Final justice - W.E.B. Griffin [156]
Easily removable things, from radar detectors to hubcaps to entire wheels, were stolen from cars, too, as the founders of JOCCWI contended. And sometimes expensive lawn furniture--or even a new garden hose--bought from Home Depot would vanish from a back lawn overnight.
Sometimes the thieves were caught, sometimes they were not. It was obviously impossible for the police to be everywhere all the time.
The Peeping Tom allegation also had some merit. There were a lot of good-looking young women, married and not, in the condominiums adjacent to the Yacht Club, and on the fringes of Lake Forest, a huge area of small to medium-sized homes. It was not a gated community. It was easily possible for someone with an interest in watching young women undress to go into Lake Forest and hide behind one of its many trees with binoculars. And hard as hell to catch them at it.
Among the other disturbers of the peace JOCCWI wished to control were high school kids racing around in Pop's--or their own--car in the middle of the night. The chief had his officers spend a lot of time trying to stop that--he had had more than his fill of picking up dead kids who'd missed a turn and hit a tree--but he knew he hadn't stopped it all.
On the surface, having a number of responsible citizens roaming through the area at night in their own cars, looking for something amiss, and when finding it, reporting it to the police by cell phone seemed at first--even to the chief--to be not so bad an idea.
And among the founders of JOCCWI were the pillars of the community. They were lawyers, executives, schoolteachers, businessmen, dentists, and retired members of the armed forces, including two full colonels, three lieutenant colonels (one of them a former Green Beret), a number of other commissioned officers, and nearly a dozen retired master chief petty officers, sergeants major, and other high-ranking former noncoms.
They showed the chief what they intended to do, and how they intended to do it, and he frankly had felt more than a little admiration for their plan.
The night the concerned citizens went into action, the chief and the mayor went to their headquarters, a rented former concession stand at the Yacht Club, to wish them well.
They learned that the organization now had a name, Jackson's Oak Citizens' Community Watch. It was taken from Jackson's Oak, a tree in Daphne under which Andrew Jackson had allegedly stood shortly before moving west to fight the Battle of New Orleans.
That's when the chief and the mayor saw that the retired Green Beret, who would serve as watch commander that night, had a Colt .45 semiautomatic pistol in the small of his back. And so did Dr. Smiley, the dentist who would command the first four-hour tour. Other members of JOCCW (without the "I" for "Incorporated") were also armed, with everything from pistols to shotguns.
As tactfully as he could, the chief had suggested to the retired Green Beret that perhaps firearms weren't really such a good idea. All that JOCCW was supposed to do was keep an eye open and call the police if they saw something that looked suspicious.
"How the hell can you go on guard without a weapon? Jesus Christ, Charley!"
The next morning, the mayor, the chief, the (part-time) municipal judge, and the (part-time) city attorney conferred vis-a-vis the armed members of JOCCW patrolling the city.
Legally, there didn't seem much that could be done about it. Under the laws of Alabama, any law-abiding citizen over twenty-one could apply to the Baldwin County Sheriff for a permit to carry a handgun concealed about the person, on or in a vehicle. The permit could not be denied without good cause.
They agreed that the sheriff of Baldwin County, who is an elected official and wished to be re-elected ad infinitum, was not about to tell the pillars of the community