Slain Cop, Murdered Biker: Evidence Points to a Connection

The body of the text tells the rest of the story; or what a reporter could scratch together from the bloody remains at the roadside. It delves into the background of the officer, a Sgt. Luke Winchester –did he report to a Capt. Smith and Chief Wesson?- and his “well known” connection to criminal rackets, including the heroin and prostitution in which the biker gangs of the Midwest “infamously” trafficked. Looks like the crack team at the Davenport Reporter’s crime desk wrapped this case up succinctly, with no further need to engage in the pesky detail of what an on-duty member of the Lincoln Police Department was doing forty miles to the east in Weston.

The hitchhiker reads on, briefly, about how the brutal murder –the local rag does a good job of detailing the effect ammonium nitrate-packed bullets have when fired at close range- was payback for the murder of motorcycle gang leader, Tommy “Tornado” Wilkinson, aka “Nado”, who was run off the road and killed earlier this morning . The inside column bears a photo of the grizzly leader, shadowed in profile as he raises some sort of braised meat to his mouth.

How the paper managed to draw such an elaborate story together in the six or seven hours since the murder transpired impresses the hitchhiker. Really, it makes him scoff at the eagerness of a small town rag such as this to seemingly solving two murders at once, simply by linking the one the other. The worse part is that the law-abiding citizens of Davenport and all of eastern Iowa will lap it up without the question. It has the woman sitting beside the hitchhiker tail-spinning into a tizzy.

“I tell ya, you can’t go outside anymore…”

For the hitchhiker, the newspaper’s clear-cut conclusions –even if they are window-dressed as mere insinuations- are cause for doubt over its journalistic integrity, and not alarm over a sudden alliance between bikers and rogue cops. As rich as it is with the gore and intrigue borrowed straight from crime novel fantasies, the driver is most incredulous over what the story fails to include. No room is left for either him or his accomplice, the driver. One would think that to be a positive note, as it leaves him –and the driver, but most importantly, him- free from the suspicion of straight cops and the retribution of dirty ones. Yet it leaves him crumpling under the same dead weight of loss that first befell him when he shot Paula. It hadn’t managed to return so heavily as long as he was with the driver. Now, he glances out the window and the combination of gray factories set against open, white fields makes his breath go short.