going to find out. He was right though, I was completely exhausted. But I needed to know one more thing. “B... Bill?”

“Bill’s fine, and in the next room over. He didn’t wake up quite like you did, but he’s not had the same experiences yet... His life signs normalized and he just went into a regular sleep.”

With knowing that my partner, at least, was still alive, I fell into a fitful sleep. My dreams were filled with laughing phantoms, spraying strange gases and dumping strange liquids all over. Taunting me, calling me “little girly”, all the while.

March 30, 2011; 1:00 PM:

When next I awoke it was in a much more subdued state, but when I opened my eyes, I was at least able to see without the searing pain from the first time. Dr. Jameson was there again, and so was the Chief this time.

“So what the hell happened out there?” I asked, immediately getting both of their attention.

“Dr... If you could please switch off any electronic surveillance in this room and leave us for a few minutes?” the Chief said. “I’ll let you know when it’s OK again.”

Damn. If the Chief wants this kept classified, I really seriously suspect I’m not going to like it.

Once Dr. Jameson had complied, the Chief got started. “The events last night...” So, I hadn’t lost more than the rest of that night and perhaps half of the day, since the sun was still shining into the room and I happened to know the entire 200 wing was on the eastern end of the town’s hospital. “...was not an isolated occurrence.”

No shit Sherlock. There’s no way you’re making that much fuss, nor that the crook would be able to get away with it in spite of it, in a town this size, without knowing something ahead of time. Heck. O’Reilly and I were probably the best cops the town had, and they made sure to put our beats right where we’d be able to respond quickly when the call came. I may not be a rocket scientist, but I am a cop.

“A few days ago we were alerted by Homeland Security that a man by the name of Samuel Michaels, wanted in most of the states back east, was suspected to be in Idaho, and that they had reason to believe he might come pay us a little visit.”
Now, the town where I grew up and was now a cop was extremely remote. The nearest city of note being Rexburg, a Mormon college town just north of Idaho Falls, and even that was a good hour or so away to the southeast. If the passes were clear. There’s only one reason someone would come to steal something out of a bank in this town, and that’s if they were after something specific.

“What was it? What did he steal?” I demanded.

“Patience, Thom.” he said. Whoa. Someone on the force calling me my real first name, this had to be important.

“This Michaels has been very busy in the past year or so. His business, Michael’s Scents and Potions was about to go bankrupt, and he was getting desperate. He began cooking up various drugs and other chemical compounds of a not-so-legal sort to make up for a lack of a more legal customer base. An FBI drug trafficking case raised some flags at Homeland Security because some of the drugs were not of a... conventional... recipe. This sparked an investigation that eventually led back to Michaels.

“Michaels apparently realized he was in it deep and began cooking up a completely new recipe: A poisonous gas that attacks every single nerve in the human body. The gas received its debut when Homeland raided his store. As soon as they opened the doors, nearby video surveillance being conducted by a second team reports that a green-brown gas literally enveloped the entire area around the building. Everyone on the task force died instantly. Several gawkers who stopped to look later died of complications from severe nerve damage. The only reason you and Bill are still alive is because your bodies apparently shut down before you inhaled too much of the gas, or so Jameson tells me.

“The next time Michaels showed, he was leading a gang of street toughs like a puppeteer does a string of marionettes. A bank alarm went off at a Wells Fargo in Philadelphia, straight down the US Route 1 from his home in NYC. Video surveillance showed a man matching Michaels description enter the bank and walk up to a banker where he appears to be opening an account. When Michaels received the intro packet, he lifted it up high enough that it could be seen over the windows outside...”

The Chief continued to relate to me how Michaels came to be in our town, stealing from our bank. Apparently, something he discovered on his raid back in Philly led him on a chase to try to find the lost city of Atlantis.

“Wait, didn’t we have an old coot who lived here claimed he knew the location of Atlantis?” I interrupted.

“Exactly. And that is what eventually led Michaels here. The man we knew as an ‘old coot’ was once a prominent anthropologist with the University of Philadelphia, and apparently had left clues in a safe deposit box back home before leaving everything to chase after Atlantis himself.”

“Why would you come inland to chase after Atlantis, wasn’t the lost city supposed to be an island out in the Atlantic?”

“An island yes... Where exactly it was that this island was located... there’s about as many opinions on that as there are people who’ve looked for it.”

“Hm... So why would this Michaels guy want to find Atlantis anyways? He doesn’t strike me as the sort who goes gallivanting off for explorations sake alone.”

“Just how much do you know about Atlantis myth?”

“Oh! They were supposed to have had ridiculously advanced technology!”

“Yes.”

“So we come back to my original question, why was that anthropologist living here, and why did Michaels come here... Is Atlantis nearby?”

“You must not have paid that much attention to what the coot was always saying... not Atlantis, descendants.”

“Hm...” I said thoughtfully, and then my mind did that thing you know, where when you’re thinking about one thing too hard, it goes and completely changes the topic on you.

“Hey... so what about O’Reilly?”

March 30, 2011; 2:30 PM:

“Thom...” the Chief began, his face solemn, “Sorry... Officer O’Meara. Your previous partner didn’t make it. Nor her new partner. Both died from inhaling too much of the nerve poison. They died while in the ambulance.” The chief of police betrayed absolutely no emotion, his entire body a rigid mask.

Previously on The Cop, The Villain, and The Wet Work:
Officer's Thom O'Meara and Bill Wilson were taken to the hospital after being knocked out by a nerve gas when responding to a bank alarm at Citizens Bank. There, after spending a few hours comatose Mara woke up suddenly, reaching for his service weapon and furiously opening his eyes, only to suffer excruciating pain. After the doctor settled him back down, he immediately asked about Katrina O'Reilly, but the doctor dodged the question. After being assured Bill was safe, he went back to sleep. When Mara next woke, the Chief was there and told him a wild story about a hunt for the descendants of Atlantean survivors. When Mara tried to wrap his mind around that, he suddenly remembered that he still hadn't heard what happened to O'Reilly. How will he react to what he just heard? And what will Bill do when he meets up with his partner later?

“Dammit, Chief. Why?! Why did you put us there in the first place when you knew he had a lethal gas in his possession? You should’ve known he’d use it! You shoulda known...” I began sobbing uncontrollably. “Why *sob* Kat... *sniff* she came *sob* here *sniff* to *sniff* escape all that...” I managed to get out between sobs, then my face turned to stone, and in a tone of pure ice: “She had a family, Chief! That sunnuva Michaels has just signed himself up for a one way ticket.”

“It’s out of our hands, Thom, you know that.”

“No, Chief. It's out of you and your department’s hands,” I said, my voice still ice. “Those Homeland morons have been chasing this guy for over a year and still haven’t caught him!? The monster has racked up a death count that would make Hitler green with envy, and he’s still getting away with it!? No more! When I get discharged from here, I’ll be turning in my resignation and following this Michaels on my own. *Sniffle.* O’Reilly would do the same if it were me...” my voice getting softer and trailing off after the last sniffle, a single tear trailing down my right cheek.

“Revenge isn’t the way, Thom. You should know that better than most.”

“Revenge? It’s not revenge I’m after, Chief. I want that bastard to rot in an isolated cell with no access to any of his toys for the rest of his life. Death would be too kind for the likes of a monster like him.”

“Thom...” the Chief began, and then sighed. “I suppose I should have known you’d respond this way. You and Kat shared a bond I’ve never seen between squad partners before, and I’ve been doing this job a long, long time. It wasn’t really romantic, though very intimate... It was more like long lost sisters who found each other after spending their entire lives apart. I don’t need that resignation, Thom... Just... Be careful.” And then the Chief left.

Dr. Jameson returned moments later while I was deep in reflection. I was thinking about all that Kat and I had been through since that first day, so many years ago. I was just a dumb rookie, straight from the Academy, and a country bumpkin who just barely graduated High School before immediately signing on to the force. Kat was an experienced city cop. A full police detective with a resume decorated with such accomplishments as bringing down huge smuggling rings and drug cartels. She’d fallen in love, and gotten married. Afterwards, having lost the taste for the danger, she decided to pull up her roots and move out here to the more peaceful life of a small town beat cop.

Still, at first, trouble had followed her out here and our first case quickly had us in the line of fire from a drug cartel who decided to use our town as a pit stop for smuggling illicit drugs down from Canada. Talk about a crash course. The academy definitely didn’t prepare me for that. But Kat was calm and plainly in command, she taught me everything I knew on that first case. And, yes, the Chief is right: we quickly formed a strange bond between us. We came to understand each other almost as twins might, but there was never anything romantic between us. Why would there be? She was married, and deeply in love with her husband!

But sisters... I’m a man. OK. True. Despite her marriage and obvious love for her husband, the other guys at the precinct took every opportunity to ogle her and talk dirty about her, and not only did I not join in, but I’d always get all pissed off, even though she’d always just laugh it off, saying that boys will be boys... Boys... I never did get that saying. I’m a boy. Well, a man. But I don’t act like that. Women deserve to be treated with respect, I always thought. They go through a helluva lot more than we can ever even know.

“Well, Mara, gonna have to send you home, I’m afraid.” Dr. Jameson said. “You and Bill are both in the clear. I’ve managed to clean all the poison out of your system and my tests just now show no evidence of lasting nerve damage. Damned lucky, girl. That’s what you are. You and your partner both.”

“No, doc, if I were lucky Kat wouldn’t be dead.” I said as I got into the proffered wheelchair. “Bill already signed out?”

“Naw, yuh ditz. Ah’ehm righ’ ‘er.” Bill said from outside the door. Soon Dr. Jameson had me outside with Bill and two nurses wheeled each of us to the reception desk where we signed ourselves out.

“Yer nuts if’n yuh think yuh’ahr goin’ after tha bastard alone.” Bill said after we were out of the hospital. “Ah’ehm owin’ ‘im a li’l sumthin. Us dee’ sou' blacks alway repay our debts.”