Weekend Freewrite -9/28/2019 - Single Prompt Option 2: After Midnight

The continuation from the "Before Midnight" freewrite ...

A knock at a dorm door, and a full male voice one minute past midnight: “Pizza delivery!”

“Who ordered pizza?” one silly frat boy said to another.

“I don't know – but hey, if it's prepaid, that's free pizza for the cost of the tip. Go get it.”

Greed is what got the door opened to a world of trouble. There was a pizza box, but the man holding it had the wrong uniform on, a stack of warrants on top of the box, and a smooth shove – and, he and three other officers were in the room, snapping photos of the obvious evidence. Captain H.F. Lee of Big Loft, VA's police force had gone back on duty, and three night beat officers had been glad to help.

Captain Lee and his officers wasted no time securing evidence and then arresting everyone in the room on suspicion of trespassing and grand theft. Mrs. Onyx Baxter had the receipts showing the cost of the food stolen: $1,568.

Of course someone was drunk enough to think they could count – four officers, 20 frat boys. Why go quietly? Why, indeed? Three well-trained paramilitary officers, headed by a 23-year Army veteran with a green beret and every conceivable award to go with it – that was why. Oh: Captain H.F. Lee, who went by colonel in his Army Reserve life, had been thoroughly enraged when he had found out who had done what had been done.

“Oh, they just think they can go to my uncle's old school (W&L University in Lexington, formerly known as Washington and Lee, the Lee there being Captain Lee's great-great-great-uncle) and drag our name through the mud again? Is it not enough for these wannabe Confederate leftovers?”

“Please don't take it so hard, Captain Lee,” Mrs. Maggie Thornton had said. “Stupid kids are everywhere.”

Captain Lee kept that in mind when the stupid kids decided to get up and start pressing what they thought was their numerical advantage. He, alone, could have killed all 20 of them … but he and the officers with him contented themselves with letting the the drunk frat boys largely trip themselves up before getting thoroughly manhandled and subdued.

It was a great scene for social media, these 20 frat boys at a party in Big Loft, hauled out and walked slowly, all beat up and cuffed, to police cars. The Lofton County Free Voice had showed up as well, having gotten word that the whole robbing of the church had to do with the usual thing they reported on: Black people getting the system to do right by them and therefore taking down racists, racists whose pictures would be plastered around the world before they were good and booked.

Mrs. Thornton slid over by Captain Lee as things were wrapping up.

“Really stupid kids,” she said.

Captain Lee's anger flared all over again, but he controlled himself … it was impossible to even think of speaking in an angry manner to such women as Mrs. Thornton...

“It is good that you came,” he said. “It was time out for this sort of stupidity a long time ago, and if they didn't know it, they should have known it. Uncle Robert came by his ruination at Appomattox by the same path, and was blessed to even live to get to Lexington – but his father was a Founder. These boys here are ruined, because they don't have the right family names to have a chance of surviving this – they've ruined themselves before they start, and have not yet even had enough pain to get them to where they can get a new start.”

“Aren't you glad,” Mrs. Thornton said, “that God will work that out for them?”

Moments like this were why Maggie Thornton could speak to the heart of Henry Fitzhugh Lee … he calmed all the way down, remembering his own past and his family's past …

“Yes,” he said. “You are right. He will. My job is done when they are booked, and I have walked you home.”