Desperate Measures: The Chase Longmire Story

By D.E. Gray

Chase Longmire is a high ranking 23 year veteran police detective working LAPD’s elite Robbery Homicide Division. He blames his divorce on his own selfishness, not being able to leave behind his job long enough to spend time with his own family and friends. His wife, Rachel, finally decides to leave him realizing she is living with a man who is married to his job and not her.
Chase soon finds out that he has an incurable form of brain cancer and is given just months to live. He has to come to terms with his terminal disease as he sets in motion his plan to provide for his family once he is gone. His plan to return to patrol and commit suicide by thug while on duty so his wife can collect on a 1.5 million dollar premium life insurance policy can be called nothing short of a Desperate Measure.
His plan runs into a major snag when the captain of his division assigns him a new female police officer to train. The female trainee’s father was a New York police officer who was killed on 9/11 when she was just a little girl. After struggling with her last FTO, Chase Longmire is her last chance to becoming one of L A’s finest.
During his quest to end his life, Chase reminisces about a major murder case he solved while he was working detectives, and if that was not enough, during one of his suicide attempts, he is visited by the ghost of an old motor cop he once looked up to.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796012019

D.E. Gray

D. E. Gray began his law enforcement career in 1967, spending twenty-eight years as a Los Angeles police officer, twenty-six of those years working as a motorcycle officer. After his retirement from the LAPD in 1995, Gray was hired by the Escondido Police Department in North San Diego County. He spent another fourteen years there, much of it as a uniformed street cop. After Gray’s retirement from the force in 2008, he authored his first book titled The Warrior in Me, a memoir following his forty-two-year career at both agencies. After writing his first nonfiction book, The Warrior in Me, Gray decided to write his second book titled True to the Blue. Even though his second book is a work of fiction, it is based in part on a true story that includes actual events that the author experienced or witnessed while on the job. Many of the characters portrayed in True to the Blue are patterned after real people who have either worked or crossed paths with D. E. Gray during his forty-two-year career as a seasoned street cop. After experiencing a forty-two-year high working at the two police agencies, Gray realized that he and others like him were being replaced by a new breed of cop, many of whom never had to think outside the box or, more accurately, outside the police manual. The new breed of cops had new cars, new weapons, newer equipment, newer training, and even more modern, newly built police stations. This gave Gray the idea for his third and newest book titled Eclipse of the Blue: For Greater Glory. This story follows the lives of twelve retired LA police officers who band together to commit the perfect crime, proving to themselves that they aren’t too old to outsmart and outwit the newer generation of cops that have taken their places. This story is part The Sting and part Mission Impossible with a surprise ending that will have you rooting for the twelve former cops who call themselves “The Retired Blues Crew.” D. E. Gray once again decided he had another story to tell. This time it would begin where his second book, True to the Blue, left off. He titled it Conflict in Blue: The Marissa Ortega Story. Marissa Ortega is the daughter of deceased police officer Sergio Ortega, who was fired from the Los Angeles Police Department for a bogus charge of filing a false police report, a charge he was later cleared of. Marissa, now an LAPD officer herself, has a score to settle, not just with the notorious Avenues Street Gang, who delivers terror to the citizens of Southeast LA, but with the LAPD itself. She soon finds herself and her partner on a Mexican Mafia hit list after three Avenues Street Gang members die, one of them the little brother of a Mafioso, after the conclusion of a violent police pursuit. Even though she is on a Mafia hit list, Marissa sets out to find the gang member who killed her uncle back before she was born and who is now back out on the streets with EMERO status and who is now considered a parolee at large. Things get worse when the hit on Marissa and her partner by gang members goes awry, and instead, her aunt Nina is murdered, and her partner’s wife is murdered by accident. Marissa eventually teams up with Bryce Stevens, a detective assigned to the Robbery-Homicide Division of the LAPD. Together they devise a plan to trick an Avenues Street Gang member into becoming a confidential informant, hoping he will lead them to the individual who killed her uncle and to the gang members who killed her aunt and her partner’s wife. Conflict in Blue: The Marissa Ortega Story has thrills, suspense, humor, and romance. Gray presently lives in North San Diego County with his wife, Suzanne. ***  

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Copyright © 2019 by D.E. Gray.

Library of Congress Control Number:     2019900819

ISBN:     Hardcover   978-1-7960-1203-3

   Softcover     978-1-7960-1202-6

               eBook           978-1-7960-1201-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 01/24/2019

Xlibris

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CONTENTS

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Chapter 1   Shit Happens

Chapter 2   No News is Good News

Chapter 3   No Time for Heroes

Chapter 4   The Illusion of Reality

Chapter 5   Unforeseeable Obstacle

Chapter 6   Put Up or Shut Up!

Chapter 7   Squad Integrity … Maybe?

Chapter 8   When the Smoke Clears

Chapter 9   Connecting the Dots

Chapter 10   Evil Isn’t Born; It’s Made

Chapter 11   Actions Equal Consequences

Chapter 12   Hiding in Plain Sight

Chapter 13   Unexplained Happenings

Chapter 14   Take the Risk or Lose the Chance

Chapter 15   Vengeance has No Foresight

Chapter 16   The Real World is Where The Monsters Are

Chapter 17   The Means to an End

Epilogue

FOREWORD

D. E. Gray turned in his badge and gun after a forty-two year long career in law enforcement and has taken up writing as his new passion. Attempting to follow in the footsteps of the grand master of the Mystery Writers of America, Joseph Wambaugh, Gray now has five books to his credit.

Even though Wambaugh has more name recognition, with his twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, many of which became best sellers, and with more than a few of those books made it onto the big screen and television, Gray has not been discouraged and continues to write, waiting for his big break.

D. E. Gray, who spent forty-two years in law enforcement before becoming a writer, began his police career in 1967 and spent twenty-eight years as a Los Angeles police officer, with over twenty-five of those years as a motorcycle officer. In those twenty-eight years on the job, he had seen it all. With the miniriots in 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, to the Vietnam protests, the Manson murder clan, the 1969 Black Panther shoot-out, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) shoot-out, the Hillside Strangler task force, the Los Angeles riots, two major earthquakes, and a handful of fires and floods, Gray was a street cop during all those events.

At the age of fifty, Gray left the LAPD and was hired by the Escondido Police Department in North San Diego County. He spent fourteen more years there, much of that time as a street cop.

So what made Gray decide to write his first book titled; The Warrior in Me? As he tells it, it was just before he retired from the Escondido Police Department when he read a couple of books written by other retired Los Angeles motor cops whom he knew and worked with back when he was just a new boot motor cop with the LAPD. The books they wrote were all about their life stories while riding police motorcycles for the LAPD. Both of those officers retired with around twenty years of service each. Gray had a total of forty-two years with the two police agencies, double what they had. Gray thought about all the things he had done during that time and was sure he had enough good stories that might interest readers as well.

So in late 2008, right after retiring, Gray sat down and began writing his first book, The Warrior in Me. It took him almost a year, but when he was finished, he had twenty-four chapters, and set out to find a publisher. As it turned out, thousands of people write books and submit them for publishing on a regular basis. It didn’t take long for Gray to realize that since he wasn’t a well-known figure or celebrity, he was going to have to self-publish his book himself using his own money. With limited funds, Gray was able to publish his first book with the help of a well-known publishing company back east.

Gray’s first book was a labor of love, and even though he lacked name recognition, he had left his legacy for his two grown sons, along with his three grandchildren, a few friends, and extended family members. It should be noted that his wife, Suzanne, has been at his side from the very beginning of his law enforcement career.

Now that Gray had written his first fiction book, he decided to write his first nonfiction book, True to the Blue. This book is based in part on a true story and follows the hardships of Sergio Ortega, a Los Angeles police officer who is unjustly fired from the force for protecting the identity of an East Los Angeles gang member turned confidential informer. The story has suspense, murder, and mayhem along with a little romance and humor.

Gray again used his own money to publish True to the Blue in hopes that the right person would find it and read it, and maybe then it would get the exposure it needed. Until then, Gray continues to write about what he knows best: stories involving street cops. His third book that was published four years ago is titled Eclipse of the Blue: For Greater Glory. It’s about a group of twelve retired Los Angeles cops, eight men and four women, who decide to pull off the perfect crime to regain some of the glory they used to enjoy before they were put out to pasture. Their real motive is to show the younger breed of cops that the old dogs still have what it takes to outsmart them at their own game and not get caught.

Now with three books under his belt, Gray decided to write his fourth book titled Conflict in Blue: The Marissa Ortega Story. This book continues where his second book, True to the Blue, left off.

It’s twelve years later, and it follows the life of Sergio Ortega’s daughter, Marissa Ortega, who is now a Los Angeles police officer herself assigned to the Northeast Division of Operation Central Bureau. When Marissa Ortega and her partner are involved in a violent vehicle pursuit and shoot-out with a carload of Avenues Street Gang members, who all end up getting killed, the Mexican mafia orders a hit on Marissa and her partner. The person who is ordered to carry out the hit is none other than Jorge Mendoza, the Avenues Street Gang member who was now out of prison after serving twenty-eight years for the murder of Marissa’s uncle back before she was born.

It turns out killing a cop is not as easy as it looks when the wrong people are killed, including some of the Avenues Street Gang members themselves. Detective Bryce Stevens, who is investigating one of the gang murders, teams up with Marissa Ortega; and together, they trick an Avenues Street Gang member into becoming an unwilling confidential informant to help them find Jorge Mendoza and bring him to justice.

After taking a short break from writing, Gray returns with his fifth book titled Desperate Measures: The Chase Longmire Story.

Chase Longmire is a high-ranking twenty-three-year veteran police detective working LAPD’s elite Robbery Homicide Division. He blames his divorce on his own selfishness, not being able to leave behind his job long enough to spend time with his own family and friends. His wife, Rachel, finally decides to leave him, realizing she is living with a man who is married to his job and not her. The divorce is amicable, and while his wife agrees to let him keep his police pension intact, he in turn gives her all the equity in the house, along with her car being paid off and a substantial amount of child support.

Even so, Chase and his wife stay on good terms since they both share two wonderful children as he relentlessly provides those little extras for his family while he continues to immerse himself in his police work.

Chase soon finds out that he has an incurable form of brain cancer and is given just months to live. He realizes that keeping his own retirement was a mistake and will leave his family high and dry after his death. Chase Longmire has to come to terms with his terminal disease as he sets in motion his plan to provide for his family once he is gone. His plan to return to patrol and commit suicide by thug while on duty so his wife can collect on a premium life insurance policy can be called nothing short of a desperate measure

His plan runs into a major snag when the captain of his division assigns him a new female police officer to train. The female trainee’s father was a New York police officer and was killed on 9/11 when she was just a little girl. After struggling with her last FTO, Chase Longmire is her last chance to becoming one of LA’s finest.

All of D. E. Gray’s books are available through online.

Suzanne Milam Gray

Scottsdale, Arizona

* * *

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I was sitting at my desk, working on my next book, Desperate Measures: The Chase Longmire Story, when it dawned on me on what a wonderful life I have had. I am still married to the same woman who has been by my side since before I became a cop in 1967. It hasn’t been easy for her, what with having to raise three children, two boys, and if you count me, that makes three. Just the same, she allowed me to go off and play cops and robbers, not knowing if I would come home on any given night. Having worked nights for the greater part of my career in the mean streets of Los Angeles and then Escondido, she certainly deserves a lot of the credit for supporting me and my lasting forty-two years at a job that I love.

I signed on to Facebook and checked out all the postings between the people I worked with at the Escondido Police Department from 1995 to 2008. Many of those who are now retired, if not talking about their families and travels, were reminiscing about how the job was done in the good old days. It’s hard to believe that my time there is now considered the good old days. I definitely had a good time when I was there, and the experience was more than I could have hoped for. I stayed on longer then I originally intended, giving them fourteen years of what I believe was a whole new chapter in my life.

Next I switched over to a Facebook group of retired Los Angeles police officers who I worked with from 1967 to 1995. They, too, were talking about the good old days when we worked a multitude of incidents that included a couple of riots where attempts to burn down the city were present, the 1984 Olympics, and a gaggle of other noteworthy escapades during those memorable years. Having worked twenty-six of my twenty-eight years on motors (two-wheel motorcycles), I had a lot of stories to tell and got to meet a lot of people.

That was when it hit me. I never believed in reincarnation before that is, until maybe now. Looking back, before I was a cop in Escondido, I was a cop in Los Angeles. That was forty-two years, and for some people, that was two lifetime careers. Throw in my time I was in the Marine Corps, my days of driving big trucks in northern California, and a multitude of other small jobs, and well, just maybe I’m now going through my fourth reincarnation, this time as an author/writer, having written four books and finishing up on my fifth book. And they’re all about what I know best: the life of a cop working the streets of a big city.

I should point out that all my books have been dedicated to the hardworking street cops in any metropolitan city, and that was because I was one of them. I never climbed the promotional ladder and I loved being outdoors working the streets. The two hardest things I did was park my city motorcycle on the last day of work at the LAPD and walk away. The next hardest thing was on December 26, 2008, when I left the Escondido PD.

But enough of that. I now must pay tribute to the other important people in my life, and that would be my children. My oldest son, Sean Tavis Gray, and his wife, Suppalak Gray (she’s from Thailand), live in Los Angeles. My youngest son, Geoffrey David Gray, and his wife, Adrienne Gray, live in Texas. I also have three grandchildren, Nicholas Gray on Geoff’s side and Lleyton Gray and Llewyn Gray from Sean’s side. Life with all its ups and downs has treated me well, and I don’t have much in the way of complaints.

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Training is learning the rules. Experience is knowing the exceptions.

PROLOGUE

I remember an old cop telling me, "Don’t take life so seriously. You’ll never get out alive." What I think he meant by that was, we’re all going to die someday so you might as well make the best of it. Over the years, I often thought about him and what he told me, and it wasn’t that long ago that he passed away at the ripe old age of eighty-nine. If nothing else, his spontaneous words of wisdom back then taught me to always keep my sense of humor no matter how bad things were going.

I was only twenty-three years old when he uttered those words of wisdom, and I barely had two years on the job. I was assigned to the LAPD’s North Hollywood Division as a patrol officer, and he was an old motorcycle officer who I often crossed paths with either in the station or out in the field. His name was Emory Dulkurn, and he had twenty-nine years on the job and was just one year away from pulling the pin and retiring. When you looked at him, you knew he had seen a lot in his lifetime. Even though his Danner motor boots were highly spit shined and his uniform was meticulous, his face and hands were rough and leathery from the years of riding the city motorcycle while being exposed to the extreme cold and heat that southern California weather had to offer. I used to wonder how many thousands of tickets he had written with those hands or how many deuces’¹ he had arrested, not to mention how many pursuits he had been in and how many fights he withstood.

I envisioned Emory Dulkurn as a wise elder who had done more in his lifetime than most men on the department have ever attempted. He once told me about the time he responded to a robbery in progress at a liquor store, and when the suspect came out the front door pointing a shotgun at him, he had no other choice but to shoot him. The suspect ended up dying, but even so, Dulkurn never lost his sense of humor.

Emory said that after the incident, they sent him to the department shrink. She was, by all accounts, an attractive lady who played the part well, with her large oversize glasses slipping down to the tip of her nose while peering over the top and writing notes on her yellow legal tablet. Her job was to see if Emory was still fit for field duty or if the shooting somehow affected him psychologically.

So the interview began.

Psychologist: Didn’t you feel bad when you killed that man?

Dulkurn: Yes.

Psychologist: That’s OK. It’s normal to feel that way when you take someone’s life.

Dulkurn: That’s not why I feel bad.

Psychologist: What do you mean?

Dulkurn: Everyone keeps telling me it’s normal to feel bad after you kill someone. That’s what bothers me. I don’t feel bad about killing that guy. You see, he was trying to kill me. What I feel bad about is that I don’t feel bad when I’m suppose to.

Psychologist: OK, I think we’re done here.

It was no secret that I kind of idolized this man, and most young cops like myself always looked up to the old motor cops who we referred to back then as Iron Horseman. Even after he retired, I found myself visiting him at his home whenever I had the chance.

Back then, I wanted to follow in Emory’s footsteps; however, that day would never come. Being a motor cop wasn’t for everyone, and even though the dream was there, it just wasn’t in the cards for me, with other things dictating a different direction.

I knew back then that Dulkurn had a lot more life experiences under his belt than I did, and I figured that he pretty much knew what he was talking about. He once told me that being a good cop is like coming to work in a wet suit and peeing in your pants. It’s a nice warm feeling, but you’re the only one who knows anything has happened.

I credit him with sharing his outlook on life that led to my lasting twenty-three years in a job where you see the worst of the worst and deal with the pariah of society. Still, I was shooting for a thirty year pension and had seven more years of not taking life so seriously and making the best of whatever life dished out.

Now that I was forty-five years old, it seemed that my someday, as what Emory Dulkurn was referring to back then, was approaching rather quickly. What do I mean by my someday? Well, let me explain.

Now, I don’t know why, since I’d pretty much ignored my ex-wife Rachel’s nagging me over the years for me to get a complete physical checkup; and while we may have been divorced, we didn’t hate each other since we both shared two great children. Sean, my oldest son, was seventeen years old; and Geoff, my youngest, just turned fifteen. Both had plans to go to college after graduating from high school, and anyone who has children knows higher education doesn’t come cheap.

For some reason, I now decided it was time to follow Rachel’s advice and get that physical she had been nagging me about all these years. They had been pushing these CT whole-body scans at work for some time, and it was supposed to reveal all those hidden problems that a regular physical might not detect. The scan procedure only took twenty to thirty minutes, and my city health plan covered the cost. So I had no reason to put it off any longer. After all, I felt OK, and I had no complaints to speak of. And even though I couldn’t run as fast or jump as high as I did when I was twenty-three, I felt confident I would breeze through the scan with no problems whatsoever.

CT body scans, which stands for computed tomography, takes a series of x-ray images of a person’s heart, lungs, abdomen, and pelvis. Specifically, the images are very thin cross-sectional slices of the interior of the body. When these slices are reassembled on a computer, they provide doctors with detailed views of bones, organs, and other tissue.

It had been two days since I got the news, and it knocked the wind out of me. I was told that I had cancer, not just any cancer but glioblastoma multiforme² a malignant brain tumor that had aggressively spread throughout much of my brain and it was deemed terminal. They abruptly told me to get my personal things in order since, in all likelihood, I only had six to eight months at most before it was lights-out. It was a hard pill to swallow, and it just didn’t make any sense. Other than a few headaches lately and some light headedness, which I attributed to working too much, I felt fine. I hadn’t had so much as a cold in the last five years, and in fact, the captain of my division gave me a department commendation for not using any sick days in the last eight years.

Now that I had the bad news, there were so many things spinning through my head that I didn’t know where or whom to turn to. I knew my wife, who never remarried, would not be able to support the boys by herself. When we divorced, I gave her all the equity in the house and paid off her car in exchange for my not losing half my pension. My pension was now all mine, and that was what scared me the most knowing that once I was gone, no one would get one penny of it. I always figured Rachel would remarry someday since she was still considered a very attractive woman. For some reason, she never did, and she devoted as much time as she could to raising our two boys.

While I was still paying child support payments to her, I knew it wasn’t enough to supplement what she made from her part-time job as an office receptionist at a medical facility. I was still forking over extra money every month so she could take care of the boys’needs, paying for braces on their teeth and uniforms needed for their school sports programs, to name a few. Since she had full physical custody of both the boys, it now became apparent to me that after I was gone, she could lose the house, there would be no more child support payments, no more city-paid health care in case of an emergency, or enough money to sponsor their college educations. As a police officer in the city of Los Angeles, once you die, only your surviving spouse is entitled to your pension; but then our divorce agreement ruled out Rachel getting any of that.

I wasn’t exactly living a lavish lifestyle myself, since I was now residing in a low-rent, one-bedroom apartment building located on Burbank Boulevard in the heart of Van Nuys Division; however, I was still close enough to see my kids, who reside with their mother in Simi Valley, twenty-five miles away.

Living my meager lifestyle never bothered me in that one might say I was still married to my job, which afforded me the opportunity to support my family by working a lot of overtime as a detective lll in the Robbery Homicide Division. Sure, there were many nights when I dreaded coming home to my empty apartment and being alone, but I could always drown out my sorrow by reading a good book until I finally dozed off.

I was still driving my 1995 Volkswagen Vanagon with 130,000 miles on it, which I bought back when the boys were small and the four of us were a happy family. The van was paid for and ran like a top, and I decided to keep it as my transportation vehicle and for the few times Rachel let me take the two boys camping up at June Lake in Mono County, California.

Now all that had changed, and after all these years, it seemed that Emory Dulkurn’s prolific words of wisdom would now rear up and bite me in the ass. I would have to start taking my life more seriously now that it was coming to an abrupt halt. In hindsight, my putting my job before my family was a selfish act on my part that may have very well jeopardized the ones I loved the most. Somehow, I would have to do something to turn this impending tragedy around, and there wasn’t much time to make that happen.

I’d always considered myself a problem solver, but looking back over the last few years, it was obvious to me that it was my fault I was never able to save my marriage. Now it was time for me to put that old proverb "Desperate times call for desperate