Superbia (Book One of the Superbia Series)

BOOK: Superbia (Book One of the Superbia Series)
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WHAT IS SUPERBIA?

Superbia
is any typical suburban community filled with grandfatherly pedophiles and drug
zombies who hide their stashes in dirty diapers. It's a place where rogue cops
rely on an angry six-foot bunny called the Truth Rabbit for really tough
interrogations.

Superbia
is where doing the right thing can be a fatal career move and the bosses are
more dangerous than any crook on the street.
 

Superbia
is a completely fictional book written by a real-life police detective who lost
his badge for telling this story, then came right back to write a sequel.

Superbia
has been called the most subversive police book written since Serpico and its
author the 21st Century successor to Joseph Wambaugh and Ed McBain.

Superbia
is the funniest, scariest, most brutal account of what good cops truly
experience and most of the world never gets to know.

***

This
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the
product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. No reference to any real
person, living or dead, should be inferred.
 

***

Read that part again.

Superbia

Bernard Schaffer

Published by Apiary
Society Publications

Edited by
Laurie
Laliberte

Copyright 2012
Bernard Schaffer

Get Your Copy of this
Book Digitally Signed + Personalized via Authorgraph

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Dropbox for Exclusive Free Content

Table
of Contents

1.
Welcome to Superbia

2.
Winter

3.
Fall

4.
Winter

Acknowledgements

Sneak
Preview of SUPERBIA 2

About
the Author

Thirty-six thousand police officers protect
and serve the citizens of New York City.
 
The five
boroughs of New
York combined in 1898, creating a citywide jurisdiction of four hundred
sixty-eight square miles.
 
Thirty-six
thousand cops.
 
One Commissioner.
 
Same uniform.
 
Same directives.
 
More than twice
the size of the FBI.
 

By comparison, the City of Philadelphia is
surrounded by three counties, all of which are broken into small municipalities
that operate independently of one another.
 
Montgomery County is four hundred and eighty seven square miles, but
contains over sixty individual municipalities.
 
Bucks County and Delaware County are much the same.
 
Different governments.
 
Different police departments.
 

It is a world of cul-de-sacs, shopping centers,
age-restricted housing developments, diners, and fast-food chains.
 
Big box stores.
 
Apartment complexes.
 
Farms that make more money selling tickets to
their Halloween maze than they do on crops.
 
Low-income housing clusters.
 
Absentee
landlords.

Low-budget newspapers with bored, lazy
reporters.
 
Movie Theater multiplexes.
 
Rich kids taking pills. Rich kids stealing to
get more pills.
 
Rich kids selling pills.
 
Rich kids overdosing on pills.
 
Rich kids dying.
  

Small towns.
 
Big towns determined to stay small towns by thinking small, planning
small, making campaign promises to keep the budget small.
 

The people in charge are the people who have
been in charge.
 
They are the people who
will remain in charge.
 
Keeping progress
down by keeping taxes down.
 
  

Everything is perfect, or at least, better
than it would be if you lived in the city.
 

Somewhere, at the bottom of the barrel, are
the people who show up when the cracks in such a carefully crafted world begin
to appear.
 

Welcome to Superbia.

WINTER

1. Emergency
tones sound like air raid sirens at four in the morning.

“Seventeen cars,
burglary in progress.”

Frank O’Ryan
jerked awake in his patrol car, kicking the pedals, slamming his knees into the
steering wheel.
 
He jumped up to look
around the parking lot.
 
The industrial
building in front of him was empty.
 
The
January sky, pitch black.

Frank rubbed his
eyes and waited, trying to decipher what he’d just heard.
 

“Seventeen cars
be advised the resident is reporting a black male inside of her house.
 
Unknown weapons at this time.”

Frank threw the
car into drive and stepped on the gas, dropping axle onto asphalt as he
bottomed out speeding onto the roadway.
 
He floored it through an intersection and took the turn without using
the brakes.
 
 

He switched on
the lights, reflecting red and blue off stop signs that he ignored, making one car
 
pull so hard to the right that it blew
out a tire on the curb.
 
It had been
swerving anyway, he thought.
 
“Drunk,”
Frank said. “Serves you right.”

He killed the
lights and then the headlights, coasting into the neighborhood toward the
caller’s address.
 
He parked a half block
from the house and swirled water around his mouth to clear out the taste of old
coffee and sleep.
 
He spat on the asphalt
and hurried up the sidewalk, seeing Sgt. Joe Hector walking out of the home.
 
 

Heck looked back
at the front door as he pointed around the side of the house and said, “He went
that way?”

A middle-aged
woman clutched her robe to her neck and said, “He ran out the back and kept
going.
 
I saw him in my bedroom.
 
He was going to rape me!”

Frank’s eyebrows
raised.
 
“This a sexual assault, Heck?”

“No,” Heck said
quietly.
 
“She woke up and saw a black
guy in her doorway.
 
When she yelled,
 
he took off running.”

“He was going to
rape me, oh my God!” the woman wailed.
 

“Hey, calm down,
okay?” Frank said.
 
“Go back inside your
house and lock the door.
 
We’ll come
back.”

Heck poked his
head around the corner of the house, looking into the darkness.
 
Her backyard opened up into a small wooded
area that separated two neighborhoods.
 
One cul-de-sac backed up against another.
 
“I don’t see any motion lights going off down
there.”

“We sure this
guy’s even real?
 
Any chance she had a
bad dream?”
 

“Only one way to
find out.”
 
Heck pulled out his
flashlight and headed across the berm.
 
He stayed low to the ground, walking silently across the grass, sensing
where the branches and leaves laid as he stepped.
 
“You go that way and I’ll check over
here.”
 

Motion lights burst
to life the moment they descended, flooding them and the area with pale
light.
 
“So much for the stealth
approach,” Frank muttered.
 

A kitchen light flipped
on inside the house closest to Frank and a homeowner came out, tying his bathrobe
around his waist.
 
“What’s going on?”

“Go back in your
house,” Frank said.
 
“We’re looking for
someone.”

“What did he
say?” a woman said from inside the kitchen

“He said they’re
looking for someone.”

Frank heard the
screen door open again and the woman followed the man outside, both of them falling
in behind Frank.
 
“What did he do?” the
man said.

“Would you please
shut the fuck up and go back inside your fucking house so I can find this
person?
 
Please!”

“This…this is
my
property,” the man sputtered.

“Good.
 
Fine.
 
Stay there, for all I care,” Frank said.
 
He checked under the car in the driveway and kept going.
 
There were a dozen more parked along the
street.
 
He stood up on his toes to see
where Heck had gone.
 
There was a figure keeping
to the shadows, coming toward him.
 
Walking
with his head low.
 
Weaving on and off
the sidewalk to avoid being seen in the street lights.
 
  

“Heck?
 
Is that you?”
 
Frank could see his breath in front of his face when he spoke.
 

No answer.
 

Frank aimed his
flashlight straight at him, lighting up the dark brown face of the young man
coming toward him.
 
The kid squinted in
the harsh light, still keeping his hands inside his jacket pockets.
 
“Don’t move!” Frank shouted.
 
He wrenched his gun out of its holster and
leveled the weapon at the center of the kid’s chest.
 
“I swear to Christ don’t you move!”

“I live around
the corner,” he said.
 

Heck came running
out of a backyard from across the street.
 
He leapt over a small fence, shouting, “You got him?
 
You got him?”

“I got him!” Frank
shouted.

“I was just
coming down to see what was going on,” the kid said.

“Show me your
hands!” Frank shouted again.
 
  

The kid didn’t
move.
 

Heck snatched the
kid by the collar and yanked him forward, trying to throw him face first to the
ground.
 
The kid wrenched backwards and
broke free, yelling, “Don’t touch me, man.
 
Get the fuck off me!”

Heck grabbed him
again, going for the kid’s jacket, putting himself in Frank’s line of fire as
the two of them struggled.
 
Both of them
yelling.
 
Heck screaming for the kid to
get down on the ground.
 
The kid
screaming at Heck that he didn’t do anything.
 

Frank ran forward
to join the fight when he heard a loud pop and saw a small puff of air escape
from the back of Heck’s left armpit.
 

The smoke twisted
in the air as it climbed toward the streetlights above, toward the dark,
starless sky and dissolved into nothingness.
 
Heck’s shoes scraped the pavement as he staggered backwards and
collapsed.
 

The kid had a
small silver revolver with duct tape wrapped around the handle.
 
A junk weapon.
 
The kind that might blow up in your hand if
you fired it.
 
Suddenly, the revolver
barked and Frank felt something smash into his knee like a baseball bat.
 

Joe Hector was
sprawled out on the concrete, face contorted in agony as he coughed up clots of
black blood.
 
Frank felt himself tipping
over, going down on his left side as though someone had kicked his leg out from
under him.
 
As he fell his gun came up,
and whether it was by accident or some deeply ingrained instinct driven into
him since the Academy, he could never say, but Frank fired.
 
He fired and the kid’s hand came up to clutch
his neck, screaming as blood spurted between his long, thin fingers.
 

Life drained out
of that young face as he sank to his knees, staring at Frank in disbelief.
 
Tears spilled down his cheeks even as his
eyes lost their light and he slumped forward, striking his head against the
concrete.
 

Frank struggled to
prop himself up, to see the twenty feet of dark distance between him and the
two figures laying on the ground.
 
He
couldn’t see the suspect.
 
Heck was face
down on the pavement groaning, “Help me, man.
 
I’m dying, Frank.
 
I’m fucking
dying.”

BOOK: Superbia (Book One of the Superbia Series)
6.82Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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