Nikki Armstrong: Measure of a Woman

By Vinny Green

Detective Nikki Evelyn Armstrong, a kickass decorated member of the United States Navy and the New York City Police Department, stood at the site of the freshly dug grave surrounded by its moist piles of dirt. From where she stood, Nikki could see all the acreage known as the Canarsie Cemetery. The cemetery was a City-owned burial ground, which

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vincent Green
• Release date: Mar 30, 2024
• ISBN: 9781962587310

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Contents

EPISODE ONE: MOLD ME

Chapter 1: Nothing in Life Happens in a Vacuum

Chapter 2: It’s a Family Thing

Chapter 3: Jazz Being Jazz

Chapter 4: By Any Means Necessary

Chapter 5: The Old-Man and the Professor

Chapter 6: Who Took Fourth?

EPISODE TWO: SCHOLASTIC ACHIVEMENT

Chapter 7: Growing Pains

Chapter 8: Meeting the Challenge

Chapter 9: Big Rig Suicide

Chapter 10: Plant Your Foot

Chapter 11: Let the Games Begin

Chapter 12: Would You Like Fries with That Crow?

Chapter 13: Making It Work

EPISODE THREE: FORGED IN FIRE

Chapter 14: No One Left Behind

Chapter 15: I Got Your Six

Chapter 16: My Integrity

Chapter 17: May I Speak Freely

EPISODE FOUR: AT LONG LAST

Chapter 18: Rank Is Sometimes Just a Smell

Chapter 19: Training Day

Chapter 20: Embracing the Call

Chapter 21: Don’t Call Me Out My Name

EPOSIDE FIVE: AUNTIE NIKKI’S GOT THIS

Chapter 22: I Don’t Even Bank Here

Chapter 23: All That Is Missing Is the Cape

EPISODE SIX: VACATION YOU SAY!

Chapter 24: Happy Trails

Chapter 25: An Ear to Hear

Chapter 26: Under the Boardwalk

EPISODE SEVEN: TIME FOR CHANGE

Chapter 27: Making Grade

Chapter 28: Let’s shine the light on law enforcement blight

Chapter 29: Kobayashi Maru

Chapter 30: Shaker or Bust

Chapter 31: Trust Doesn’t Come with the Badge

Chapter 32: Day of Reckoning

Chapter 33: Cops, Cops Everywhere, but Trusting, I Don’t Think

Chapter 34: Advantage, Armstrong!

Chapter 35: Victory at Sea

EPISODE EIGHT: COMING FULL CIRCLE

Chapter 36: Broken Doors; Splintered Careers

Chapter 37: No Justice

The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis!

—Dante Alighieri

EPISODE ONE

MOLD ME

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Chapter 1

Nothing in Life Happens in a Vacuum

If my peace depends on external reality, then it is not my peace.

Vinny Green

Detective Nikki Evelyn Armstrong, a decorated member of the United States Navy and the New York City Police Department, stood at the site of the freshly dug grave surrounded by its moist piles of dirt.

From where Nikki stood, she could see all the acreage known as the Canarsie Cemetery. The necropolis was a city-owned burial ground. The property ran the length of several blocks along Remsen Avenue in Brooklyn, New York.

This final resting place was just a few blocks south of Canarsie Park, once a part of the famed hunting ground of the Canarsie Indians, and about two miles from the Belt Parkway, the handy escape route for many Canarsie residents needing to just get away for a while. This sacred ground was open to the public as a site to honor loved ones who had gone home to be with the Lord. For those who questioned the existence of a higher being, it was no more than a final resting place.

Over the years, it had become increasingly the resting place for those who had passed on with no one willing to, or possibly able to, celebrate their life. Many of the Canarsie residents had taken to calling it Boot Hill.

Nikki wiped a tear as her finely manicured, slender fingers stroked the oversized wooden casket sprinkled with knotholes, splinters, and other imperfections that housed the small body of Kamari Prescott, a young boy who seemed to love life despite its harsh realities.

Kamari had been befriended by abuse far too often in his battered young life. To then be visited by death at a time which Nikki believed was much sooner than the good Lord intended. To her, this was beyond freakin’ outrageous. As she stood at the grave, she questioned the wisdom of God’s gift of free will.

It was clear to Nikki that human beings had misused this precious gift. One day soon she hoped God would remove the scales from the marred eyes of what seemed to be countless human beings daily abusing this unmerited gift.

It appeared that in Boot Hill, casket purchases for impoverished members of society were in bulk and only came in one size, much like death itself.

Nikki felt there was nothing spiritual or humbling about where she stood; everything came about in an assembly line process. The sole intent was nothing more than getting the expired product to the assigned hole in the ground.

Nikki shook her head when she realized that the hole she stood before already had four other wooden caskets resting in it. Each one riddled with imperfections and housing the remains of life all but forgotten.

Nikki thought, Dad preached that we enter life alone and we exit it alone. Young Kamari’s resting place seemed filled with soulless bodies assigned to spend time with the lad, at least until the rapture. I guess no one in Boot Hill got the damn memo.

The business approach in Boot Hill seemed to be: always room for one more. Life meant nothing here. All that mattered was keeping the damn assembly line of death moving.

Nikki was flanked on either side by impatient gravediggers leaning on government-issued shovels. These merchants of death were on their third chorus of reminding Nikki that union rules required that they take lunch at noon.

There was a dirt truck standing by just a few yards away. Leaning on the truck with a clear, do-not-give-a-damn attitude, complete with their own government-issued shovels, were three other gravediggers, not one of whom seemed to show an ounce of care or compassion.

These disposers of flesh were merely waiting to whisk away Nikki’s assigned merchants of death to the nearest fast-food joint, for the newest artery-blocking meal of the day. A meal that would bring them a step closer to their own holes in the ground as soon as Nikki released them from their current disposal chores.

Nikki smiled, giving no other response. Sadly, she noted that bureaucracy had no bounds, and seemed to carry a universal passport of apathy. Unfortunately, this apathy appeared to find comfort even in the grave.

It saddened Nikki deeply that she and the gravediggers were the only ones in attendance for the homegoing service of a little boy whose life had painfully ended. A life that was taken with no mercy by his uncaring bitch of a mother.

The reality of this setting renewed Nikki’s rage over the entire heartless chain of events. As she stood wondering if there was more she could have done, or should have done, she began to ponder the injustice of it all.

To her, it all seemed purposely designed to fail the people and to perpetuate the existence of spinning wheel bureaucracy, injustice, and the irrelevance of truth. The entire elaborate system turned out to be all form with no substance.

Nikki reflected on the words of her former ethics professor, "Nothing in life happens in a vacuum. Everything that you do or say will influence someone else whether you want it to or not. The simple truth is that because you breathe, someone’s life will be changed."

Nikki never wholly embraced these words or understood how they related to the Public Ethics class she was taking.

Well, more than a decade had elapsed since she first heard those words and began to ponder their meaning. It was only now as she stood in a cemetery surrounded by broken lives, graves marked by numbers instead of names, that Nikki wondered who all of these people were or could have been in life. It was here that the wisdom of her professor’s words spoke with clarity to both her heart and mind.

The little boy in the casket had a corporeal existence of less than five years. He was born into an abusive household, birthed by a brutal mother unmatched by any woman Nikki had ever crossed paths with in her life.

Nikki didn’t know Kamari as a child who would run to sit on her lap whenever they were in each other’s presence. Nor did their time ever consist of talk of his day, of conversing with imaginary friends, superheroes, or what’s for dinner. She and the boy never had a conversation focused on his hopes and dreams for his future. Nor had they ever had a conversation focused on what he might want to grow up to be in life. What Nikki did know with certainty about him was that because Kamari breathed the air, her life was irrevocably changed.

While the experience of losing him hurt her deeply, she hoped the change was somehow for the better; she wondered how that could be, but she had learned over the years that hope was always a good thing.

Nikki looked at her cell phone and saw that it was ten minutes before noon. She turned to one of the gravediggers who was patting his foot in the mud and impatiently tapping the face of his watch, which was now wet from the drizzle that had begun to fall again.

She picked up a handful of moist dirt, thankful that the earlier rain had not turned the soil into mud. Nikki touched the casket and thanked the young boy for coming into her life, if even for a moment. She spoke these often-heard words, Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, as she sprinkled the dirt over the warped wooden casket.

Nikki turned to the gravediggers, thanked them for bearing with her, and gave them each a twenty-dollar bill as she slowly navigated mud holes, wooden boards, and patches of dry land making an effort to return to the parking lot without destroying her favorite high heel shoes in the process. With each step, she repeated to herself, Nothing in life happens in a vacuum.

Chapter 2

It’s a Family Thing

Can’t is not an option!

Vinny Green

For Nikki Evelyn Armstrong, it has never been about years of experience, annual salary, or name recognition as much as it was about the desire to make a positive difference.

Nikki was born and raised in the Bronx, New York, in one of the many federally subsidized Housing Authority developments that peppered the sometimes worm-laden Big Apple landscape.

Nikki grew up in a stable two-parent household surrounded by love with her three brothers and two sisters.

By all accounts, the matriarch of the clan, Mabel Armstrong, affectionately known by most as Mama Armstrong and by a few as That Bitch Mabel, was a stunningly attractive woman, who turned her fair share of men’s heads.

There was also a scheming crop of envious and jealous females in the neighborhood who spent a good portion of their days focused on doing harm to Mabel Armstrong. This was for no other reason than she was all they had hoped to be but never took the time to try to be.

Mabel Armstrong was well aware of the existence of these conspiratorial and insufferable women. She always felt they weren’t worthy of her time and made the conscious choice to ignore their hateful ways.

Mabel was a staunch believer in the adage, Look, but don’t touch. If these spiteful clucking hens adhered to that rule, they would have no problems with her. As for the hateful women that dared to cross the line of civility, she openly welcomed all challengers.

Mabel was a no-nonsense woman who would fight anyone, be it man, woman, or beast, that foolishly stepped to her with intent to do harm.

Most members of the Mabel Haters Club were aware of this position and dared not cross the proverbial line when it came to Mabel Armstrong or any of her offspring.

There was a well-known tale in the neighborhood of Mama Armstrong besting two pit bulls that dared to try to lay siege on Mikaela, the oldest of her three daughters.

Both K-9s and their owner left the skirmish, bruised, battered, and limping. Mikaela survived without any physical wounds or marks but was forever cautious around dogs of any kind.

Mabel, forever the victor, left the bout with a new nickname, Homerun Mabel. The name alluded to the force with which Mabel swung the bat she deployed to keep the dogs at bay and a few pop-fly type swings she directed toward the knees of the dog’s owner to experience as a reminder to maintain control of his animals in the future.

Mabel didn’t care for the nickname, and in less than a week, it disappeared from open use. Very few people called Mama Armstrong by her first name. It was either Mrs. Armstrong or Ms. Mabel. Anything outside of that risked experiencing the Wrath of Mabel for being too familiar.

Whereas Mabel knew many of the residents in the neighborhood and always come to their aid when called upon, those that she identified as friend existed on a list that did not need to be numbered.

Ms. Mabel was a military brat. Both her father and mother were career soldiers. This being the case, she spent most of her formative years moving around to different military bases. Most of them stateside, but she did spend her fair share of time at bases overseas and attended many Department of Defense schools for military children. Mabel was even fluent in several languages.

Mama Armstrong made an effort to pass on her linguistic skills to her children. For the most part, Nikki and her oldest sister Mikaela were the only ones that made a serious effort at drinking from the well of linguistic nectar tended by their mother.

Nikki spoke fluent French and Spanish. She could pretty much hold her own in various Russian dialects and Farsi. She also dabbled in the Igbo language, having learned what she could from a schoolmate.

While Mabel was an honor student during her academic years, she was also as tough as they come. Due to her years spent on military bases and exposure to a multitude of cultures, she was skilled in the use of firearms, edged weapons, and while capable of being as ladylike as need be, she was a formidable street fighter.

There exists an extensive list of people over the years who can personally attest to her skill and accuracy with defensive weapons and empty-hand combat.

Nikki’s dad, Clayton Winston Armstrong, the patriarch of the family, was a tender, caring man that went out of his way to do for others. He spent more than twenty years as a proud United States Marine. He received two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star for his heroism in the Vietnam conflict and the brief military skirmish that took place on the island of Granada in 1983.

Clayton Armstrong lived by the creed of No Man Left Behind. In Nikki’s view, supported by most who encountered him, Clay was a man among men. He not only demanded respect, but he also earned it.

There was never any doubt that Papa Armstrong loved his family and took the role of father and husband very seriously.

While his wife never seemed to need his protection, he made it clear that he was her champion and was prepared to pick up the gauntlet if any man dared disrespect her.

Clay Armstrong taught all his children the importance of respecting women, authority, and their elders. With that bit of enlightenment, Clay Armstrong also taught his offspring to fear no man who walked on two legs.

Clay was a God-fearing man who required any family member living under his roof to attend church, or in the alternative, seek somewhere else to live. This rule was not open to negotiation.

Clay’s oldest daughter, Mikaela Bethany Armstrong, was a bit different from the rest of his offspring. Mikaela left home at an early age to join the Peace Corps. She had a close friend who attended the Million Man March in Washington, D.C., in 1995. When that friend returned from the event, he formed an organization called Each One, Support One. Most people called it E1S1 for short.

In growing up, Mikaela believed intensely in the mission of E1S1, which simply boiled down to helping those in need wherever they may be. She felt strongly that she could complement that mission by joining the Peace Corps and extending the code of E1S1 to those across the seas in need.

Mikaela was a staunch believer in the concept of Pay it forward. Whenever anyone was kind enough to reach out and offer her a helping hand, she did all that she could to show a similar kindness to someone else. When Mikaela joined the Peace Corps, her assignment was the African continent.

Mikaela was intent that she plays a role in ensuring that the lives of those in need might change by the existence of the E1S1 mindset. Over the years, Mikaela kept in touch with family through letters, e-mail, and as technology developed, Skype.

She rarely got home for visits but made it clear that family was still important to her. Nikki always spoke proudly of her sister and her commitment to a cause she believed in without question.

None of the family except for Papa Armstrong and Nikki understood Mikaela’s career choice. Still, everyone supported her desire to move forward in her calling.

Nikki’s oldest brother Grayson Armstrong, also known as Gray-Matter, was a no-nonsense type of guy. He earned his nickname while defending an elderly woman in the neighborhood who had been set upon by two junkies attempting to steal her pocketbook to satisfy their need for a drug fix.

As one of the reprobates attempted to hit the woman with a glass bottle, Grayson stepped in and disarmed the felon who stumbled back in the scuffle and struck his head on a wooden telephone pole, causing a large gash in his head.

Many of the onlookers mistakenly identified the fluid seeping from the individual’s head as brain grey matter. Hence, Grayson’s nickname became Gray-Matter.

Grayson didn’t care for the nickname. However, it did send a message that he was not a man to trifle with, so he never made a sincere effort at stopping its use.

Like his mother, Grayson didn’t suffer fools gladly. While he never looked for a fight, he also never ran from one. To his credit, he never lost one either.

Gray-Matter lived by two hard-and-fast rules. Those rules were: never disrespect anyone in his family and never ever disrespect him. The violation of either of those rules has placed a considerable number of neighborhood thugs and so-called tough-guys seeking services in local hospital emergency rooms.

Gray-Matter came by his inflexible demeanor honestly. It seems that his hard stance on life took shape at the hands of his well-respected parents. While both felt he took his commitment to the extreme, they were proud of the fact he believed in family and respect.

Nikki’s second oldest brother was very much like their father, soft-spoken, unbelievably giving, and very sure of himself. His name was Jackson, but everyone called him Kansas City, or KC for short.

Nikki never knew where the nickname originated, possibly from his days as a cross-country truck driver. She never felt the need to find out.

KC was the complete flipside of his older brother, Gray-Matter. However, like everyone else in the Armstrong clan, he knew how to handle himself. When called upon to do so, he would step up without hesitation.

Patronizing countless and nameless trucker drive-ins and dives across the country, KC had his fair share of physical confrontations. His girlfriend Theresa, and later wife, told tales of One-Punch Jackson, which is how she described him because of the many rides that she took with him across the country.

On more than one occasion, some surly truck driver or diner patron approached Theresa and initiated some type of romantic encounter. KC, always being the better man, would work to resolve the issue without incident.

In the instances where KC’s kindness and gentle approach were mistaken for weakness or fell on deaf ears, it usually only took one punch to end the dispute and open the eyes of the ne’er-do-well of his poor choice of words and disrespect for KC’s princess.

KC was unbelievably skilled at handling all types of long-haul and heavy-duty vehicles. He passed some of these skills on to Nikki at an early age. In fact, she was still in her first year of high school when she first got behind the wheel of a heavy-duty cement truck.

While Nikki never called the skill into service in the same way her brother had, she kept her own skills sharp. In fact, her ability to handle heavy-duty vehicles became a part of her future crime-fighting arsenal, during covert operations, surveillance, and to the horror of her superiors and delight of onlookers, in hostage situations.

Unconventional, Nikki never thought twice about jumping into a bulldozer, pickup truck, or the like and taking bad guys by surprise by driving through walls or taking down doors to end tense hostage situations. She was a unique molding of mother, father, sister, and brother, but at the same time, her ineffable self.

Nikki’s third brother was a few years older than she was, and very much his own man. Everyone in the neighborhood called him Doc. His actual name was Tiberius Winston Armstrong. Tiberius was low-key and very caring of others. Whenever you saw Doc, he was eating a Slim-Jim or a Twizzler. If that weren’t the case, you could be certain that he had one or the other in his pocket. Doc always held himself out to be the