Tom felt his heart pounding in his chest rapidly like an Indian war drum, he felt hot, he was burning up, his mouth was like cotton, the back of his throat was like sandpaper, where the hell was he? Was he in hell? He was seriously starting to wonder. He'd almost swear he was. He kept feeling his skin getting hotter…hotter…hotter, he was burning up! He shot up in bed and woke up and realized he was back in his apartment, and heaving a half awake sigh of relief, he fell back against the pillow and closed his eyes again. But he opened them again and looked around the room and tried to think back to how the hell he had gotten here? He couldn't remember. Wait…he remembered something…he remembered, being at the school, he remembered…being in the principal's office, he remembered…Doug eating the phone cord, Doug? Penhall?
"Doug?" he called out, low at first, testing the waters, and when there was no answer he shot up in the bed again and bellowed at the top of his lungs, "DOUG!"
The second call was loud enough to rouse the man asleep on the couch in the living room, Doug jerked awake with a jolt and got out a shocked yelp and fell on the floor.
"Doug!"
"What?!" Penhall replied as he looked around to remember where he was.
Hanson stepped out of the bedroom, somehow tangled up in the bedcovers like an oversized poncho over his 'school clothes', his hair sticking up on end, his eyes wide in shock, and he half reminded Doug of a zombie from some dumb horror flick.
"What happened?" Tom asked, "How'd we get here? What's going on?"
Doug got up from the floor and decided to refresh his partner's memory, "We had the principal send us home, remember? Jenko had to come down and bail us out after you acted like you were in The Exorcist."
Despite sleeping all day, Tom looked exhausted and his body started to sag, he placed one hand along the side of his face and asked Doug, "What time is it?"
Doug found a clock in the living room and said, "4:12, we gotta go to work soon."
"Terrific," Tom said.
It was only now that Tom was starting to calm down that he realized he'd sweated through his clothes when he was asleep and he told Doug, "Don't go away," as he went back to the bedroom to change.
"Where'm I going?" Doug replied, "I can't show up without you, people will talk."
Hanson changed his clothes quickly but was still trying to pull himself together. Still feeling ever the mess, he told his partner through the open bedroom door, "I tell you, Doug, we better find this guy soon because if we don't, I think I'm going to kill somebody."
"Oh that's comforting," Doug said.
"I mean it, man," Tom shook his head slowly, "I can't take much more of this. How do they do it?"
"Who?" Doug asked.
Tom turned towards Doug, "Huh?"
"How does who do what?" Doug asked him.
"How do cops deal with this? There're always serial killers running around, how do the cops assigned to those cases do it?"
Doug shrugged and replied, "Just do. What other choice is there?"
"I don't know," Tom shook his head again.
"So what happened to you guys earlier?"
The sun was long gone until another day, Doug and Tom had gone to meet with the crew they'd taken to hanging with to try and get to their key target, Mark Pembleton. Half a dozen losers who were two steps from being kicked out of school entirely but somehow or other they managed to stay in by the skin of their teeth, and why they did was anybody's guess as well. No matter, they had a job to do, they had a role to play, and they were going to do just that.
"Food poisoning," Doug answered.
"Food poisoning?" one of the other spatula heads repeated.
"Food poisoning," Tom repeated in affirmation, "Bad Chinese, man. Besides, it got us out for the rest of the day, didn't it?"
"Yeah but where'd you go after?" one of the other guys asked, "We were looking for you."
"Should've come around our house, you would've found him," Doug told them, "With his head in the toilet all afternoon."
All eight of them were crammed into one large old beat up car and one of the other gorillas was at the wheel, which made both Tom and Doug slightly uncomfortable because so far nobody had said one word to either of them about where they were going, or what their plans for the night were.
"So uh," Tom decided it was now or never to ask, "Where' we going?"
"Gonna meet with some friends of ours," one of the guys smashed in the back with them said.
Tom turned to him, looked him dead in the eyes and asked point blank, "You dopes have friends?"
The two guys on either side of him punched him for that remark.
A few minutes later, they got off the main road and pulled off onto an abandoned spot that looked like nobody had ever been out there, but there was another car there waiting for them. The second car flashed its low beams twice and the two cops took that as being some kind of signal, but what kind they had no idea.
"Well," Doug said, "Guess it's time we got acquainted."
The pack of young men piled out of the car and went over to the other car, where its occupants were also stepping out. Getting close enough to recognize some faces, Doug snorted and told his 'brother', "Check it out, it's the Chinese Bandits."
A term of endearment for a gang of Asian boys from the school Ioki was currently working undercover in, and speak of the devil.
"Funny, you don't look Chinese," Tom said as he happened upon the other cop.
Defiantly Ioki replied, "That's cuz I'm not."
"So what the hell are you then?" Doug asked.
"I'm Japanese."
"What's the difference?" Doug asked.
Ioki glared at him.
"So where's this other guy we were supposed to meet?" Tom asked, "Pembleton…where's he hiding at?"
"I don't know how they did things at your last school," one of the boys told him, "But around here, we got a system, you want to see Mark, you've got to prove yourself worthy first."
"Okay so uh…how do we do that?" Doug asked.
"Once this is all over, I'm gonna kick every last one of their asses," Penhall said during the drive back to the Chapel.
Hanson adjusted the side mirror to get a better look at the shiner he'd gotten during the beatdown they sustained tonight, part of the initiation process to prove themselves 'worthy' of meeting with the 'great' Mark Pembleton.
"This is a sick system these guys have," he said.
"Hanson," Ioki offered from where he sat in the backseat, "You really think this is anything new?"
"All I know is I never went through anything like this when I was in school," Tom answered.
"And you were a cop's kid and a goody two-shoes dork," Penhall offered as he alternated between watching the road and looking over at his partner, "Of course this didn't happen to you in school."
"And you?" Tom asked.
Doug just shrugged and replied, "Point taken."
"If everything didn't ride on catching Pembleton, we could've busted them all tonight," Tom said.
"Yeah, before they made the two of you look like fresh hamburger," Ioki suggested.
"Rub it in, Ioki," Hanson said as he leaned back in his seat, "How come they didn't kick the crap out of you too?"
"Because I don't care about seeing their leader, my job is to get enough on the car thieves to bust them."
"So how is it our gang and your gang just happen to know each other anyway?" Penhall asked.
"Birds of a feather I guess," Ioki said.
"Sure, jailbirds," Hanson responded.
"Well, I hope Judy's having better luck on her end," Ioki said, "Otherwise this is going to be a washout for all of us."
She still has to be doing better than us," Tom said, "I'm just guessing the girls at her school didn't do a slam dance on her face."
"Penhall, you know as well as I do that you can't go beating up all of these kids just because they did it to you first," Jenko reminded Doug when the younger cops returned to the Chapel with a report for the night.
"Oh come on, Jenk, just once," Doug said.
"Didn't you get enough of that before?" Jenko asked, "You just about blew this whole operation wide open when you did the same thing to that Livingston girl."
Tom made his way around Penhall and taunted the bigger cop with a comment of, "You're an animal, Doug," and hissed as he made his way back towards his desk.
But the captain was two steps ahead of his men and he moved over to Hanson's desk and pointed at him and said, "And don't think I don't know the same thing's going through your mind either. You think you're the first cops that ever had to take a beatdown to stay under cover?"
"How many other cops had to take a beatdown at the hands of a bunch of high school losers?" Doug wanted to know.
"Look, Doug, the minute you have enough to bring in this Pembleton kid, assuming you do, then and only then do you have the okay to also bust and haul in every last one of these guys for assault and battery, but not before, got it?"
Reluctantly, Doug grumbled, "Yeah I got it."
"Good."
"Not much longer till 3 o' clock," Ioki looked up from his watch and asked the others, "You think the city's gonna be safe from this guy tonight?"
"He's not about to do anything to make our lives any easier," Jenko pointed out, "All the same, with a fresh kill under his belt, it's possible he'll subside for now."
"Captain, you think we're ever going to catch this guy?" Hanson asked.
Jenko looked up, opened his mouth to say something, then stopped, then answered, "I'd give you my honest opinion, but I think you guys actually want to sleep tonight."
"Captain."
"Hanson, the truth is sometimes it doesn't matter how efficient you are, they're one step ahead of us, and sometimes they always will be, there's a whole slew of killers who were never caught, never identified, never anything. All we can do is keep on as we are and hope that eventually he falls into our clutches."
"What was that you said about sleeping tonight?" Ioki asked.
"Yeah," Tom agreed, "I don't think I'm gonna get any sleep."
"Oh yes you are," Doug told him, "You're going to sleep if I have to put you to sleep for a week, you're not coming over and waking me up at 4 in the morning again."
Ioki listened to the two other officers argue and carry on a bit, before he turned to Jenko and asked humorously, "Aren't they something?"
"Oh sure, terrific," Jenko replied, and added in an almost deadpan tone, "It'd be wonderful if they ate each other." Addressing all of the young officers he told them, "Alright, everybody go home and get some sleep, we start again tomorrow morning."
"Wouldn't miss it, Jenk," Doug smirked as he headed for the door.