Thanks for the help.........first draft posted to my blog so here is your part....
Everything was conspiring to start me drinking again. All the bad old days were just ten sober minutes away. I wasn’t an alcoholic I was a non practicing drunk. I kept a bottle in the apartment and another in the trailer just for occasions like that one. I almost always resisted the urge to take a drink, but I didn’t that night.
From the trailer, I recovered the bottle of Jack Daniels with the green label. I sat it on the picnic table even though the rules prohibited me from doing so. The big, Duke arena plastic cup, the one that had cost me a buck, plus the coke that came with it, sat full of ice beside it. Beside that sat a can of Wal-Mart cola. It was probably not a drink to get me any awards for class, but it was what I had.
I sat there screaming quietly to myself as I got totally blown away. I hadn’t had a drink in 5 months so it was a cheap drunk that night. After a couple of drinks to take the edge off the nights events, I began reliving my nightmare.
It happened on a hot night just about like the one I was suffering though at the moment. I was working a sector car in one of the nicer sections of Atlanta. The call was a suspicious noise next door kind of thing. One of those just vague enough to be nothing at all, 99.9% of the time, calls. Everyone cop sooner or later gets that .1%, and I got mine that night.
I remember that it was a Wednesday night. It was also my first night on the midnight rotation. Rotating shifts tend to case a blur on the first night of the midnight rotation. I was tired at 1 A.M. I will freely admit that now. I parked the sector car in front of the dark house then I walked up to the front door. I listened carefully before I rang the bell. There was the sound of breaking glass somewhere in the house. Any indecision I had about breaking and entering was washed away by the sound of a woman’s scream. It was a muffled scream but I immediately recognized it for what it was. I called for backup then tried the door. To my surprise it opened easily. When I shined my flashlight on it, I knew why. The lock was broken.
When I entered the house, I tripped over a table. The burglar had obviously moved the table in front of the door to do just what it did. Alert him that someone was on the way into the house. By the time I found the source of the sobbing, I knew I was in trouble. A greasy looking white man in his late twenties held a bloody young woman in front of him.
“You come any closer Cop, and I cut her throat.” Judging from her battered and bloody face he appeared to be up to the task. To murder takes a lot of rage, anger or just plain mean. He looked to have all three in abundance.
“Let her go,” I said as menacingly as possible.
“No way cop, Stand aside I’m walking out of here.”
“Ain’t gonna happen kid. Let her go and you can stand trial. These days you’ll probably be out before she’s finished with the plastic surgery for the scars.”
“If you don’t move I’m gonna cut her.”
“If you cut her, there will be no trial for you.”
I watched his eyes and knew he was going to do it. I have no idea why, but I froze. I stood there watching as he cut her throat. I only snapped out of it when she fell to the floor like a pile of dirty laundry. The son of a ***** smiled at me. He made a move toward me. I shot him in the forehead before he could take even one step. I know it was cold blooded murder for both of us.
Later I found out he was on drugs. PCP as a matter of fact was his excuse. Mine was that I couldn’t explain how he lived and a hostage died. I murdered him so there would be just one story told. I wasn’t sure at the time why I did it, but I had inkling. By that time I had passed out in front of the house. I had also awoke in the hospital and began to cry like a baby. I got admitted to the psych ward but still couldn’t stop crying. The more I tried to explain it away, the more I realized what I had done. I did the only thing I was conditioned to do, I lied.
