DRAGNET 2000
This is the city, Santa Fe, New Mexico. My name's Joe Friday. My partner's Bill Gannon. We're Cops.
The mean streets of this city have a thousand stories to tell. Tonight. I'm going to tell you one of them. I call it "The
Curious Caper of the SFPD, The Donuts, and the Handhelds."
That's right, The Handhelds. That's not the name of a pop group,
and I'm not talking about 45-caliber revolvers. It refers to the
small, handheld computers we cops carry with us on the beat.
Trouble is, the bad guys carry them too.
Before I say more about Handhelds, let me dispense with the subject
of traditional firepower -- guns and bullets and the like. Truth
is, the cops and the criminals are pretty well matched in this
department.
So now, whatever advantage we might have over the bad guys comes
from the kind of handheld PC we've got in our shirt pockets.
If we pick the right machine, we live to enjoy a nice Policeman's
Pension. If we pick the wrong machine, well let's just say a full-dress
Policeman's funeral, with horses and everything, is a very dignified
way to go.
But rookies don't understand this. I remember when Malone, a fresh-faced
kid out of the academy, brought an Apple Newton to work! oor
kid almost got laughed out of the station house.
Cops are a proud and stubborn breed, though, let me tell you. Malone stuck with the Newton as long as he could. The straw came
when he tried to write me, Joe Friday, a memo.
As soon as he wrote "Friday," the damn Newton brought
up the calendar applet! All Malone could do was make an appointment
with Friday -- that's me -- on Friday. To save face, the
rookie acted as though that's what he wanted to do all along.
I played along, kept the appointment -- and took advantage of
the opportunity to give it to him straight, cop to cop.
"Malone," I said, shutting the door behind me and
looking him straight in the eyes, "this is one of the toughest
jobs on the planet. If you want to survive, you'll need a serious
handheld machine -- not that glorified pocket calculator of yours."
Malone was a little taken aback, and I wouldn't say he was overjoyed
by the news, but he came around. Now he's carrying a Phillips Velo H/PC with 2MB of RAM and an auto-synch to Outlook 98 on his
desktop.
Not bad for a kid.
But hey, office shenanigans are one thing, and the streets are
something else. I'm no pencil-pusher, I'm a cop. And the truth
is, all the fancy memos in the world won't save you when you're
standing face to face with some psychopath on cold, hard cement.
Here's the story, taken from my report:
May 16, 1998, 3AM. We get a call on the two-way; some crazy has
just emptied the cash register at the Dunkin' Donuts on Saint
Francis Drive.
You'd think he would just take the money and run, right? But no,
this guy wants to take some donuts home with him! So he says,
"give me a dozen Bavarian Creams, and make it fast."
Poor girl at the counter, pretty, couldn't have been a day over
sixteen, realizes it's late and they're out of everything, right? But she's afraid if she says there's no Bavarian Creams left,
he's gonna shoot her!
So she thinks fast -- ya' gotta hand it to her -- she starts filling
a box with Boston Creams, right? All she can do is hope
the guy doesn't know or care about the difference.
...a plea to help keep Cops away from donuts!!!
So she's putting the last donut in the box and she's about
to wrap the box with cellophane tape. The guy almost screams:
"No! Don't close it! I want one now!"
A young girl's life is passing before her eyes, while this nutcase
is reaching into the donut box, pulling out a donut, and biting
into it.
As soon as he bites, he knows something's wrong.
"This isn't a Bavarian Cream!," he shouts, like some
little kid who's angry at his mother.
"It's all we..." the girl begins, nervously.
"Freeze, right there, now!" I say, bursting through
the door, with Gannon right by my side. The Donut Desperado is
on a direct line of sight with our Smith and Wessons.
It's a clean shot, and I thought we had him there. But what does
this guy do? He just falls down, right behind the counter,
taking the girl with him. We can't even see him! But we can hear
him say:
"I've got the girl down here with me. You make one move,
she doesn't live to dance at her wedding."
Now we're in a real spot. He's laying on the floor behind the
counter, the girl's there with him, maybe he's holding a gun to
her head, who knows?
"Let the girl go, and we'll leave," I say, slowly, making
the first move. "Just let the girl go now."
"Let her go?" the guy says, his voice kind of shouting
and shaking at the same time. "Let her go? She gave
me these damn things -- these crullers..."
"They're not crullers," we heard the girl say, in a
proud, steady kind of voice. That was pretty remarkable, given
what she was going through. "They're Boston Cream-filled
donuts"
"They're crullers, bitch!" we heard, and then
a loud slap, and then a cry of pain. I winced. The bastard was
hitting her. I figured it was time to crank up the diplomacy,
before this innocent girl got hurt or worse.
"Listen, buddy," I pleaded, "just let the girl
go. We'll turn around and we won't come back. Donuts, crullers,
coffee rolls, muffins, munchkins -- you can fill your pickup truck
with this junk, for all we care. Just let her go."
But I guess the guy was in the middle of some psychotic episode
or break or something. Maybe his mother beat him with crullers
when he was a kid, while his father poured hot coffee on his head. I don't know, I'm just a cop, not a shrink.
All I know is, he couldn't get past the cruller issue.
It was then that I got one of those flashes that I sometimes get. You know, the occasional burst of inspired thought that separates
the good cops from the great cops.
I pulled out my Handheld PC, reached for the stylus, and spoke:
"Listen, buddy. If you visit the product section of the Dunkin
Donuts web site on your Handheld, you'll see that the girl
gave you just what you asked for. A Bavarian Cream donut. Not
a cruller."
"That's bullshit, copper," he said. "I know a donut
from a cruller. You're just buying time."
"Check out the page," I said, real matter-of-fact. "The
girl knows her donuts -- she's a professional. Just check out the
page. WWW donuts dot com. You know the internet never lies."
I could almost feel him wrestling with the thing.
"If this is a trick," I heard him say -- but then there
was the sound of plastic rubbing against cloth -- he was pulling
the Handheld from his shirt pocket -- and a small clicking sound
-- the sound of the power switch being flipped...
...He was smooth, all right -- real smooth. He'd used that handheld
plenty. I knew there was only one chance, my last card. I wouldn't exactly have called it an ace. But I had to play it.
"What kind of Handheld you got?" I asked, trying to
sound extremely casual.
It's the kind of question you answer without even thinking. Luckily,
he did too.
"A Palm Pilot," he said. "What's it to you, copper?"
"Nothing," I said, casual again. "Not a damn thing."
I counted out three long seconds, said a silent prayer, and then
leapt over the counter, while Gannon covered. After a small struggle,
I knocked his Palm Pilot out of his hand he had put his gun down
on a shelf behind the counter, next to a stack of empty coffee
cups and cuffed him.
Next, I helped the girl up and told her to call home; Gannon
was already talking to the station while I was reading the creep
his Miranda rights not politely.
Of course it was a close call, and sometimes you just have to
take your chances. I figured, with a Palm Pilot, there would be
a small window of opportunity while the guy was struggling with
the Graffiti handwriting recognition system before he'd finally managed
to bring up his web browser.
I figured right.
Of course, if he'd had a Hewlett-Packard Handheld PC with Windows
CE like mine -- God knows what might have happened to that poor
girl.
But everything came out all right. Last I heard, she's working
in an art gallery on Canyon Road, real nice gig. Only now, she
carries a chrome-plated 9mm Beretta in her evening bag.
In a town like Santa Fe, anything can happen.
Friday, out.