Chapter Eight
After Tom was turned, life went on in Local Probation pretty much as before. People riding
 bicycles on the sidewalk were arrested, stood before the judge, got Community Service 
instead of jail time and showed up at Tom’s office so that Tom could find a Community 
Service site where they could work off their sentence. (You laugh. Try riding a bicycle
 on the sidewalk in the Tidewater Area and see what happens.) Mostly though, real criminals
 were arrested and showed up at the window, dour over having lost their case and miffed 
that the big gold cross that they had bought and worn just for the occasion hadn’t worked 
with the judge. One guy once showed up in Sandi’s window wearing cut-off blue jeans and an
  Hawaiian shirt- you know, pink with flamingos and palm trees. 
“You went before the judge wearing that?” asked Sandi. Don’t you have a suit?” 
“Never owned a suit and never will,” replied surfer dude.
 Well, that explains why your case wasn’t dismissed, thought Sandi. Some were kids
 under 21 who had been caught drinking. One time a whole fraternity showed up in the waiting room.
One time a family showed, miffed that their son had been arrested for having a glass of
 champagne on New Year’s Eve. Now, before Sandi buzzed anyone through her door, a background
 check was done on a computer in the back. If there was an outstanding warrant, Sandi was
 told to call the police who were just down the hall. They would come through the back door
 (the one the Probation Officers sneaked out of to go to lunch) and nod to her. Smiling, 
she would announce to the offender, 
“Oh, Mr. So and so, your Probation Officer is ready to see you now.”  She would buzz him in
 and point to the cubicle he was to go to. The police would emerge, ask him his name, tell 
him to put his hands behind his back, put on handcuffs, and lead him out the back door 
and down the hall to the police station. Half the time the client would fight the police, 
and the cubicle walls would rock. The Probation Officers all had escape routes out of their
 cubicles in case this happened. One, however, once was not able to escape the melee
 because a file cabinet was in the way. After this, she moved the file cabinet so that
 she could get out of the cubicle more quickly. An aspect of all this puzzled Sandi. 
If they had an outstanding warrant, and had gotten arrested again and had told to show up
 for court, and had showed up and stood before the judge and the judge had given them 
Community Service as a punishment, why didn’t the judge know that they had an outstanding 
warrant already and have the baliff arrest them then and there? Another wrinkle was that 
if Sandi called the police and told them they had a client with an outstanding warrant 
and the warrant was more than a couple of states away, the police would not bother to come.
 Once, one client had an outstanding warrant issued out of Massachusetts. When Sandi told the
 police on the phone they said: 
“Ah, that’s Massachusetts’s problem.” And they hung up. 
One time a fellow with the thickest accent imaginable- Sandi guess he was from Russia or
 some East European country- showed up, saying that he had gotten papers or something to 
come to Probation or Court- he wasn’t sure and Sandi couldn’t understand him, either. 
They did a background check, found an outstanding warrant and told Sandi to call the police. 
She called, and told them what she knew of the situation. Only one policeman showed and he 
went out into the waiting room and tried to communicate with the fellow. Realizing that half 
of the problem was communication, the policeman put the cuffs on the man with his hands 
in front and gently led him away as not to scare him. Unusual, because Sandi knew normally
 the police cuff with the hands in the back. Evidently the police thought he was as about as
 dangerous as a dandelion. Now, Sandi was of the opinion that everyone who checked into the 
Probation Office had mental health issues. (After all, she was getting a Master’s in Psychology).
 So she gave to Tom some books about it. The other Officers, of course, were not interested. 
They felt that these folks were some sort of inferior being and were not worth the time to
 rehabilitate. They felt that Community Service was too good for them, they didn’t care how 
long they had to wait in the waiting room with their screaming children, they didn’t care if
 they had no job and no money and no car and so no means of transportation to go to the 
Community Service site or transportation to check into the Probation office on a weekly basis.
 As they were so fond of saying: "If they do the crime, they have to do the time."
 They talked to them in a rude fashion, and when the client became insulted  and began to
 stand up for their rights, they threatened them with case termination which meant sending 
them back to court to go to jail. And the judge went right along with this attitude. One could
 sit in the courtroom and hear the ignorant judge extol the virtues of the hard-working, 
self-sacrificing Probation Officers, who came in early, worked through lunch, stayed late, 
worked for poor pay, etc. and how the client had, in the face of this incredible generosity 
and kindness, had thrown his contempt back into their face. In fact, the only people that 
fit this description of coming early, staying late, etc., were Tom and Sandi. More than one
 client, insulted, had gotten up from his seat, and marched for the door, saying out loud that
 being in prison was not as demeaning as being in the Probation Office and that he would prefer
 to go to prison. The other Probation Officers were only too eager to fill his request. 
Then they would go back to goofing off. 

 When you go about late at night you are more likely to run into the outcasts of society. 
You see stray cats running under cars in the parking lot, and you see the homeless trying
 to stay warm as they try to catch a few winks on the park bench. The people and animals
 who come out at night mostly don’t want to be seen. One night Tom was in D.C., handing 
out dollar bills to the drunks sleeping on the grates. Another time he went out to mail
 a letter at eleven o’clock at night to see a little kitten running down a gutter. 
When the kitten saw him it began to run but Tom bent down and called out: "Here, kitty!" 
It ran to him, a gray striped tabby and climbed up his shirt. He took it home to raise,
 and called it Tiger. Eventually Tiger would become so fat, that its tummy would droop.
 People would say: is your cat pregnant? (It was a boy). And Brady, seeing it one time, remarked:
 “Your cat is so fat, that it needs two trips to haul ass.” 
One time Tom was at a convenience store when it was being robbed. A guy in a ski mask was
 holding a gun at the clerk when Tom came out of the store’s rest room. Ski mask or not,
 Tom recognized the guy as one of his probation clients. Tom stood there, staring at him 
and smiling. The guy turned and looked at Tom and paused.
 “Hey, guy, good to see you,” said Tom. “How’s your mom?”
 Mr. parolee sighed, put the gun in his waistband and said: 
“She’s fine.” And with that, walked out the door. 
Of course, the following week when Mr. parolee showed up for his check-in, Tom was grinning
 like a possum eating a sweet potato but said nothing. 
“I, uh, had a lapse last week.” 
“I’ll say,” said Tom. “Busy giving your poor old mom more gray hairs, eh?” 
In reading one of Sandi’s books about psychology, Tom became fascinated with the
 disorder called the Psychopathic Personality or as the DSM called it, Anti-Social
 Personality Disorder. Sandi, who had read  O’Hare’s book, informed Tom that from her
 studies the psychopath will, as he gets older, outgrow the condition and that statistically,
 psychopaths were normally young white males.  
"Naturally. The devil wants a body to inhabit that he can wreak the most amount of
 damage by," Tom replied half-seriously.
 Tom thought he had a client that fit that bill. This particular fellow had been caught
 embezzling funds. Usually as children those with this mental illness terrorize their
 parents and siblings and teachers. They are into instant gratificiation. It has been said the
 only psychopaths who aren’t in prison are the ones who haven’t been caught yet.  If the
 psychologist or DA sees through their charade and labels them correctly, the psychopath,
 when released, will hunt down and kill the psychologist or DA and his entire family,
 if he can. Like in the movie Cape Fear.  They bore easily and normally want to die painful
 and gruesome and exciting deaths, such as DBC: Death By Cop. It is said that psychopaths
 have no feelings. This is not true. They readily feel lust, anger, hatred and jealousy.
 And that’s about it. But Tom had already taken a trip to Hell and back, and so Tom was more
 than a match for him. Of course, at first the psychopath  wanted to be extremely social,
 wanting to chat about the weather, one’s favorite football team, one’s family, how were 
the kids doing on their sports team… trying to find out as much as possible about the 
parole officer so that later the information could be used against them, the suggestion
 being: give me a clean bill or I’ll show up at your son’s soccer match and take him for
 a little ride…but Tom knew this game and just played ignorant, telling the psychopath
 how he had no family or children or friends and giving no hint where he lived or what
 kind of car he drove…So the psychopath tried the other tack of informing Tom (merely in 
passing, just to make conversation, of course) about all the dangerous things he had done 
in his life, the implication being: give me a clean bill or I’ll jump you in the alley with
 a lead pipe. Smiling all the time, of course. Tom smiled back and told the psychopath how
 in the Army he had qualified with a .45. Tom could see the psychopath was getting frustrated
 about being unable to control Tom. Of course, there are psychologists who believe that this
 mental condition is curable. Oh, dear. Only by old age or death. 

 One time a young lady was sent to Tom to do 40 hours of community service. She had been
 arrested for prostitution. She was a mess. Pale skin, terribly thin, ulcers and needle
 track marks on her arms. Hair greasy. Tom opened up his file cabinet and offered her a
 granola bar.  You know, there’s a lady’s room upstairs where you can freshen up. It has 
a combination lock but just yank on it- it’ll open. The girl had a tragic past. Sexually
 abused by her father, she had run away and begun living on the streets and now was being 
controlled by a pimp. Who probably deliberately gotten her addicted to drugs so that he could
 control her behavior. And the city’s solution to this was to send her to the SPCA for 
community service so that she could shovel dog poop. If she had had an adequate lawyer…but
 what lawyer would represent a client who couldn’t pay? Virginia lawyers were notoriously poor
 because Virginia was still a Contributory Negligence state (instead of a Comparative Negligence 
state), and the Public Defender’s Office in Virginia received the least funding of all fifty states.
 Tom had taken a trip through the Public Defender’s office and seen one lawyer having lunch of 
ramen noodles on a pull-out tray. 
Tom sensed that she was a mixed-up alleycat. Suspicious, treacherous, but still wanting 
love and compassion. You know, good jobs can be had for folks who can type, Tom said. 
She said that she didn’t know how. 
“Well, said Tom, "At the Public Library, they have computers loaded with the program 'Mavis on Typing'.
 Wouldn’t you like to have an office job one day? You know, warm in the wintertime, 
air-conditoned in the summer? Wearing nice suits? Going out to business lunches with 
other office people? Sitting on a nice chair eight hours of the day?” 
She nodded. But a problem was that her pimp gave her a home. And safety from the predators on the street.
 She needed decent family and friends to help her. Tom made some phone calls to area shelters
 but they were all booked up. It being summer, one had just closed for the season. One had gone
 out of business and was being audited by the IRS  because of misappropriation of funds. 
 “Well, I’ll tell you, you have enough for taxi fare, right?” He wrote down an address on a 
slip of paper and gave it to her. “Go to this address around six o’clock. It’s my home. 
I’ll arrive there at six. I have a spare bedroom. I don’t want you going back to the street
 and to your pimp."
 When Tom arrived there at five, the girl was no-where around. He unlocked the door and went
 inside- no girl. Maybe she was out back. He went into the back yard and underneath a bush, 
he found her purse. He could only wonder what had happened. It was obvious that she had been
 there, but where was she now?  He continued to look for her. He was out back when he saw a 
small light on a motorboat that was coming into the waterway that ran behind his house. 
The whole area was tidal, so that many people had houses that fronted lakes and waterways
 and Tom was one of them. Indeed, the whole area was called the Tidewater area, and from Tom’s
 house the Chesapeake Bay, the James River and  the famous Intercoastal Waterway were only a half
 hour away. Tom watched the boat pull up onto the marshy, weedy beach behind his house. It was
 Brady and some dark-complexioned dude. Brady waved hi. 
“What on earth?” asked Tom. “Something wrong with your car?”  
“Ah, it’s Joseph here. He needed a quiet inlet to come ashore.” 
Joseph nodded and smiled, and then began to offload canvas bags onto the beach. 
“What’s that stuff?” asked Tom. 
“Coffee beans,” replied Brady, smiling.
 “Oh, really,” replied Tom.
 “What are you doing here, anyhow?” asked Brady. "You normally work late on Thursdays.” 
“Aren’t we the observant one,” replied Tom.  
At this point a white SUV pulled up into Tom’s driveway, headlights shining brightly
 across the lawn and Stone and two other gentlemen got out. Stone looked at Tom with 
interest. The two men went over to get the canvas bags and to tote them over to the SUV. 
Stone came up to Brady, nodding in assent at some unspoken question, and then smiled at Tom.
 “So, Thomas, nice evening, isn’t it?"
 “So, Stone, what is all this?” 
“We’re running a sting operation,” replied Stone.
 “In which direction?” Tom asked. “Listen, if you want to do drug-running, why don’t you
 do it at your own house?” 
 “Too many neighbors,” replied Brady. “Your location is perfect.”
 “Lucky me,” replied Tom. 
“So, Tom, you have a new work schedule?”
 “No. I’m just looking for a girl that I told to come here.”
 “You sent her here?” asked Brady. Stone looked surprised and then looked at Brady who shrugged.
 “Yeah. She’s a client of mine. On probation. I found her purse under that bush over there,
 so I know she was here.”
 “One of your clients?” Stone asked. 
“Not any more,” breathed Brady, walking up the slope of Tom’s lawn to the SUV. 
“What does he mean by that?” asked Tom to Stone.
 “She’s dead.” 
“What do you mean, ‘she’s dead’?” demanded Tom.
 Stone smiled at Tom, revealing his vampire teeth. “We just came back from getting 
rid of the body. The Baron has a furnace in his basement. Can't leave bodies laying around the place.” 
Tom put his hands on his hips and stared at Stone. Brady saw that his partner needed help and 
he came back down the slope. 
“Listen, hadn’t you ever wondered  how we get our nourishment?” asked Stone. “No.”
 “Well maybe crashing intellectual bores like you can be satisfied with sucking on steaks
 cooked medium rare. But Brady and I are from the old school and we do it the old-fashioned
 way. Actually, you can credit Brady and I with virtually cleaning up the downtown of hookers
 and disease.” 
“So what the hell is this?” 
“Cocaine.” 
“Oh. How different.” 
“Ah, we supply white upper middle class parties. We’re not part of the physical decay downtown.” 
“No, just part of the moral decay uptown,” replied Tom.
 Brady laughed.
 Tom collapsed with dismay on his lawn. 
“Oh, you shouldn’t let such a small amount of cocaine upset you,” replied Brady.
 “It’s not the drugs. It’s the girl.”
 “So, you wanted to tie one on with her tonight, eh?” Brady said. 
“Leave it to you to make that kind of interpretation,” replied Tom, getting up and 
heading for his house. The girl had looked like a photograph that Sandi had once showed 
Tom of her teenage daughter who had died of cerebral palsy. Tom walked by the white SUV
 with the unknown fellows. They saluted him in Spanish, Tom guessed. 
“Dorks,” he replied and he got into his truck and drove to the DA’s home. 
He pulled into the driveway, and rang the doorbell. The butler answered. Without a word,
 Tom ran up the stairs to the third floor where he knew the DA would be. 
“I can’t believe those idiots,” Tom fumed. 
“What idiots?” asked the DA, but he could guess already whom Tom was referring to.
 “Brady and Stone. There was this frail girl, this wraith…she was arrested as a hooker
 and sent to me to do probation. I couldn’t find a homeless shelter to take her in anywhere
 in town. So I told her to go to my house. I intended to put her up for the night.  
Who does she run into? Stone and Brady, who, by the way, are running drugs across my back yard.
 I’m not sure, but I think they killed her.” 
The DA began: “Well, you shouldn’t be fraternizing with clients outside of work. It’s
 called engaging in a dual relationship.”
 “How convenient. Is that the psychobabble shit that professionals have come up with so that they can
 assuage their guilty feelings over not being their brother’s keeper?” fumed Tom.
 The DA laughed at this, but understood the paranormal problems Tom had. 
“How can you stand those two, anyhow?” asked Tom.
 “In my line of work, they have their uses. Their problem, though, is that their souls
 are not old enough yet. With time, I am sure, they will mature, if they live long enough.
 They will become more sensitive and caring. Right now it is just booze and broads and baseball
 with them.”
 “Well, I want them off of my lawn. Suppose I wanted to date a girl? I’d be afraid of bringing
 her to the house, worrying that they would be there, ready to pounce.  Suppose my sister came
 to visit?”
 “You have a sister?” asked the DA.
 “Durn straight. My baby sister, Lauren. She’s a pentagon colonel. And that drug thing. If it 
came out that my property was being used to traffic in drugs, what a dishonor it would bring upon her.
 And me.”
 “I’ll speak to them,” replied the DA. 
The pair went downstairs to run right into Stone and Brady. 
“Well, if it isn’t the liberal, welfare-state, tree-hugging criminal coddler,” said Brady.
 “And your point is…?” asked Tom.