Chapter 29
Jack quickly felt the folly of not having worn a thicker coat. He was sure it was ten degrees colder than when he’d first entered the bar, or maybe it was the cold beers that had chilled him.
After two hours of drinking, he’d successfully offended the bartender with his comments about Obama’s election and had been booted from his neighborhood drinking hole—a lifetime ban. It was like the entire country had become pussies overnight. Card-carrying members of the PC Brigade.
Whatever happened to free speech?
He leaned against the bar’s brick wall, which had been tagged with graffiti.
Nothing gang related. It was the type of markings produced by aimless youth with too much time on their hands.
Jack was one of those kids once, smashing mailboxes with his father’s old golf club and toilet-papering his math teacher’s house at two in the morning.
He pushed himself off the wall with his heel and flagged an oncoming taxi. A yellow cab pulled up to the curb. Jack approached, trying to hide his intoxication.
The driver unlocked the doors and Jack got in the back.
The driver was wearing a head covering and had a thick Chicagoan accent. Jack figured he was from Bridgeview or Chicago Lawn, where most Muslims lived.
“Good afternoon,” the driver said. “Do you have an address?”
Jack stomached his disgust. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a white cab driver, especially an Irish one. It had to have been in the early nineties, he thought.
“I don’t know where to take you,” the driver said. “I’ll need an address.”
“It’s Rosehill.”
“You talking about the cemetery?”
“You know it, then?”
“Sure, but don’t the gates lock at five o’clock? It’s already four.”
“Then you need to get moving.”
“It’ll take some time with traffic…”
Jack reached into his pocket and pulled out his billfold. He opened it and took out a crisp bill, then dangled it for the driver to see. “An extra twenty if you drive like you’ve got a pair.”
“Look, man, I can’t afford a ticket right now.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Jack said. “You’ll be fine.”
“What do you mean? I’m the one who’ll have to pay.”
“You get pulled over, and I’ll deal with it, all right?”
“Really? And what the hell are you going to do?”
Jack flashed his badge. “I’m a cop, asshole. CPD.”
“Oh, shit. I’m sorry, Officer. I didn’t—”
“Yeah, yeah, just fucking get me there and we’re square.”
The driver shifted into drive, checked his side-view mirror, and gassed it. The engine made a grinding noise, and Jack thought the transmission had slipped out of gear. Most cabs in the city were shit boxes, filthy and poorly maintained, and this cab was no exception.
Jack closed his eyes and tried to ignore the musty odor and foreign driver who’d irked him. He mused, “What happened to America?” It had gone from a glorious country to a garbage dump right before his eyes, before the country’s eyes, and no one seemed to notice.
Were people under some spell? Why couldn’t they see what was happening under their noses? America was being lost to a foreign invasion.
—
When he arrived at the cemetery, the driver parked near the entrance, where there was a wrought-iron gate and an information booth that looked empty. Jack paid the driver the fare of thirty-two dollars.
“What about the extra twenty?” the driver asked. “I got you here before it closed.”
“Oh yeah,” Jack said, balling up the twenty-dollar bill and tossing it in the man’s face. “A deal’s a deal.”
The driver glared, straightened out the money, and smoothed it against the dashboard until it was flat again. “Asshole,” he said under his breath.
Jack slammed the door and began walking toward an opening in the fence.
He listened as the cab sped away; he hadn’t given any thought as to how he’d get home.
The cemetery was minutes from closing, and there weren’t any cabs waiting around.
If he had been marginally sober, he might’ve planned things out better.
He cut across the lawn as it began to snow, and walked toward a black headstone in the distance.
No matter how drunk he got, he’d always know the way.
When he reached the grave, he sat down quietly for a moment.
The ground was frozen; he felt as if he were sitting on a block of ice.
The headstone’s facade was caked in snow.
Jack brushed it away, revealing an inscription etched into the marble.
Here lies Theodore Briscoe.
Husband.
Father.
Loyal Friend.
“God, I miss you, brother,” Jack said, and his mind faded back to when Briscoe first took him under his wing, and the times they spent together as mentor and mentee.
—
Theodore Briscoe was the kind of officer who thought he was the department.
With more than twenty-five years on the force, he spoke with authority, swaggered through roll calls like a general, and never missed an opportunity to remind rookies who built the foundation they walked on.
He took Jack Dunham under his wing like he was passing on a bloodline.
“This job’s not for the weak,” Briscoe had told him on his first day. “And it damn sure isn’t for people who think they can change it.”
To Jack, Briscoe was a legend. Rough around the edges, sure—but loyal, smart, seasoned. The kind of man who kept score and made sure the right people got what was coming to them. But everything shifted the day the city announced its new chief of police.
The new chief was Black. A younger man who’d climbed the ranks, had a clean record and a graduate degree. Teddy Briscoe was furious. He’d already ordered a fresh navy suit and had rehearsed his speech in front of the mirror—he thought the job was his.
“They gave it to a goddamn affirmative action hire,” Briscoe sat in the break room, slamming his badge down. “You work your whole life, and they pass you over for a monkey with a college degree.”
Jack didn’t say anything. He just nodded, watching the man he admired unravel.
From that day forward, Briscoe’s mentorship took on a different meaning. Every patrol ride, every briefing, every training session came with sharp reminders of whom the city “belonged” to.
“We gotta take back our city,” Briscoe said one night as they drove through the South Side, lights off, windows cracked. “We can’t let these affirmative action monkeys have control.”
Jack looked out the window with a blank face.
Briscoe wasn’t just venting. He believed it.
He believed that the department—and the city—were slipping through white fingers, and it was their duty to get it back.
He filled Jack’s head with stories from the eighties and nineties—times when “cops had real power,” and “respect meant fear.” He trained Jack in technique, in discipline—but also in resentment.
Months later, it all exploded.
A standoff erupted after a Black man, reportedly armed, refused to exit his vehicle during a high-risk stop.
Briscoe took command, ignoring backup procedures and escalating the situation.
The gunfire lasted less than two minutes.
When it was over, Briscoe was on the pavement, bleeding out.
The suspect—who’d been shot five times—was barely alive.
Jack arrived moments after Briscoe went down. He ran past other officers, slipping in blood. The man who taught him everything lay dying on the cold concrete, his badge still pinned to his chest as he took his last breath.
Jack didn’t cry at the funeral. He stood like stone, arms locked, jaw clenched. The old guard turned out in full dress blues. The new chief gave a eulogy about “service and sacrifice,” but Jack barely listened. He heard only Briscoe’s voice in his head—angry, proud, unfiltered.
A week after the burial, Jack received a letter from Briscoe’s estate attorney.
Briscoe had left him something: a small black lockbox, the kind you keep under your bed or in the back of a closet.
Jack took it home, placed it on his kitchen table, and sat in silence for a long time before finally opening it.
Inside were dozens of yellowed papers: handwritten notes, arrest reports, printed photos, and clippings from internal complaints.
Each one detailed a moment in Briscoe’s career involving Black citizens—arrests, interrogations, “use of force” reports.
Tucked beneath the last folder was a small envelope labeled For Jack.
He opened it.
This is how to keep those monkeys in check in our city that we run.
I want you to study these reports, learn from them. Use what fits. Adapt the rest. Figure out which tactics work best in which situations.
You’ve got what it takes. You’re not like the soft ones coming through now.
Remember, we have to make sure we have control of our city. Make sure you train the young ones like I did for you.
One day you’ll have your own lockbox of mementos. Keep running the city.
Jack stared at the note, the words bleeding through the paper like oil.
The hatred wasn’t hidden anymore. It was laid bare—recorded, memorialized, passed down like a family heirloom.
He ran his fingers over the edge of one of the police photos: a young Black man with a busted eye and busted lip, and an autopsy report of death by excited delirium.
Also clipped to the photo and the autopsy was a Georgetown Hoyas headband that showed this punk was a top lieutenant in the Gangster Disciples street gang.
In the report, Briscoe had written, “Noncompliant. Resisting arrest. Put officers’ safety in danger.
I wanted to make sure that every officer got to go home safely. ”
There were seven more descriptions left in the locker for Jack to study and learn from.
Jack closed and locked the box. He placed it in his bedroom closet behind his winter gear and shut the door.
He didn’t tell anyone about it. Not the department. Not the chief. Not even the other officers who’d quietly revered Briscoe.
But something in him had shifted.
At night, he sometimes replayed Briscoe’s voice in his mind. The jokes. The insults. The warnings. He heard them in the quiet between dispatch calls, in the long shadows at traffic stops. The lessons weren’t just methodical. They were generational.
Briscoe may have been buried, but his ideas were not.
And Jack had inherited more than just a lockbox.