Max was in bed recovering after her wild celebrations. She had a headache and had just been woken by Rob mowing the front lawn. Max stumbles downstairs for some headache tablets and a drink of water. Ironically, now Max was awake, the mowing stopped. Into the Kitchen walked Rob also after a drink of water.
"Wow, you look rough! Good night?" Enquired Rob
"Yeah, kind of, from what I can remember," said Max in a delicate voice
"Those nights are always the worst-something will turn up that you forgot about!" laughed Rob.
"You should hear about your results today. Is it an e-mail or a phone call?" Asked Rob.
"I think it's a phone call...I'm going back to bed."Mumbled Max.
"It's ten-thirty!" Said Rob, tapping his watch.
Max began to feel more human as time flew by, but there was no phone call. It was nearly five o'clock, and the office support side of the department must be due to finish for the day. Max was a little disappointed that she hadn't heard anything.
"How many were on the fitness test? They probably have one person to do all the calls and deal with queries," Pam said, trying to reassure Max.
The phone rang. Everyone froze and looked at each other.
"Someone answer it before it goes to answer!"Yelled Rob
Max seemed apprehensive, afraid of the outcome if it was the call. Pam got to the phone, but it rang off.
"Shit!" Exclaimed Rob
"You were the nearest to the phone!" Pam was pointing to add to the point she was making.
"It was Max's phone call, she should have answered, " said Rob
Pam glared at Rob.
Sensing that a ridiculous argument was about to start, Max walked over. She picked up the phone and used the ring-back option. The phone rang, and someone answered.
"Hello?"
"Yep, what can I do for you?"Their reply unprofessional
"Oh, yeah, I just missed a call from this number," explained Max
"What is your name?" Asked the voice
"This is the police department?" asked Max, a little confused with the vague person at the other end of the phone.
"Yep. Recruitment services," said the voice on the other end of the phone.
There was a pause of silence.
"it's ok. I've found your information from the telephone number displayed. Maxine, yes, Maxine. You've passed. You start on the 30th of April. Is there anything else I can help you with?" Asked the voice
"No, thank you. Max put the phone down." She turned to Rob and Pam, sitting at the ends of their seats.
"I'm in shouted!" Max. They all embraced and danced around the room, full of joy.
...
"But Sarge, I don't need the hassle of a rookie," said Max.
"Remember Max, not so long ago, you were once a rookie," said the Sarge
"That's not the point."
"You'll grow to love him like a puppy", smiled the Sarge.
Max was now twenty-four. She had been in the department since she was twenty-one after training. The job had changed Max slightly. She seemed to have less patience than before, didn't suffer fools, and worked many extra shifts. Some cadets like Jen & Sarah had decided it was not for them and left the police. Lightning was still in, but the rumours were she would pursue something out of the police, army special forces, maybe. Max was trying to become a detective, but being short-staffed and working extra shifts, she never had the opportunity to participate in their operations.
Max was out on patrol with the rookie. Max realised that she needed to mellow and not give the rookie such a hard time and remember what it was like for her when she was in that position. Max was on routine patrol with the rookie when they got a call for assistance. There was a fight taking place at a corner store. Max hit the emergency lights and drove to the location at speed. She could see out of her eye that the rookie was holding on tightly. He had nothing to fear as Max was one of the best drivers in the department. On arrival, a person was lying unconscious on the road, and the shop had been smashed. As they exited the car, they heard shouting and raised voices. As usual, Max didn't wait for backup; she approached the shop doorway with caution and could see there were three suspects. The rookie checked on the unconscious person.
Creeping into the store, Max went down an aisle a few rows away from the suspects. Max navigated herself to the aisle nearest to the only suspect who visibly had a gun. He was holding what looked like a sawn-off shotgun. The suspect with the gun was now standing in the centre of the aisle, continuing to threaten the staff, his anger and constant yelling telling Max she had to do something...fast. She could not get a clear shot of the bad guy.
Looking around whilst she was crouched down, Max noticed the shelving display, which she was close to, didn't seem to be connected to the rest of the shelving; it was like an additional shelving unit added on. It was a poor fit and slightly taller than the other shelving units it stood amongst. She had an idea; Max put her gun back into her holster, and she turned to face the shelving. With one knee on the floor and the other knee also bent, she positioned her hands underneath the frame of the shelving unit. Max did some quick calculations- a rough estimate- and figured the shelving unit must weigh about four hundred and fifty pounds. The shelving unit wasn't fully stocked; from what she could see, they were standard cans of Beans. If Max could lift and tilt it in one movement, gravity would do the rest of the work and remove the bad guy. She had to act quickly; his shouting and ranting increased, and she thought he would lose it at any moment. Max got off her knee and tightened her grip on the bottom support of the shelving unit. She knew that for this to work, she needed to be explosive; it needed to be a powerful movement. Max's shoulder pressed against the back of the unit.
"Fucking hurry up, put the money in the bag, I'm going to blow your fucking head off...5-4" he continued to count down.
There was no more time. Max lifted and rammed the unit in a swift action. Lifting the heavy frame, its rear support legs lifted off the ground, her powerful shoulder pressed into the rear of the unit. Max added more power, pushing with her legs and engaging her lats. The large metal framed shelving unit tilted further; Max's muscles had awakened, her arm and leg muscles expanding, testing the uniform's integrity. Max gave a final push using her powerful physique. Gravity kicked in, and the large shelving unit toppled over. The bad guy turned as the first few cans fell off the shelf, landing on him; he turned to get a better look at what was going on. As Max lifted and tilted the shelving unit further, more cans fell off, one hitting him square in the face and off balance. Then, the entire unit started to fall on him. In a futile attempt, he dropped his gun and tried to hold the unit, but the momentum and force with which Max shoulder barged the heavy unit gave him no chance. He fell to the floor, and the rest of the unit fell on him, pinning him down. The other bad guys turned around to investigate the commotion. Max emerged from the aisle, her gun drawn.
"Police don't move", Max shouted
The two remaining suspects quickly grabbed what they had and ran out of the shop. One turned, throwing something at Max; it hit her gun, and she lost her shot. Outside, the rookie was slowly approaching the shop. The suspects raced out, one of them crashing into the rookie and falling to the ground. The bad guy tried to get up, but the rookie grabbed him, and they started wrestling on the ground. Still on his feet, the suspect managed to sidestep and run off down the street. Max came running out of the shop. She could see that the rookie needed help. But she also thought she could grab the other suspect, and Max could run fast and easily catch him. She looked again at the rookie; he was taking a few blows, and the suspect had started overpowering him. Max didn't like losing suspects, but she needed to help the rookie. A quick radio call first alerted other units to the description and direction the suspect was running towards.
The rookie was on the ground with the suspect on top. He was raining blows, but the rookie wouldn't release his grip. They continued to wrestle; the rookie, to be fair, was doing a great job of preventing the suspect from getting up but not such a great job protecting themselves. The suspect was increasingly frustrated with this. They were now fighting even dirtier. The suspect was trying to grab the rookie's gun from his holster, punching the rookie in the face. Max finished her radio call; it felt like the slowest radio call in time; she could see the beating the rookie was getting. Max grabbed the suspect's belt with one hand and the other the back of his shirt. Like the six-foot male suspect weighed nothing, Max effortlessly lifted him off the rookie. The suspect struggled, thrashing about as he was being lifted. He managed to break free from and release himself from one of Max's hands, but Max still had hold of his belt. He tried to sprint off but could not pull away from Max; although she initially pulled a few steps, her strength stopped him from getting away any further; like a tug of war, she pulled him back. Max then forcefully manoeuvred him over to the patrol car, slamming him onto the bonnet. The rookie was also back on his feet,
"Cuff him", she instructed the rookie.
Protocol dictated that she couldn't abandon the rookie, which frustrated Max. She wanted to get the other guy. The suspect was put in the police car.
Are you okay? She asked the rook
Yeah, I think so. Does my nose look okay? Asked the rookie as he was wiping away the blood
The first casualty, who was unconscious earlier, started to rouse.
"Take it easy; you were knocked unconscious", she said to the waking victim, sitting them on a bench until the medics arrived.
"Go inside and get the other guy; he's in aisle five," said Max as she listened intently to the chatter on the police radio. Other sirens could be heard as backup finally arrived, and the arriving units searched the area. The rookie came out of the shop. He looked at Max.
"I can't lift the shelf", he said, looking at Max.
"Shelf?" her training officer colleague was confused; he looked at Max
"I don't know, I guess somehow the shelf fell on him!" Max gave a wry smile and shrugged her shoulders.
"Go and help the rookie -rookie!" he ordered his trainee to help and was very familiar with Max's unorthodox tactics.
"You know if he's injured, he could so the City and you? It would help if you didn't teach your rookie to do it this way," lectured her colleague.
"You have issues with me. Take them to the Sargent." Max made it clear she was not in the mood for a discussion. The conversation ended.
"Just because you have the most arrests in the department", he mentioned. And he shouldn't have.
Max walked up to her colleague and moved in close.
"You have a problem with me?" asked Max
"Let's not make this personal", he replied, a little intimidated by Max's physique, her broad shoulders eclipsing his body.
"I'm just saying you should have waited for back up" he had a good point.
The two rookies came out.
"We managed to get some help. Damn that shelf was heavy!" said Max's rookie
"How on earth did you lift that yourself?" he asked.
Max didn't reply.
"Stick him in their car, you can book him in" Max was a little pissed off.
On the one hand, she was teaching the rookie that textbooks and scenarios don't always mirror real life. Sometimes, you must act quickly and create a new page for the training manual. But she was responsible for the rookie, and there wouldn't be many officers who shared Max's strength. She could outlift most of the department. Max had some thinking to do.
On the other hand, Max always got the result; she used methods which weren't in the training manual, but Max worked damn hard and also played hard. Max made her decision, and she would not change.
Max grabbed her coffee. She hated early shifts; a few of her colleagues preferred them, but the majority disliked them. Max entered her patrol car, and the rookie did all the pre-patrol checks. Max had the crime report, a small amount of cash, around eight hundred or so in total, had been taken, and cigarettes seemed to be the main focus of the theft, though it looked like a particular brand was targeted. These cigarettes were the last on the market to contain such high levels of nicotine.
Max racked her brains and kept trying to think where someone could offload the cigarettes quickly and for maximum profit. Retailers wouldn't touch them; only permitted stores in the town could sell them and risked huge fines, and the profit margin for them, even illegally, was small.
Max's thought process was interrupted by a call on the radio. A cash slam was taking place, and illegal street fights for cash were taking place. Recently, there has been a rise in these pop-up fights. A convoy of cars would turn up in derelict areas or under bridges, and then brutal fighting would take place, often without rules and most of the time, the participants get seriously injured. Sometimes, weapons were used, and slam fights occurred. The only thing that mattered was dirty cash.
The rookie was driving today, so their arrival at the cash slam was not as quick as if Max had been driving. When they finally arrived, four cars were alerted by the police sirens. The other units were still some distance away. Priority was to attend to the bare-chested male lying on the ground. Odds on he was unconscious. Max and the rookie got out, and Max could see he was in the wrong way and radioed for a medic to attend. She instructed the rookie to get the first-aid kit, but it looked to Max like there was little they could do.
The medics responded quickly. Luckily, they weren't away when the call for assistance came in. They started work on the male, various medical terms being shouted, wrappers from medical items being thrown down, and different equipment being used to try and save the unknown male. In unison, the medics stood up,
"I'm calling it." said the medic
"What? Shouldn't he be going to hospital?" questioned the rookie.
Max guided the rookie away.
"Is this the first death you have seen?" she asked.
"Yes. It is, but can't the doctors save him?" replied the rookie naively.
"Listen, they are the medical experts. Let's not question them. They know what they are doing. The truth is, rooks, he was probably dead before we arrived. We tried. That's all we can do. You are going to see a lot more death." Max wanted to comfort the rookie, but she needed him to accept what he had seen.
Max was going to search the dead man's pockets to see if there were any I'd when she noticed a red four-door car drive past slowly. Max was sure that it was one of the cars that left the scene earlier. She quickly noted down the licence plate and carried on with the unpleasant search of the deceased male.