… Dave and I were sitting in the office one night trying to get ourselves geared up to go to the shelter for another evenings’ activity when the phone rang. I was closest, so I answered and it was Morgan. He said, “We got a telephonic search warrant for some evidence a guy has at the jail. They just called us and said it was ready to be picked up, will you get it?” I replied, “Sure, what is it?” He continued, “Get with the jailers’; they’ll have it ready for you. We are on our way home or we’d go get it ourselves. Okay, we’ll go now. Thanks a lot, we owe you dinner.”
I told Dave what we needed to do, so we drove to the jail on Four Hundred South. We pulled up to the sally port door, identified ourselves, and told them they had some evidence ready for Morgan to pick up. There was total silence. Then, the sally port started to open and the jailer in the control room was barely able to say “Come on in,” because it sounded like he was crying. Dave and I looked at each other, shrugged our shoulders and drove in. We secured our weapons in the trunk and walked to the jail doors (which opened with no talking from control). As we stepped in, the outer doors closed, the inner ones opened, but the booking area was completely deserted. As we looked toward the control area, we saw all the jailers’ pointing at us and leaning against each other. They were laughing so hard they were crying, and could hardly stand up. We looked at each other and wondered, “What the heck is so funny?” then started walking toward control. When we got there, one jailer gave us a plastic spoon, a Ziploc bag, two pairs of rubber gloves, and pointed at a confinement cell. We looked in to see this naked, exhausted transient who looked like he was rode hard and put away wet.
Now, maybe you know where this is heading, but we didn’t and asked, “What the heck is going on?” They all started laugh-crying, and told us that Morgan and Jeff had gotten a telephonic search warrant for the guy after he swallowed drugs at the park. They had taken him to the hospital to get his stomach pumped and found some drugs in the vomit, but thought that some had made it into the lower GI. The water had been turned off (so it couldn’t be flushed) and the jail had been waiting for him to finish evacuating his stomach. They told us the plan was to move him to another cell and we were the lucky ones chosen to examine the waste.
I then said something to the effect that I was very unhappy with the assignment and wished that something bad would happen to Morgan. Dave shrugged his shoulders and said, “Come on, how bad can it be?” (Remember, Dave has done snow angels in the stuff, so what was this going to bother him, right?) Anyway, I am dying and have many less then complimentary things to say about Morgan. But, because Dave is my partner, I put on the gloves and held the bag. Nothing else happened and we left! Not!!! Anyone that knows me also knows that I have the most developed gag reflex in the lower forty-eight, so that can’t possibly be the end.
As we went into the cell, the stench was almost more that I could take. Hospital bathroom bad, in the emergency room bathroom bad, after someone died in the bathroom bad, had nothing on this bad!!! I am gagging so hard that I am afraid I’m going to dislodge something. Dave smiles, shakes his head at me, kneels down near the stainless steel throne and starts probing the blackish water (from the charcoal that they used to pump his stomach) with the spoon. “I found it!” he exclaimed. As I looked down at the spoon, Dave says, “Nope, it’s only a peanut,” and plops it back into the water. That was it for me; I said something nice and walked out. Morgan, what can you say about him?
When I was brand new, I had a 1985 Chevy Celebrity for my police car. It had an AM radio, no cage, and an obsolete light bar. I loved it. I would wash and clean the windows every day. I truly loved that car!!! One very cold winter night, I was driving around on graveyards when I noticed a displaced home owner sitting by a business at 600 West and South Temple. I thought that I would save this man from the cold, so I pulled over after letting dispatch know where I was and made contact with him. He was in his fifties but the years had not been kind to him as he looked to be in his late seventies. He had a long, grey beard, was balding and generally unkempt. He wore a plaid suit and beat up, brown shoes. If anyone needed to be saved that night, he did. I promptly donned my gloves (I call them my “people touchers”) and found his wallet and ID so I could check him for warrants. I found he had enough that the jail would take him so I went and prepared my beautiful car for the visitor. A heavy duty garbage bag went down on the front passenger seat (no cage, remember?) on top of a sheet that Gold Cross had given me. Then, a healthy spray of Lysol was needed prior to having this man get into my chariot of truth and justice. I picked him up, searched and cuffed him, and placed him inside. I fastened his safety belt, cracked his window, and started off towards jail.
There was an interesting smell that progressively became worse on the way there and it was just my luck to get stuck behind a train. So, I looked at this guy as I was waiting and realized that as he was warming up, the urination and defecation in his pants were defrosting. And, as if that wasn’t bad enough, there was something worse going on. He had several pieces of moldy, green, phlegm covered bologna in his beard that was starting to slide around. I quickly looked away, unrolled my window, stuck my head out and drove like the devil to the jail.
I got into the sally port, secured my weapons and took a moment to congratulate myself on not losing my dinner on the way there. I thought to myself, “I’m so impressed, not one gag the whole trip!” I put on my “people touchers,” made sure that my long sleeve shirt overlapped my gloves, and opened the door to my chariot. Whew, it smelt! But, because I was a doer of good deeds, I knew all was well. So, I reached across the man to undo his safety belt and that is when it happened. Something very, very bad happened! It was horrible bad! I heard a noise and had an accompanying feeling that I was not going to be able to deal with. A piece of moldy, green, phlegm covered bologna had slid out of his beard and had fallen onto the ½ inch part of my wrist that neither my sleeve nor my glove covered in the outreached position that my arm was in. It made a sheplunking noise on my skin and I felt it gooing around like a snail looking for a new home and had spied this “fresh meat” ready for the taking. I stood up, and as dignified as I could, flicked it off of my wrist and promptly projectile vomited in the sally port. . . . .
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