Chief Thief

Chapter Four-1

Chapter Four

Chief

The first few days after meeting Blink, I went about my work in almost a dream state. All I could think about was him: his confidence, his boldness, and his declaration of fighting on my behalf, and most of all the feeling of his huge c**k as he thrust himself inside me. He was better than Mike had been, better than any lover that I had felt in years; the best I’d had, period!

He must have been inside my apartment for…who knew how long? He’d taken my emergency cash supply, but somehow I just didn’t care. With a surge of desire I remembered the feeling of his gloved hands raking across my breasts as he took me. Goose-flesh sprang alive across my arms and my hand shook slightly as I initialed a report on an armed robbery on Clement Street.

I could feel people’s eyes on me as I moved through my daily routine; they knew something was wrong, but as usual, I did not share with anyone. I had built up a reputation as a tough, hard-lipped leader. Very few people knew the real me.

Five days after Mike deserted me, my aide asked me if I was all right, and I gave a curt nod. I quashed my inner feelings and pushed the encounter with my lover into a separate mental compartment. It would have to wait. If only my p***y wasn’t so wet! My legs were slipping as I walked from one department meeting to the next; so much so that it was hard to stay focused on the events of the day.

Eventually I got a moment alone to myself in my private bathroom, and wiped myself down. I looked in the mirror, and saw what everyone else had been seeing: haunted eyes, worn face, and a slight tremor in my hands. I looked like a woman who had been through a life-changing experience, and, of course, I had been. My husband had thrown me over for his ambitions, and now I was the subject of potential blackmail by two separate people, either one of whom could destroy my career. But I was in lust for one of them, and realized that I would do anything to keep him!

Ever since I had admitted my appetites to myself, I realized that I would have to live a double life: hard and uncompromising on the outside, deferential and obedient behind closed doors. This was the life that I had lived for fifteen years. It was a difficult tightrope to walk, but I did so because it was the only way I could live. My rise to power in the ranks of the police had been meteoric. I thrived on the discipline of the ranks, and my contention that men came in two classes had served me well in organizing the departments and detailing the best men to their respective jobs. Now and then someone proved troublesome, but I found that if I applied the right pressures at the correct places I could force a round peg into a square hole. It had earned me a few enemies, sure, but at the same time I got results from the people under my command. A lot of them respected me more because I wouldn’t put up with bullshit. Those who chafed at taking orders from me learned to do so, or I gave them transfers to other departments outside of my command. By the end of my first two years in office my department had become known as the most disciplined and efficient police force on the West Coast.

That was how I had attracted Mike’s attention. He was an ambitious City Councilman who had been looking for a good match to attach himself to as he maneuvered for higher office. A politician and a cop was a great union, he thought, but he smothered me with attention and all the right words. It was not until after he became Deputy Mayor before I could see that any emotional contact took a backseat to his ambition. Unfortunately, I had revealed my darkest secret to him before I realized his true nature.

I knew that no matter how much Mike threatened, he would never reveal my secret because there was no way he could avoid being painted with the same brush. As much as my appetites endangered me, they also protected me from him.

Now, though, I was linked to someone else; a man whose ambitions I had not yet unraveled; an unknown whose motives and needs were much darker, and who had me at his mercy. My p***y surged in wetness again, and I shuddered with desire. Blink, what are you going to do with me?

I composed myself, repaired my face with makeup, and took several deep breaths. I had to get control of myself. My job and my life were on the line!

I strode out of the bathroom and saw that said Brandy Mayfield, my aide, was pointing at my phone. “Chief, the mayor is on the line. He says it’s urgent.”

“I’ll take it in my office,” I said and shut the door behind me.

As I sat behind my desk, I glanced once at the many trophies and awards which sat in my personal display case. They always helped to buck up my nerves; looking on them, I knew that I was a person to be reckoned with; someone to respect and fear! I took a breath and felt strong.

“Yes, Mike? What do you want?”

“Nothing more than I’ve already taken,” he said, and I could picture the smug smile on his lips. “Have trouble getting free that night?”

For a moment my nerve slipped, and I nearly shouted at him, and then I stopped. This was his way of twisting the knife. He wanted to reduce me to tears, and then offer some kind of lure to make me come crawling to him. In the ruins of my self-respect he would toy with me, and then offer some kind of emotional morsel to enslave me to his will. He might come to me with a few hours of control or pleasure and leave me begging for more. In that way he would control me, and make me do whatever he wanted; he would get everything, and end up giving me very little. He’d once explained it as a sound political strategy called Smash-and-Bait; a way to reduce enemies to manageable pieces.

Or, I realized, it might be that he wanted to make me his mistress. That way he could have both me and Nancy Harding, and lose nothing!

My anger spiked, and then I realized that I had a very simple counter-strategy, a way to turn the tables on him.

“No, not at all,” I said. I smiled sweetly, although I was alone in the office. “After you left, my boyfriend came by and stayed with me until I felt better.”

“What boyfriend?” Mike’s voice was incredulous, and my grin got bigger. I could imagine his wide eyes and dumbfounded expression. A surge of satisfaction swept through me, and I leaned back in my desk chair and put my feet up on my desk. In my mind’s eye I saw his face contorting into a mask of shock and rage. There was nothing he hated quite as much as someone escaping his influence.

“No one you know,” I said, chuckling. That was certainly true. No one knew who Blink was. He’d come from nowhere, no one knew what he looked like, or how many people he’d fleeced. His total take so far was estimated at about a million dollars, but that was just guesswork. From the confident way he had bent me to his will I was sure that he had stolen far more than that, and probably had much more in influence. “I’ll tell you this, though: he’s everything you’re not.”

“The ink is barely dry on our divorce papers and already you’re schlepping about with some stranger?”

“Michael, you actually sound jealous,” I chided him, and then my voice got hard. “Now why don’t you cut the crap and tell me why you’re calling.”

“I just wanted to say that despite everything that’s happened, I want to be sure that our professional lives remain unchanged. The police department will get full cooperation from the Mayor’s office, and I trust the reverse is true?”

What a prick! He reduced me to tears, literally left me hanging, shattered our marriage, and he had the balls to expect me to act like nothing had happened.

For a long moment I thought about slamming the phone down on his ear, and then an even better thought occurred to me. It was fiendish, but it dovetailed neatly into the promise of aid that Blink had promised me.

“Of course,” I said, using the best public relations voice that I had in my vocal repertoire. “Nothing’s changed.”

“Fine, Chief, then can you please tell me when we are we going to get this rotten Blink in handcuffs? He robbed Hieronymus Delco sometime in the last few days, and made off with a small fortune in negotiable bearer bonds. The poor man was forced to wait six hours before his housekeeper found him and set him free. Delco was on the phone to me this morning, and he’s spitting blood.”

Brandy came in with a folder in her hands, and I made a motion like pouring a cup, and she nodded and hurried to get it.

“What do you want from me, Mr. Mayor? Would you like me to drag a shaking junkie out of the cells, dress him up in a domino mask and then trumpet to the press that I’ve got the famous Blink Burglar in my hands? Would that suit you? Would that placate Mr. Delco, who just happens to be a donor to your re-election campaign?”

“Don’t push me, Sibyl! I can have your job anytime I want it.”

“If you think you can do my job for me, Michael, why don’t you just walk on over and take command yourself. I’ll take my three-week vacation, get tanned in Cancun, and come back to find you none the wiser, and worse off than you were before. I’m sure that would do wonders for your political career.”

I heard the receiver hiss. “Sibyl, I’m sorry, but I’m frustrated. We just had our six-month anniversary with this one-man crime wave, and the press is having a field day. I’ve just been told that Blink now has his own fan club on f*******:, and that he is the costume of choice for the kids on Halloween! Do you have any idea how that makes us look? We’re going to have kids running in the streets dressed up with giant B’s on their chests and domino masks on their faces yelling ‘Trick or Treat’!”

Brandy came back in and handed me a steaming cup of Joe.

“What would you have me do?” I asked, making my voice as tart as possible. I took a sip of hot coffee from the cup and glanced at Brandy. She was looking at me with unrestrained approval. She did not like our beloved mayor. I knew for a fact that Brandy had voted for Marty Crane, who had been the Democratic challenger.

“Double the patrols, call in the National Guard, do something!”

“Mr. Mayor,” I said in my most reasonable tone of voice, “none of those solutions are practical and you know it very well. If you don’t, then you should, but here is why I cannot do any of those things: we cannot double the patrols because the city budget cannot afford it, and there is no one to do the work. After we made those Draconian cuts that you insisted were ‘absolutely necessary’ we had to lay off one-quarter of our staff. Those who were lucky enough to find new jobs in their field have all moved away: either out of town, or out of state. We have no officers to call in.

“If I were to call in the National Guard it would naturally attract the attention of the press, and I would be forced to say that the mayor had ordered me to do this because he did not think that the police were capable of doing their jobs. That would make you look very bad in the eyes of the public; that you thought so little of your own police force that you felt it was necessary to declare martial law. I doubt that any of the members of my police force would vote for you again; neither would their families; their friends; or any members of the policeman’s union. On top of which, the governor would want to know why you were calling out the Guard when no natural disaster has struck. That’s not a terribly good angle for you to work if you’re thinking about higher office.

“Finally, the National Guard could do very little except stand guard in the streets; they are not trained detectives, unless of course you’d like me to pull people off the streets to provide training?”

There was dead silence in the receiver, and I finished my coffee with a smile. Brandy poured me a second cup. I glanced out the window and saw a couple of tourists wearing Giants caps walk past Police Plaza. I waved at them and they waved at me.

The silence from the mayor’s office went on and on. I was sure that Michael was bent over his desk, rubbing his head and wondering what to do.

“If you’re worried about looking good to the public, my task force is having a briefing on the current Blink situation at ten o’clock tomorrow morning, and you are welcome to attend. Thank you, and have a nice day.” I hung up the phone and leaned back in my chair and felt very proud of myself.

“Beautiful work, Chief,” Brandy said, and handed me a folder containing the events of the last 24 hours. “I heard through the grapevine that the two of you split up. I’m sorry.”

“It’s for the best,” I said, doing my best to sound indifferent. “I was always second fiddle to his ego. Thankfully, the Blink Burglar has done a good job at deflating it a bit.”

“Why do you think he does it?” Brandy asked. “The Blink, I mean.”

I smiled and looked at Brandy. She was a lieutenant who’d won her rank in the line of duty by confronting and killing a mad sniper two years before. I’d made her my personal aide after I realized that despite her heroism, she was still very young inside. She had no parents, no family and no significant other and needed some mentoring to reach her full potential. And, I did like her.

“Did you ever see the movie, The Great Train Robbery?” I asked.

“No, but it’s on my to-watch list.”

“There’s a scene where the judge asks Sean Connery why he went to such great lengths to rob the train. Sean Connery looks at the judge and says, ‘I wanted the money.’”

Brandy gaped, and then started to laugh. Her mirth went on for several moments, and then she nodded. “Okay, I walked into that one.”

“It might just be as simple as that,” I said, smiling at her.

“Maybe so, but I think there’s something else going on. You don’t mind if I investigate it a bit on my own?”

I shook my head. “Not at all, Brandy. It will be good training for you. But I want you to give me regular progress reports. I can’t have you and the task force covering the same ground. It will make the department look inept, and separate investigations have a habit of tripping over each other’s feet, or worse.”

“Understood, Chief,” she said, giving me a sketchy salute. “I’ll keep you posted.”