Black Cat Weekly #84

Chapter 5-2

Hodges said, “I found a place for this, though.” She showed him a Mini-Griptilian folding knife that had been a Christmas gift from her husband. She tucked it into her waistband.

“All right, then,” Holland said. “You know your perimeter, right? All five attacks have taken place in this twelve-block area, although in different places, so he’s probably not lying in wait. Just keep on the move, cover as much territory as you can, and try not to look like a cop.” His smirk told her he didn’t think she ever looked much like a cop.

He hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Robby the Robot here will shadow you as much as possible.”

“Can it keep up with me?” Hodges asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Floyd said. “Although Molly normally operates at 1 to 3 miles per hour, she has a top speed of 18.”

“Molly?”

Floyd blushed lightly. “Yes, well, we have to call her something, don’t we? We had a contest.”

“And Molly won?”

Floyd frowned.

“Its voice doesn’t even sound female.”

“Oh, I can totally make her do that. She just sounds more serious with a man’s voice.”

Hodges shook her head and rolled her eyes. “Is it armed?”

Floyd’s mouth popped open. “No way! She’s not meant to be a replacement for a security guard. She’s an enhanced surveillance device. A user interface to the video monitoring system back at HQ.” He puffed up his chest with pride as he recited her attributes, as if he was listing her vital stats for a Playboy pictorial. “She has five different kinds of sensors. A laser array lets her create a 3D map of her surroundings every twenty milliseconds.” He pointed at a couple of dark patches on the robot’s surface. “These are ultrasonic sensors for proximity detection—like the collision warning system on new cars. There’s an inertial measurement unit, GPS, of course, and odometers on each wheel. All this tells Molly what’s around her and where she is in space, so she can figure out how to navigate without hitting anything.”

PlayboyHolland guffawed. “I need to get my wife some of those gadgets. She gets lost in the mall parking lot.”

Hodges frowned at him. “How does any of that help me? If I get attacked, which is the whole point of this operation, after all, what’s he…she…it going to do?”

Floyd waved both hands in the air. “She’s constantly recording the ambient noise level, so anything out of the ordinary—like if you scream—will cause her to send out an alert.”

“So, basically it’s not Robocop. More like a glorified mall cop. Overweight and out of shape, with no real power and not even a toy gun.”

Floyd glared at Hodges. “Some models have concealed weapon detection capability.”

Hodges glared back. “But not this one.”

Floyd looked at his feet. “Uh, no. Not this one.”

“And as I’ve already seen, it can’t exactly defend itself if someone decides to rough it up.”

Floyd didn’t look up.

“Great,” Hodges said. “Just great.”

The security robot must have gotten bored by the conversation. “Excuse me,” it said before spinning around and trundling off, whistling to itself as it went.

Hodges gave Holland another look, rolling her eyes in exasperation. This assignment wasn’t quite as dangerous as dressing up like a streetwalker and hanging out in a sketchy neighborhood late at night, surrounded by pimps, johns, and d**g dealers, but she was still making herself a target for a serial s****l predator. The fact that her primary backup was a glorified Roomba didn’t make her feel any safer. She could take care of herself in many situations, but she was probably smaller than her target, so if he took her by surprise, she could be in trouble.

One of the realities of being a female police officer was that she rarely ended up grappling with a perp. Physics wasn’t on her side. She—and others like her—relied more on their batons, Tasers and side arms. Experienced crooks knew there was a greater chance they’d get shot or zapped by a female cop, so they usually didn’t resist. She couldn’t be sure this guy would behave like that though.

Hodges’s first day undercover was uneventful. She didn’t expect to strike pay dirt right out of the gate, but she really wanted to get this guy off the street. She jogged the sidewalks of River Heights for over three hours, covering the full range of the attacker’s territory and the time window during which he’d been active. She met dozens of people as she ran—slower than her normal pace to conserve energy—and got a few appraising glances from by-passers, including one guy who resembled her grandfather and one well-appointed woman—but encountered no one threatening or aggressive. She also saw one guy she thought she recognized from high school, but managed to avoid him to keep her cover intact.

She noticed the surveillance robot out of the corner of her eye every so often, but she didn’t pay much attention to it. She had a hard time thinking of it as a Molly, though. It reminded her more of Chappie—eager to please. People often approached it to take selfies, and the robot cooperated, up to a point. If someone delayed it too long from its rounds, the calm blue lights flashed red, and a stern (and most definitely male) voice told the person to step back. Presumably this was a feature to prevent miscreants from distracting it from its appointed rounds.

When Hodges got to work the next day, she found an article taped to her locker door. The headline read:

The accompanying tongue-in-cheek report from a Washington newspaper explored the existential angst of menial jobs. A grainy photograph showed a robot exactly like Molly immersed headlong in a fountain at a shopping mall, where its sensors had failed to detect the shallow steps leading down to the water. A sidebar story told of another incident where a similar robot had been accused of running over a toddler’s foot, tripping him, and then simply turning and driving away.

“Mandy’s new partner,” someone had written in marker on the margin of the printout. “How long before it commits suicide, too?” There was a smiley beneath, which Hodges supposed was meant to soften the dig. She shrugged it off—this kind of banter went on all the time—but it didn’t instill confidence in the robot’s ability to do anything helpful. She didn’t need Marvin the Paranoid Android for backup.

Hodges’s next few days were as uneventful as the first. She remembered similar nights dressed up as a p********e when no one approached her, making her wonder if she looked too much like a cop—even out of uniform—or if she wasn’t attractive enough for johns. Or, in this case, a s****l predator.

Compared to those assignments, though, this one was a breeze. No one had ever trained her how to act like a p********e, so on her first time out, after only a few days on patrol, she had showed up to work the street looking like something out of a bad porno movie. The real hookers had laughed at her. Dressing up like a jogger was more to her liking, especially in the fancy new outfits she’d bought for the assignment. Plus, she was getting a good workout. Thankfully, it was October and not August, so the Texas heat wasn’t as much of an issue. She could get used to this—it was much better than rousting vagrants or driving d**g-addled miscreants to the lockup.

She was getting used to the robot’s presence, too. It was almost a comforting figure, so long as she didn’t entertain thoughts of rampaging Daleks or suicidal robots. Although it could last for up to twenty-four hours on a single charge—according to Floyd—it nipped off for a session at one of several charging stations every two or three hours. She once worked with a fellow officer who behaved similarly. The main difference was that the robot didn’t come back reeking of booze.

By the middle of her fifth day, Hodges was beginning to think this was all a huge waste of time. There’d been no further attacks since she started, and she hadn’t seen anyone suspicious around the neighborhood. The most exciting thing that happened was when a car backed out of a driveway and the driver—she was pretty sure he’d been ogling her—narrowly missed colliding with the security robot, which had swiveled nimbly and darted out of the way just in time, whistling indignantly, lights flashing red.

Shortly before five p.m., Hodges was jogging in place at an intersection, waiting for the crosswalk light to turn green, when someone grabbed her from behind. He wrapped his arms around her in a bear hug, his hands pawing at her. His face was buried in her neck, l*****g and kissing, while he ground his crotch into her backside.

Hodges tried to squirm free, but he was too strong and he had her arms pinned. He started dragging her off the sidewalk toward a nearby hedge. She knew what he would do once they were out of sight. He was already dry humping her, and his hands were now under her shirt, trying to push up her sports b*a.

Hodges stiffened her body, locking her knees to make her harder to maneuver, but her attacker simply picked her up and carried her toward the hedge. She lashed back with her feet, but he took her blows without slowing down. His utter silence dismayed her. He was as quiet and determined as…

As a robot, she thought, emerging from her stunned silence. “Help!” she yelled as loudly as she could. Her attacker couldn’t grope her and silence her at the same time. “Help!”

As a robotThe man threw her to the ground, knocking the breath from her and stunning her momentarily. He was pulling down his jogging pants to expose himself when a loud and authoritative voice came from nearby. “Cease and desist. Cease and desist.”

Hodges’s attacker turned to face the security robot. It had no arms to grapple with him, and no legs to trip him as he yanked up his pants and made ready to flee the scene, but it did have a loud voice and ear-splitting whistles to disorient him.

Hodges couldn’t let him get away. Capturing him was the whole point of this operation, and she doubted she’d get a second chance. She scrambled to her feet, fumbling at her waistband for a weapon. She found and passed over the Navy Seal knife, opting instead for the other item she had brought along. The one she hadn’t shown Detective Holland because it wasn’t strictly regulation: a personal Taser her husband had given her for her most recent birthday.

hadn’tThe assailant pushed his way through the hedge onto the sidewalk. There, he was again confronted by the robot, who, at apparent odds with its programming, stepped in front of the fleeing man, deliberately causing a collision instead of avoiding one.

The 300-pound robot teetered precariously but did not fall over. The delay gave Hodges time to catch up and apply a debilitating blast of high voltage to the man’s shoulder. It took two zaps to bring him down, at which point Hodges was able to secure his hands and feet with plastic zip ties, also part of her limited supply of gear. The robot had presumably sounded the alarm, because a River Heights security vehicle pulled up shortly thereafter, with one of her protective detail officers on its heels.

Of course, the robot got all the credit. Its manufacturers sent out a flood of press releases, and the story was picked up by the national media. Molly—or a robot very much like her—made appearances on Today and on Jimmy Kimmel Live! Hodges’s part in the capture of the River Heights Ripper was relegated to “an undercover HPD officer” who “assisted in the arrest.”

TodayJimmy Kimmel Live!Granted, the reams of footage Molly had captured in which the predator’s face was clearly visible would seal his fate in court. Hodges didn’t mind not being in the limelight, though. Her sergeant knew the truth and the arrest looked good on her record. At the end of the day, she’d accomplished her mission—a bad guy was in jail, the residents of the neighborhood would be able to sleep more easily, and the other victims would know that their attacker was out of circulation. She received letters of thanks from three of them.

She wasn’t as amused by the cascade of toy robots that greeted her when she opened her locker a few days after the story went viral. It pained her to think she was going to need to buy a padlock. In a police station, of all places.

She glanced around the room, wondering if, perhaps, the perpetrators have been caught on a security camera.

Bev Vincent is the author of several non-fiction books, including The Road to the Dark Tower and Stephen King: A Complete Exploration of His Work, Life and Influences. He co-edited the anthology Flight or Fright with King and has published over 120 stories, with appearances in Ellery Queen’s, Alfred Hitchcock’s and Black Cat Mystery Magazines. His work has been published in more than twenty languages and nominated for the Stoker (twice), Edgar, Ignotus, and ITW Thriller Awards. To learn more, visit bevvincent.com.