Prologue

​

Racist

 

It was a reflex. It was training. There was no consciousness to the act of squeezing the trigger. The bullet left the gun, as it always had on the practice range, and found its mark. Before Buck Mason could weigh the consequences, the deed was done. The perpetrator’s body slammed into the wall and slumped forward, leaving a Rorschach blotter of crimson red against the wall. The bullet had entered the man’s jaw and in the process of exiting his skull severed his brain stem. It was dead on. There was a gurgle that arose from his throat, but it was evident from the unnatural way the man’s body lay crumpled against the wall that Buck Mason had killed another human being.

 

He holstered his gun and walked up to the body.

 

“Buck!” shouted Patrolman Elliott Farner, the first back-up on the scene. “You got him.” Patrolman Farner walked up behind Buck. “Is he dead?”

 

“Yeah.”

    

“Was he armed?”

    

“I didn’t want to find out the hard way. I told him to freeze, but he went for his belt. You look. I need to sit down.” Buck grabbed a plastic milk crate and sat down only briefly before he threw up.

    

Shooting a drug dealer had not been on Buck Mason’s agenda when he began his 3:00 PM shift. Now, it had happened and there wasn’t a force in the universe that could undo the reality that lay crumpled before him against an auto parts store wall.

    

By all accounts it had been a righteous kill. The perpetrator was an ex-con with a penchant for high-stakes crack and gambling. He was well known on Minneapolis’ north side as a street hustler. He had a gun in his belt when he was killed, 18 rocks of crack in his 

pocket and $2200 cash in his sock. Toxicology would also report that he was legally drunk with man-sized quantities of cocaine in his system. 

    

The perpetrator’s Lexus had run a red light when Buck pulled him over. Before getting out of his squad Buck had run the plates and discovered that the car belonged to a man with a checkered and violent past. To compound matters, the Lexus had tinted black windows. The windows were illegal, but Felons? Buck knew without a refresher course at the academy, had lesser appreciation for the letter of the law than most.

 

Buck knew the procedure in such matters and agreed with the manual: call for backup and wait. He was willing to wait, but the perpetrator had a different timeline in mind. A two-time loser, he was bound for the state pen for a long time if he were busted again which, it appeared at that moment, was a looming possibility.

 

Buck pulled his gun and told the man to get out of the car with his hands in clear sight. Nothing. Buck crouched behind his squad door and spoke across the PA for the man to come out. Suddenly, the Lexus backed up at full throttle and creamed the front end of Buck’s squad. In the act of the collision the driver’s side door of the Lexus popped open and Buck seized the moment, wrestling with the driver, who was a large, muscular man. Buck reached across the man and pulled the keys out of the ignition, throwing them onto the street. When Buck pulled him out of the Lexus they struggled briefly as he reached for his pepper spray. Before he could get the canister out of his belt, the perpetrator bolted and bounded over a fence, disappearing between two houses. Buck kept him in sight as he used his shoulder radio to call for more backup and report his location.

    

The newspapers, days later, would hint that Buck Mason had not exercised due restraint in subduing the suspect. The paper implied, without saying it explicitly, that proper police procedure would have been to counsel the man, check his psychological inventory, call in a negotiator, a counselor or a priest to defuse the situation. No, the paper concluded, Buck Mason had taken it upon himself to pursue a felon down the alley and shoot him because he had been guilty of D.W.B., driving while black. Besides, the commentary argued, why couldn’t Buck have placed a bullet in his 

arm or his leg? Why shoot him in the head? Buck, the paper hinted, had acted like a cowboy, a maverick. And, when it was learned that earlier in his career Buck had been placed on unpaid administrative leave not once, but twice, for arguing with black citizens about the way they raised their kids, it was concluded by inference that Buck was an out-of-control rogue cop. The paper abstained from using the word ‘racist,’ a word the editors said privately might be ‘inflammatory.’ They would let their readers fill in that puzzle piece. 

    

What the police report said, but was conveniently lacking in the news accounts, was that the perpetrator had a history he couldn’t hide indefinitely. He was running from his past up to the moment he raced up an alley and found himself trapped between a brick wall and a chain link fence. 

    

Buck trained his gun on him and commanded him to get on the ground, spread eagle. When the perpetrator went for his belt, Buck didn’t wait for the approval of the Star & Tribune. He did what he had been trained to do: shoot to kill.

    

Righteous as the kill had been, there were mitigating circumstances Buck could not escape: he had killed a black man in a black part of town while being unmistakably white. The black community in north Minneapolis, always suspicious of the police, wanted any lethal action by any officer to be adjudicated in their own court of public opinion first—a jury few white men can walk away from without earning scars.

    

The dead man, Claudius Jenkins, aka, Santa Claus, had been a neighborhood legend. Each Christmas for the four adult years he had not been in prison, Santa Claus would show up in full Santa regalia at the local community center and give away expensive electronic games to the local kids. The fact that the toys were bought with dirty money wasn’t mentioned in the news reports. The Star & Tribune ran front-page profiles chronicling the generous, giving nature of Santa Claus. The paper seemed to conveniently ignore the fact that Jenkins had seven children by three different women, all of whom were on record as desperate for overdue support payments. The paper also seemed to conveniently downplay the fact that Santa had a rap sheet that included six convictions for larceny and two for aggravated assault. The paper also seemed to lose the fact that Santa’s apartment turned out to 

be a treasure trove of weapons, drugs, pornography and 78 cartons of stolen, untaxed cigarettes. Instead, the local TV stations had a field day with neighborhood activists, one of them being a Baptist preacher who said “oh, Santa was no saint, don’t get me wrong. But the po-leese had no right to just shoot him for running a red light. This was a man with a big heart and the children won’t have no Santa Claus this Christmas.” 

    

It was the kind of quote that made newsroom editors erect with journalistic anticipation.

    

It was a tough position for any cop to be in—killing Santa Claus. The media fanned the flames of the story. In order to justify their crucifixion of Buck, the Minnesota media found it necessary to air their own biases, prejudices and white guilt. The print and electronic commentators chose the moment to fully expose just how truly repentant they felt for the unforgivable sin of whiteness. Their editors prodded reporters to purge their guilt publicly. The more they confessed, the more their ratings spiked. In their great white purge, they made the killing of Santa Claus a story with national legs. It wasn’t long before the major networks began snooping around and reporting the guilt, irony and pathos of Buck Mason’s unfortunate traffic stop. The press chose the moment to open the scab of racial inequity and exploit it like flies. It became a human smorgasbord of white guilt and black injustice served on a buffet table of journalistic malfeasance. Each reporter took turns lamenting Santa’s unfortunate demise. None of the reporters asked the cops—particularly the black cops—about the incident. The reporters knew better than to quote the black cops about characters like Claudius Jenkins. It just wouldn’t fit their template. Instead, the reporters spent their time quoting each other, how they and their fellow reporters were so ashamed of the injustice the black community had to endure at the hands of scum like them.

    

Buck Mason was subjected to standard administrative leave with pay while the incident was being investigated by Internal Affairs. Cooling his heels at home, Buck had to endure the endless exploitation by the local TV reporters who couldn’t resist the irony of a cop killing Santa. During his time at home Buck received numerous phone threats. He wasn’t surprised. The way the media was reporting the story, he was tempted to kick his own ass. 

​

In frustration, he picked up the phone and dialed the police chaplain, the only officer on the force who wouldn’t be put under a microscope for talking to Buck.

    

“Chris, this is Buck”

    

“How you holding up, pal? Anything I can do?”

    

“Yeah. Answer me a simple question: Is there any sanity 

to this?”

    

“Nope. Not a lick. Captain Mallard is trying his best to deal with the press but they’re vultures. I’ve never seen them like this. There were two squad cars pelted with rocks last night on the North Side, Buck. They’re taking it personal. Either that or they know that the spotlight is on them and they’re making all the hay they can.” 

    

“Chris, let me ask you something. Does God forgive me for killing that man?”

    

The chaplain had been asked the question many times. He knew the answer and he knew that Buck knew the answer, but he also knew that Buck was under a lot of weight at the moment.

    

“The Bible says ‘thou shalt not what?’” asked the pastor.

    

“Murder.”

    

“You know your Scripture. A lot of people say ‘thou shall not kill.’ The Hebrew translation says ‘thou shall not murder.’ Did you murder that man?”

    

“No. Listen, Chris, I’m not looking for absolution. I would do the same thing today if it happened again. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

    

 “But you can’t understand why the press is condemning  you, right?”

    

“Yeah. Don’t they understand police procedure? And due process?” 

    

“You want me to answer that?”

    

“I’m not sure.”

    

“The answer is the press is their own god. They don’t defend what is right because they have a problem defining it. If they had to do that, it might cause them to actually think. Listen, Buck, don’t get me going on those parasites. You did the right thing. Now, we just 

need some time for this thing to play out.”

    

Both Buck and the chaplain knew it was the nature of police work, when guns were fired, that the officer’s actions would be placed under a microscope. That was standard procedure. Buck had the patience to let the process play itself out, but when he received a phone call from the principal of the public school his kids attended advising him that threats had been made against his kids—his patience grew short. The thought of his son and daughter having to answer for his actions wasn’t right. As a consequence of the threats, he kept himself, his kids and his wife home behind locked doors. The call to the pastor was made because he needed to vent to someone who knew the process. Besides, it was part of Pastor Nordling’s job description to periodically be a whipping post.

    

 “Chris, my own kids have been threatened,” Buck said. There was a silence, punctuated by a sigh from the pastor.

    

“Listen, Buck, this is all going to take some time to blow over You’ve seen these things in the past. It gets a lot of airplay and then it gets forgotten. You just have to be patient.”

    

“What’s Captain Mallard saying—off the record?”

    

Another silence and sigh. “Well, I’m not feeling real good about Duck. He’s been behind closed doors with an endless parade of very angry people all day. It sounds like a torture chamber in there. The mayor’s been in to see him twice. Mayor walks in, unloads on Mallard and then they shuttle in another group of people to chew him out. It’s like a dawn-to-dusk root canal. It’s not been a good day for Cap.”

    

“He’s not going to hang me out to dry, is he?”

    

“Buck, I can’t speak for Cap. You know that.” Chris paused. “But, I think I know Duck better than most. He might.”

    

In the final analysis Captain Alan Mallard made Buck walk the plank. On the evening news Buck listened incredulously as his boss explained to the assembled press that all avenues of redress were going to be explored to get to the bottom of “this tragic and senseless loss of human life.”

    

Captain Alan “Duck” Mallard turned out to be more beholding to the mayor, the press, his career, his private parking spot and the 

advice of the city attorney’s office—than to an insignificant street cop. Buck tried to view the situation objectively, but objectively, he couldn’t escape the irony: he was innocent!

    

Buck never did meet the captain and discuss the matter man-to man. Duck Mallard saw to it that Buck was out of sight, squirreled away where neither the public, nor Captain Mallard would have to answer the thorny question of what becomes of a cop when he performs his job by the book.

    

Less than three months later the city attorney’s office made a handsome settlement with the mothers of the children of Claudius Jenkins. Each of the women received a half a million dollars in exchange for their silence. It was more than they would have ever gotten out of Santa. The city attorney had convinced the mayor and the city council that a settlement would be far less expensive than having the spinelessness of the police chief and the mayor’s office exposed before God and everybody in a highly visible civil suit. He didn’t quite phrase the strategy in those terms, but the city council understood it without the explicit language.

    

The mothers of Santa’s kids took their money and moved to   the suburbs. 

    

For the next two years Buck spent eight hours a night, five nights a week, as the properties officer in the basement of the aging downtown Minneapolis Police Department. Most nights he would listen to the radio, read and try not to brood while he tended, mindlessly, to cataloging the belongings of thieves, drunks and other assorted midnight cockroaches ushered in for night           time booking.

    

The union wouldn’t let Captain Mallard fire Buck, demote him or cut his pay grade. To do so would have resulted in a union action against the good captain; a legal prospect neither Duck Mallard, 

nor the equally invertebrate mayor, wanted to bring up for a 

public cleansing.

    

For a while, a semblance of normalcy reigned over the Mason household. Buck adjusted from the initial insult of being kicked downstairs. Police work didn’t pay extremely well, but it wasn’t that bad, either. It paid better than any other job he had had. His wife, Emily, worked part time in the evenings at a local boutique as their 

bookkeeper. It gave Buck some time home with the kids. All in all, their lives had come to an equilibrium.

    

A little more than two years later, their ship changed course.

    

On New Year’s Eve, just after midnight, a detective brought in a kid for booking. Buck had seen him before. 

    

“What do we have here?” Buck asked the detective. “Woody Nelson? Can’t stay away from this place, eh? What’s it this time?” 

    

“Possession with intent,” said the detective. “C’mon,” he implored the prisoner. “You gotta help me here,” he said, steering the prisoner to the properties window. “You’re too big a kid for me to carry. You know the dance.”

    

Standard procedure when booking a prisoner was to keep him cuffed while police did a thorough search and cataloged his personal possessions.

    

“I’m just going to empty your pockets and pat you down one more time and then we’ll log what you got. When we get you in a cell, we’ll have you sign a receipt. Got it?”

    

The kid couldn’t have been more than 20 years old. Buck would f ind out the next day that it had actually been Woody Nelson’s 19th birthday. He was quite a specimen. He was six feet tall and had to be 400 pounds, maybe more. The young black man was spaced, whacked, totally lost in whatever drug was in his system. 

    

“Where am I?” he asked.

    

“Home,” said Buck, smiling at the detective.

    

“I’m not home, where am I?”

    

“Woody, you’re being booked into jail,” said Detective Stein. It was the word ‘jail’ that triggered the chemical cocktail cooking in Woody Nelson’s brain. The young man looked at Buck from behind his properties cage and ran his face—hard—into the steel bars. 

    

“Ahhhhhggg!” he screamed as he repeatedly smashed his face into the bars. Buck opened the door and ran out to help the detective restrain the boy. Blood was already flowing from a huge gash along the bridge of the prisoner’s nose.

    

“Call dispatch,” shouted Buck. “This kid’s gonna kill himself.” 

​

But, there was no one to call dispatch. Both Buck and Detective Stein had their hands full.

    

Even for two grown men, restraining a 400-pound handcuffed man—with a central nervous system under the siege of a mixed bag of chemicals, including angel dust, was no small task. While they sought to wrestle the man to the floor, he tried to pin them to the wall with his mass and bulk, screaming obscenities and spitting like a raging bull. He broke from their grasp and ran his face into the bars again, busting his lips wide open and breaking several teeth. He spit them out like an insult.

    

“My mama don’t want me back in jail!” he screamed, tears running down his face and manic desperation in his voice. Buck tried to get his arm around the man’s neck but there was just no restraining the bull. The young man head-butted Detective Stein in the face, breaking his nose in a torrent of blood and semi-conscious spit and splatter. The detective tried to shake the cobwebs out, but his vision was blurred and his balance was gone. Stein slumped into the wall.

    

Buck was staring at the bull one-on-one. The young man stood back. He looked at Buck with his demons in full fury.

    

“You can’t stop me!” he said in a low growl as he propelled his full might and bulk, face first, into the bars. Buck heard his neck break. The young man collapsed like a rag doll onto the floor.

    

Buck found out from the paramedics three hours later that the young man was on life support. He would be paralyzed; word had it —if he managed to survive. X-rays showed that he had broken his neck between the C3 and C4 vertebra.

    

The Minneapolis Star & Tribune broke the story that a young man, booked on suspicion of possession with intent to distribute, was mortally wounded in the process of being jailed.

    

That was on day one.

    

On day two, Woody Nelson died. The paper said that the young man died because of injuries sustained while under interrogation from two Minneapolis police officers. The editorial page pondered how a healthy young man could go into the jailhouse at 1:00 AM and come out in an ambulance less than an hour later—bloodied, bruised and with a broken neck. They wanted full accounting. 

​

On day three, the Star & Tribune reported that Buck Mason had been one of the officers involved in the suspicious death of Woody Nelson. In case readers had forgotten, the paper ran a full recount of how Buck Mason had killed Santa Claus just two years earlier.

    

 On day four, Captain Duck Mallard relieved Buck of his shield and service revolver. Chaplain Chris Nordling was brought in to make certain Buck understood the process, and to counsel him in case Buck popped a bolt and decided to kill someone new.

    

On day five, Buck Mason got really drunk.

    

On day six he retained an attorney.