8 June 2025, @mariannewest's Freewrite Writing Prompt Day 2761: lack of supply

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One hot September 2020 morning in Big Loft, VA … Officer Bill Riker of the Blue Ridge Precinct could feel that it was going to be truly hot, and when Officer Joe Baxter showed up in his uniform, he knew it.

“They called you off furlough, Joe?” Officer Riker said.

“Listen, I got told forget about turning over my disability to retirement while they are out here paying double time for the rest of the week – I'll have enough hours for a full 25 years by Friday, so, bring it on.”

“Well, the good thing is, they figured out they can't do without Capt. Lee after all.”

“Yep. 'Bout time.”

Henry Fitzhugh Lee, who in the context of Big Loft in 2020 was police captain for both the Blue Ridge Precinct and Special Investigations Unit, was already inside police headquarters and had been coordinating the whole police response to what indeed was likely to be a hot day, so essentially...

“He's basically Acting Chief Lee,” Lieutenant Andrew Anderson said, “but ain't nobody gonna get bold and say it.”

“And you had better be quiet too,” Lieutenant James Longstreet said, “because today and probably this week is going to be hot enough in the city.”

On this day, everybody in Lofton County found out who had gotten paid off to build Bayard Heights just to have Bayard Creek do what Edwin Ludlow had warned it would all the way back in 1952 and wash the whole neighborhood out – 1,987 houses washed over 20 miles all the way into Big Loft, VA. Everyone also found out what else this group of unscrupulous politicians and businesses had also built, and found out that they and their families were hardly safe … and that accounting for all the Bayard Heights cleanup and civil suits that would be coming, the county was effectively bankrupt.

The need for police presence began where few people wanted to expect it, but Capt. Lee knew his area of responsibility well. Big Loft was the county seat, and so the folks who were implicated all worked in City Hall and County Court. So of course he beefed up security, but …

“The call is coming from inside the house, and has been for quite some time,” he said to the press about it later.

Sure enough, an implicated official tried to go postal on the people he figured sold him out just because the Lofton County Free Voice had and published the actual documents.

“Fire everybody Black in government – y'all have no gratitude for us letting you be here and sold us all out!” This overwrought individual had tried to get a gun through security that day talking about he had reason to fear for his life … he had been relieved of two guns, a knife, and a few other things, so he just picked up a chair to go after at his female colleague, only to get clothes-lined by Lt. Jonathan Jackson and taken into custody.

“Like we didn't know what he was trying to do when he came with all that stuff to work,” the lieutenant said later. “Like we didn't put a special watch on all the people listed.”

Someone else on that list decided to be dramatic and climb to the top of the county courthouse to throw themselves off, only to get as far as the loving arms of Lt. Horatio Lightfoot, who just grabbed him and yanked him off the edge and knocked him out.

“We didn't have the staff to waste on talking folks down today,” he said to Lt. Anderson later.

“Mr. Halleck couldn't have known it any more than Chief Scott would have,” Lt. Anderson said, “but you can't just be putting folks on furlough for a week at a time and expecting all of them to just come back in an emergency like this – folks are making the most of this extended vacation and can be hundreds of miles away, and even when they are not, no one really wants to protect these people. It takes a higher sense of duty. Even double time pay is not enough.”

“The real fun is going to start at lunchtime,” Lt. Lightfoot said, “because either all of these people packed a lunch, are going to eat at the cafes in City Hall and County Court, are going to order in, or they are going to have to come out and meet the public for lunch.”

“If it were me,” Lt. Anderson said, “but then it couldn't be me because Capt. Lee would have put us all out of our misery before letting us get into a situation like this.”

“Yep,” Lt. Lightfoot said, “but if it were, I'm eating on the road – that is, I'm leaving town and the state, and I'll get something on the road a hundred miles from here. I wonder why people don't do that.”

Lt. Anderson sighed.

“Leave everything they sold their souls for?” he said.

“I keep forgetting how these things work,” Lt. Lightfoot said.

Ordering in was a common thing for many officials during the pandemic, and that is how people from the *Lofton County Free Voice* and Uppity Foolery Watch kept having the run of the buildings, all masked up and legitimately working for food service to get in. The morning coffee crew was just replaced by the lunch crew, and 16-year-old Tom Stepforth just changed clothes and mask colors in a phone booth, went and picked up a food order on his bike, and came back for the second Free Voice shift.

“County is in here trying to kill fellow officials, and they don't realize –!” Mayor Donald Lee Garner Jr. started to say to a city official and then stopped. “Never mind. The deli ham sandwich on silver platters regime is about to end – let us mind our city business and stay out of the way.”

Most county officials did not dare to go to lunch, but even so: they could not enjoy any of their lunch inside their respective buildings, because there was now a huge crowd of protesters filling the square, reading all the documents on the bullhorn and making their commentary … louder and louder … a lot of them were wearing purple, so of course as soon as someone expressed how they were going to vote everyone in the building out, the chant started: “Purple up! Stupidity down! Purple up! Stupidity down!”

A few officials did try to tip out by the back doors of both City Hall and County Court, and they would have been “purpled up” with beatings quick but that beat officers were walking along parallel to them.

But this was not even the hard part, the part that occupied most of Capt. Lee's mind. The hard part was staying on top of securing these officials' homes and also maintaining sufficient police presence such that the criminal element did not take advantage of the city at large while the distraction was going on at City Hall and County Court. So …

“Only a Lee,” Mr. Henry Halleck VII, conservator of the Big Loft Police Department said to a colleague in Virginia's state government. “Have every car that looks halfway right in impound wrapped in peelable paint in the right colors, turn out the whole police academy to hold down City Hall and County Court under his best lieutenants' command, and put the most experienced officers out in every car we have and every car it looks like we have to keep these people's families' safe and the city secured.”

“What they need to do is elect Lee to the highest county office they can,” the colleague said. “Just write him in and make it happen before Lofton County is officially bankrupt – with his Garner cousin doing that kind of same brilliant job in Big Loft, they together could steer Lofton County through the storm.”

“Alas,” Mr. Halleck said. “Think about how Lofton County got to this situation. There is a vast lack of supply of honest people in government here. Donald Lee Garner is basically the designated survivor; he wasn't ever supposed to be mayor, and he is not even on the ballot – although given what just happened, he's going to be written in and re-elected anyway.”

“When both your mayoral candidates are implicated in what is only the seventh biggest disaster in town in the past year,” the colleague said. “You can't see me shaking my head, but just know that's what's going on.”

“The good thing, this all will restore the reputation of the police department,” Mr. Halleck said, “and that will make me getting the conservatorship done much easier.”

“Are you going to make Capt. Lee the acting chief?” the colleague asked.

“We shall see if I can *unmake* him as that,” Mr. Halleck said. “Technically, all this double time he has me paying to have all hands on deck will need to be recouped by putting even more people on furlough for longer, and he will be included in that, so, by Monday, he should be back at home. But if things stay unsettled, I may have to keep him on.”