CHAPTER 29 – Grease is the word

Harris left the bathroom first and gave me the all-clear before I could come out. He walked far ahead of me now back towards the cafeteria and I hung back, thinking about our next meeting.

We were to meet at the climbing wall of the obstacle course at 2100 hours. Not only was it remote, but it overlooked the beautiful lake, completely hidden from the academy's view. No one would hear us or bother us in such a place.

I went through the rest of the day in a daze, watching Harris attempt to stay awake while instructing us on how to perform maneuvers on the driver's course. It had a bunch of cones and some kind of makeshift rain-maker that drenched the car when it drove through it. I did well enough driving the course, but apparently none of us went fast enough to please Callahan and Harris. Thankfully the reporters stayed on the main campus and didn't follow us to the exercises that took place away from the main buildings. It was good we hadn't had self-defense lessons in the gym today, because we would have more than likely been watched by the reporters.

"No comment," Harris insisted, as he was being approached by two reporters as our squadron returned to main campus from the driver's course. "Of course, I'd be glad to tell you how I, Lieutenant Thaddeus Harris, recently rescued one of our very cadets from a kidnapping only a couple of wee—"

"Sir, what I want to know is why you didn't go to the press conference on Sunday," the reporter demanded.

"Isn't it interesting that something so… innocuous is so fascinating to you people," he replied, flashing the reporters a smile of disappointment. "Now, it was only a month ago that I arrested a Wilson Heights gang member who had tried to infiltrate this very police academy as a—"

"Why does Captain Tackleberry outrank you, being as you've been at the academy far longer?"

Now Harris was frowning.

"Sir—what is your opinion of Captain Tackleberry?"

With that, Harris's sour face turned into a smug smile and he picked up his pace, putting distance between himself and the reporters.

"No comment," he called out, waving back at them.


At about 8:30 pm, I left the women's dorm, freshly showered and nervous, hoping I wouldn't run into Captain Callahan again out here. I borrowed Mullers' Walkman and headphones so I'd have an excuse for why I was wandering around campus by myself at night.

The campus was dead silent. Perhaps now that the instructors were all focused on torturing Lieutenant Harris, there were none left to check over the campus.

I reached the climbing wall just before nine, and sat down beside it, looking out at the lake. I hadn't even asked Mullers what cassette she'd left in the Walkman, and decided to check. Meatloaf's Bat Out of Hell: Back into Hell. Not too shabby.

It might not be such a bad idea to come out here on my own and listen to music sometime. Of course, I'd rather meet up with Thaddeus than be out here alone but apparently seeing him during the week was now a luxury that had to be planned well in advance and out of earshot of everyone.

"You lost?" a gruff voice came from behind me, after I'd been waiting for ten minutes or so. I flinched at the sudden sound and looked back. There was Thaddeus, standing a short distance away, his hair slicked to his head and artificially shiny-looking, a grimace on his face. He hadn't even tried to hide it under his hat. Another dumb prank. Not again.

"Hello there, stranger," I said in reply, smiling. He could apparently sense I was staring at his hair, because he fidgeted awkwardly.

"They replaced my shampoo with some kind of vegetable oil," he explained. "Washed it four times and it's still a greasy mess."

"That's awful," I said. "You'll have to use some heavy-duty degreaser shampoo to get that out."

"Yeah, well, my Head and Shoulders isn't cutting it."

"Anyway, I'm glad you could make it here," I commented, hoping we could move away from the subject of his hair.

"Yeah, don't know how that happened," he muttered. "Of course, they're probably fillin' my room full of toilet paper or spiders or roaches as we speak. Damn cretins."

I could also see that he wasn't carrying his baton—he had said today that he'd broken the ball off it while trying to remove the alarm clock from his ceiling. The confidence he usually exuded with every step was not there. With his baton missing, his hair an oily mess, and without his usual swagger, he looked like an entirely different person.

"Do you want to stay here, or do you want to go somewhere in your car?" I asked.

"If I leave campus, they'll put an APB out on my vehicle and get me arrested by my own damn men. I can just see that prank coming a mile away. The reporters are just waiting for a juicy story. Probably hiding in the bushes ready to ambush me. Wouldn't doubt that they're all working together to nail me."

"But this is supposed to be about Captain Tackleberry," I replied, recalling Harris's impassioned speech in the bathroom earlier about his opinion of Tackleberry training more mini-Tackleberrys. "Why are they changing the—"

"Because they all know he's trouble," Harris grumbled, striding up to sit beside me in the grass. He lowered himself to the grass slowly, continuing to speak. "Not even a year ago, when we were in Moscow, Tackleberry got up on stage in front of a whole room of Russkis and bitched about American police regulations, namely what constitutes excessive force nowadays. And to top it off, he used me for his demonstration of a chokehold."

"Oh man," I began, but was interrupted by his continuing to explain.

"That's not the half of it. Then, while I was still trying to catch my breath from the chokehold, he whammed me in the thigh with his damn police baton. All the while, Jones and Callahan stood there and winced in the back of the auditorium. You should've seen the bruise on my thigh. I could have gotten a damn blood clot!"

"That's really awful," I muttered, shaking my head. "So they watched that whole thing and still blindly defend him?"

"Those two are lyin' through their teeth when they say he's a good cop. We all got to see firsthand in Moscow what he wishes he could do to perpetrators. In fact, he finished off his little talk by brandishing his firearm and then he actually fired the damn thing! Inside a building, no less, in a country less than friendly to us!"

I could see that Harris was getting more and more worked up. I sighed, regretting the topic. I hadn't meant for this meeting to be another source of stress for him.

"Maybe we should try to think of other things besides Captain Tackleberry," I muttered. "Just look at that sunset. It's perfect, isn't it?"

The sun was just setting over the lake, and we sat in silence watching it. I didn't know what else to say to him. He was refusing to make things easier for himself—he hadn't retaliated for any of their pranks, as far as I knew, he was not giving the reporters any answers that would satisfy them, and he was continuing to stay in the men's dorm at night, even though he'd lost sleep for two nights now.

"You're right; that sunset is fabulous," he said, peering at the beautiful view, his face now serene. "Never really got a good look at it before, all the years I've been here. This was a good idea, coming out here tonight."

"Are you holding up okay?" I said. "Do you want to take a nap or something? To get ready for the night ahead?"

A low chuckle began in his throat and grew until he was laughing heartily.

"Knowing us, we'd sleep 'til noon and get trampled by cadets on the course tomorrow."

"Would that be so bad, really?" I suggested. "Sounds a lot better than having an alarm wake you up every hour."

"True," he said, "but I just gotta endure this for another three days. And then—"

"What?"

"Then the weekend. The glorious, glorious weekend," he said, clasping his hands together. "We can give it another go in the Corvette. Or outside somewhere. I always wanted to try that, but never did."

"Or really, even another prop—"

"Or a proper date," he interrupted, pretending to have read my thoughts. "First and foremost."

He really did try to be a good man, in spite of the underhanded ways he tried to do so. I was impressed with his resolve this week, his confession about feeding the poor, and the about-face in his personality that he was able to do when speaking with me alone as opposed to the grumpy, shrill-voiced man running D squad. It had been a difficult week so far, and we both needed a bit of fun.

I glanced around us, scanning the fast-darkening area. The obstacle course was dead silent and curved along the backside of a steep hillside that sloped down towards the bank of the lake. This particular stretch of the course was far down below that hillside and was impossible to be seen from the academy grounds. Not only that, but the obstacle course itself was several hundred yards away from the academy.

"So, what's stopping us now?" I commented, touching his slicked-down hair.

"Stopping us from a date, you mean?" he replied, finally able to flash a big smile.

"No, having a go outside," I said. "I mean, no one's around. It's gonna be dark soon."

"Damn, you are insatiable," he chuckled, shaking his head with amusement. I could see him looking behind him now, at the hill above the obstacle course. "Now, I don't think there are any security cameras along here but I can't be totally certain, so I think it's best to wait until—"

I leaned over and kissed him, stopping him mid-sentence. He blinked several times in surprise and then glanced at me, his eyelids definitely heavy.

"That may well be all that I need to get me through the rest of this week," he muttered. "Knowing you're looking forward to it too."

"It's up to you," I said. "Is there nothing we can do to get back at the pranksters?"

"I'm already on Mahoney's shit list and I would argue I'm on Lassard's too. Not only that, but half of my pranksters got promoted lately, so there's that. Too risky."

"No, I get it," I said. "I just feel so helpless. It's not fair. So you missed a stupid news conference. How can they be so childish?"

Just then, he put his now healed arm around my shoulder and pulled me up against him.

"It's not all bad. Before you, all I had was Proctor by my side. Far better company now."


The next day, Harris wore his hat to the early morning formation. He looked far better rested than he had these past two days. I hoped I'd had something to do with that. It sucked that I couldn't ask him directly. There were only two reporters on campus now, and they stayed a distance away from Harris, which was a relief.

After lunch we were due to go to the classroom for a lesson on police procedures, followed by a pop quiz I'd totally neglected to read over for in preparation for something so predictable by now. It would be a miracle if I was able to get through this academy at all, with where my focus ended up being. This was just like college all over again, with me not focusing on my studies and instead on some guy. At least Lieutenant Harris was a better person than my college boyfriend Tony.

I took my seat near Mullers and Stiner and saw the A squad guys come in. I'd now become familiar with more than just Stetson, who Brookstone was still hanging all over, and Johnson, who'd had to take on Captain Callahan in the self-defense session. There was Goldberg, who was tall and dark haired, Francis, a buff redhead, and Thomas, a guy who happened to have the first name Thomas as well. Thomas Thomas. Ugh.

The A squad men sat in various locations in the classroom, with Stetson seeming to purposely box himself away from Brookstone, taking a seat in which all four seats around him were already taken. Hmmm.

Lieutenant Harris was the first instructor to walk in. A reporter had been following him, and he promptly shut the door in the reporter's face.

"Now, today, we will be hammering down the municipal code," he said, picking up a piece of chalk, looking a bit full of himself. Being followed by reporters was going to his head, and he strode around looking about as self-important as someone could look. Now that he'd blocked the reporter from entering the room, he'd toned down his ego somewhat as he moved to the blackboard. Harris then proceeded to stretch out his speaking to match the obscure letters and numbers he wrote on the board, which made him very difficult to follow. I tried to keep up, but also could not help wondering if he'd had to endure more pranks last night. He did seem slightly less sleep-deprived than the day before.

Captain Callahan came in and stood near the door, closing it behind her, leaning against the jamb as Harris went through his convoluted lecture. She wore her sunglasses, her hair in a tight bun, looking cool as a cucumber.

After a short time, Goldberg raised his hand.

"Sir, I know this may not be the right place to ask, but are you planning on making a statement about our squadron instructor?"

There was a beat that passed, in which Callahan crossed her arms, looking unnerved. She reached up and lowered her sunglasses onto her nose. Harris's expression changed from shock to annoyance to suspicion.

"You mean, Tackleberry?" Harris said, narrowing his eyes at the question.

"Yes, Sir. Is that not why the reporters have been here the last couple of days?"

"Those reporters are vultures," Harris replied. "They're just looking for any gossip they can sink their claws into."

"I would argue that they are a significant distraction to the learning process, to the academy as a whole," Callahan muttered, pushing her sunglasses back up over her eyes again, and crossing her arms. "Now, some of us have the ability to make them leave, and yet choose not to."

"Is that right?" Harris growled, squaring off with Callahan now, his hands balled into fists. "Maybe they've been too busy dealing with hot peppers in their food, oil in their shampoo, and alarms waking them up every hour of the night. But you wouldn't know anything about that, would you."

At first, Callahan was taken aback, but then visibly frowned at his insinuation—he was accusing her of being involved in the pranks he'd had to endure these past couple of days. For a moment, she glanced out at the classroom, and then back at him. Wow—he'd called her out.

"Lieutenant Harris," she began, her voice uncharacteristically weak. "I'm not sure that—"

"Don't play coy with me, Callahan," he snarled at her, interrupting her mid-sentence. There was a definite electricity in the classroom now, with all of us cadets sitting on the edge of our seats. "You're all in on it, aren't you? Trying to make me look like a fool in front of the cadets and the reporters. You want an official statement on your buddy? I'll give you one."

Silence followed his statement. He could see now that everyone was staring at him and his eyes seemed to glow with intensity. Even so, Harris kept his mouth shut, his jaw locked defiantly. He no longer looked to be squaring off with Callahan—now it appeared that he was squaring off against everyone in the classroom.

"Now?" Stetson asked, finally breaking the tense silence.

"No," was the sharp reply from Harris. "There's a time and place for it, and this ain't it."

"Not the press conference either, apparently," someone in the class muttered. I couldn't tell where it came from, but it got a strong response from Lieutenant Harris.

"You know what?" Harris snarled, pointing at the class, his voice now loud and shrill. His Texas drawl was much more apparent when he was yelling. "You should thank your lucky stars that I missed the damn press conference! In fact, I'd be more than happy to make an official statement on Captain Tackleberry's conduct, but you maggots ain't gonna like what you hear!"

Several A squad and D squad cadets gasped at his statement, but said nothing else. Captain Callahan had since lowered her hands to her sides and was balling her fists. Harris turned back to the blackboard, his hackles going back down. "Now, where was I…."