They said Jagg was so good at his job because he didn’t believe a word out of anyone’s mouth. Didn’t take a thing at face value. While most people believed a stranger would do good given the opportunity, Jagger believed that person would cut off your balls and wrap your dick around your throat given the opportunity—something I heard he’d done, by the way. Innocent until proven guilty? No, not in Jagg’s delusional world. Guilty until proven innocent, every time.
I’ll never forget my first experience with the detective. It was my first week at BSPD. I’d been given the graveyard shift and was somewhere between watching a tutorial about evidence collection and contemplating how to remedy my boredom woody when Jagg burst through the door to the bullpen, singlehandedly dragging a man twice his size who had a bloodied lip, two swollen eyes, and a swastika on his neck. I recognized him instantly. The infamous Pistol Pete, one of the most notorious gang members in the tri-state area. Pete was loosely connected to several homicides but the cops couldn’t link enough evidence to ever arrest the man—until Max Jagger took the case. Rumor was the detective spent days, weeks, stalking the gangster. I mean, literally stalking the guy. From his car, a drone, the woods surrounding the gangster’s house. Rumor was Jagg spent thirty-one hours perched in a ninety-foot hickory tree in Pete’s backyard with nothing but his camera, his gun, a pack of beef jerky and a flask, before capturing the moment Pistol Pete tried to sell a handful a jewelry he’d stolen from an old woman who’d been beaten to death during a home invasion. Those pictures had been enough to get a warrant to search Pete’s home and, within six hours, Jagg had arrested a man who later confessed to killing six people over three states. Confessed, because, rumor was, Jagger had threatened Pete with photos of him on his hands and knees accepting an unconventional kind of payment from a fellow gang member. Decades in federal prison, a pile of dead bodies and evidence to match had nothing on Pete’s sexual orientation, apparently. Jagg had found the man’s weakness and exploited it, saving years of trials, thousands of tax payers’ dollars, and perhaps most importantly, providing closure to the victim’s families.
After getting the confession, Jagg breezed out of the station with a cup of coffee in one hand and a stack of files in the other, like it had been just another day at the office. While most cops would be gloating and celebrating, Jagger went back to his house, wherever that was. Not many people knew where Jagg hung his shoulder holster. I imagined a cave, or a dungeon of sorts.
A day didn’t go by that I didn’t see Jagg either in the station or working a case somewhere in town. He was the definition of a workaholic. People said he didn’t sleep, rarely ate. The man put everything he had into his cases, cutting through red tape, legally and illegally, to get things done. He was a dog with a bone when it came to solving a case, hence the nickname Dog.
Stories of his days as a ruthless, merciless Navy SEAL proceeded him, as well as the number of bodies he’d left in his wake. It was still debated why he’d left the military. Some said it was because he was dishonorably discharged after kicking his CO’s ass. Some say he just simply walked out one day because there were no more terrorists to kill. Others even suggested he’d turned, hated the very country he’d spent decades defending. No one really knew. He’d just shown up in Berry Springs three years ago and applied to be a beat cop. I heard that when he accepted his job at BSPD, crime in our small town immediately went down by seventeen percent. Six months into the job, that number dropped to twenty-seven percent. Two years after that, Jagg accepted a position with the state police, as a detective. His territory covered multiple counties around Berry Springs and had the same effect on surrounding crime rates. Detective Max Jagger was a feared man.
You see, Jagg had his own Wild West way of doling out punishment beyond what the courts offered. The stories were always spun, either by Lieutenant Colson, or “witnesses,” to Jagg’s outbursts—more often than not, blondes with a pair of double D’s and a dazed, satisfied look behind their eyes. There were even a couple times where the infamous Steele brothers, of Steele Shadows Security, took the rap for one of his “disciplinary actions.” Everyone would simply look the other way… until he cracked the wrong man’s jaw.
Max Jagger might have been like an immortal God around town but everyone has their secrets, and thanks to my ability to flutter from room to room without being noticed, I knew his.
And it was a big one.
I was there. He didn’t know that, though, of course. It was a typical, small-town Saturday night, my third night on the job. Berry Springs was having their annual bluegrass festival to kick off tourist season. Main Street was closed, cars and trucks replaced by tents and food carts. A band played on a makeshift stage in the center of the square. It was one of those rare times that the town’s cowboys and hippies came together in a blur of spiked coffee and glaucoma medicine. Jagg slinked through the crowd, not speaking, not drinking, not laughing, certainly not dancing. Working a case, I knew, so I followed him. I watched him, his gaze skittering from belt buckle to belt buckle, taking inventory on each person with a gun hidden on their hip. Then, he slipped out of the crowd and into the shadows where I followed. I lost him for a moment, until I heard a scream. I took off on the direction of the single shout and that’s when I saw a pair of silhouettes behind the maintenance building of the city park. Drawing my gun, I sprinted across the footbridge but came to a halt when the faces came into view. Why? Shock, really. I jumped behind a tree and watched Detective Max Jagger beat the living snot out of a kid at least two decades younger than his rumored-to-be forty years. Jagg didn’t fight like a normal, rough and tumble redneck. The man was like a feral cat, with lightning quick speed and accuracy that involved some sort of martial arts. MMA, more like. The kid didn’t stand a chance and was on his stomach with both arms twisted behind his back in seconds flat. Jagg said something in the guy’s ear, then pushed off him, and I remember grinning when the kid took off like he’d seen a ghost, stumbling and tumbling down a hill.
Then, I realized why.
I watched Jagg help a younger boy off the ground, using a piece of ripped fabric from the kid’s T-shirt to dab the blood from his face. The kid was skinnier than me, and based on the confused, sluggish movements, had been beaten pretty badly. I watched Jagg guide the battered boy across the park and fade into the darkness. The next day, I learned that boy was an autistic junior high kid who played the violin, only when his flute hadn’t been busted in half. Rumor was, after the fight, Jagg had taken the kid to Steele Shadows Security to be taught self-defense. It was also rumored that he’d been gifted a priceless, vintage car for all his troubles. Two weeks later, the kid rolled up to high school in a gleaming, six-figure mustang and was never bullied again.
Sounds like everyone won, right?
Wrong.
The bully? Received a new set of front teeth, courtesy of his father, the governor. That’s right, Max Jagger had beaten the living shit out of the governor’s son. Normally, this would’ve been enough to remove the detective’s badge and gun, but good ‘ol Jagger marched himself into the state capitol building and bribed the governor with a video of the beating, proving his spoiled rich-ass son was a guilty asshole. Very bad press. The validity of video is still heavily debated today. Anyway, Jagger walked out of there with his badge and gun still on his hip because he’d exploited the governor’s weakness—his need for a smooth reelection.