Partner drives my golf cart and I’m not the only one here with a bodyguard. Since I play alone, tonight I’m paired up with Toby Chalk, a former city councilman who served four months in the wake of Dewey’s demise. He drives his own golf cart. Caddies are forbidden at Old Rico.

After an hour of drinking and preliminaries, we head for the course. It’s getting dark, the lights are on, and we do indeed feel privileged to be playing golf at night. It’s a shotgun start. Toby and I are assigned the fifth tee, and when Alan yells “Go” we race away, carts bouncing, clubs rattling and jangling, grown men half-drunk and puffing on big cigars, whooping and yelling happily into the night.

Partner grins and shakes his head. Crazy white men.

PART THREE WARRIOR COPS

1.

Here’s what happened:

My clients, Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Renfro, Doug and Kitty to everyone, lived for thirty quiet and happy years on a shady street in a nice suburb. They were good neighbors, active in local charities and the church, always ready to lend a hand. They were in their early seventies, retired, with kids and grandkids, a couple of dogs, and a time-share in Florida. They owed no money and paid off their credit cards in full each month. They were comfortable and reasonably healthy, though Doug was dealing with atrial fibrillation and Kitty was rebounding from breast cancer. He had spent fourteen years in the Army, then sold medical devices for the rest of his career. She had adjusted claims for an insurance company. To stay busy, she volunteered at a hospital while he puttered in the flower beds and played tennis at a city park. At the insistence of their children and grandchildren, the Renfros had reluctantly bought his-and-her laptops and joined the digital world, though they spent little time online.

The house next door to them had been bought and sold a dozen times over the years, and the current owners were oddballs who kept to themselves. They had a teenage son, Lance, a misfit who spent most of his time locked in his room playing video games and peddling drugs through the Internet. To hide his habits, he routinely piggybacked on the Renfros’ wireless router. They, of course, did not know this. They knew how to turn their laptops on and off, send and receive e-mails, do basic shopping, and check the weather, but beyond that they had no idea how the technology worked and had little interest in it. They did not bother with passwords or security of any kind.

The state police initiated a sting operation to crack down on Internet drug trafficking and tracked an IP address to the Renfros’ home. Someone in there was buying and selling a lot of Ecstasy, and the decision was made to launch a full-scale SWAT team assault. Warrants—one to search the house and one to arrest Doug Renfro—were obtained, and at 3:00 on a quiet, starlit night a team of eight city policemen rushed through the darkness and surrounded the Renfro home. Eight officers—all in full combat gear with Kevlar vests, camouflage uniforms, panzer-style helmets, night-vision goggles, tactical radios, semiautomatic pistols, assault rifles, knee pads, some even with face masks, and a few even with black face paint for maximum drama—ducked and squatted and moved fearlessly through the Renfros’ flower beds, their itchy fingers eager for combat. Two carried flash-bang stun grenades and two carried battering rams.

Warrior cops. The vast majority, as we would later learn, were woefully untrained, but all were thrilled to be in battle. At least six later admitted to consuming highly caffeinated energy drinks to stay awake at that awful hour.

Instead of simply ringing the doorbell and waking the Renfros and explaining that they, the police, wanted to talk and search the house, the cops launched the assault with a bang by kicking in the front and rear doors simultaneously. They would later lie and claim they had called out to the occupants, but Doug and Kitty were sound asleep, as you would expect. They heard nothing until the invasion began.

What happened in the next sixty seconds took months to unravel and get straight. The first casualty was Spike, the yellow Lab who slept on the kitchen floor. Spike was twelve, old for a Lab, and hard of hearing. But he certainly heard the door crash just a few feet away. His mistake was to jump up and start barking, at which time he was shot three times by a 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol. By then Doug Renfro was scrambling out of bed and reaching for his own gun, one properly registered and kept in a drawer for protection. He also owned a Browning 12-gauge shotgun he used twice a year to hunt geese, but it was tucked away in a closet.

In attempting to defend the home invasion, our bumbling chief of police would later claim that the SWAT assault was necessary because they knew Doug Renfro was heavily armed.

Doug had made it to the hallway, when he saw several dark figures swarming up the stairs. An Army veteran, he hit the floor and began firing away. Fire was returned. The gun battle was brief and deadly. Doug was shot twice, in the forearm and shoulder. A cop named Keestler was hit in the neck, presumably by Doug. Kitty, who had rushed in a panic out of the bedroom behind her husband, was shot three times in the face and four times in the chest and died at the scene. Their other dog, a schnauzer who slept with them, was also shot and killed.

Doug Renfro and Keestler were rushed to the hospital. Kitty was taken to the city morgue. Neighbors gawked in disbelief as their street was lit by flashing lights while ambulances rushed away with the casualties.

The police stayed at the home for hours and collected all possible evidence, including the laptops. Within two hours, before sunrise, they knew the Renfros’ computers had never been used to peddle drugs. They knew they had made a mistake, but coming clean is simply not in their playbook. The cover-up began immediately when the commander of the SWAT team gravely informed television reporters on the scene that the occupants of the home were suspected of trafficking in drugs and that the man of the house, a Mr. Doug Renfro, had attempted to kill several officers.

After his recovery from surgery, six hours after getting shot, Doug was told of his wife’s death. He was also informed that the invaders were actually police officers. He had no idea. He thought they were armed criminals invading his home.

2.

My cell phone rings at 6:45. I’m staring at an impossible bank shot to sink the 9 ball in a corner pocket and run the table. I’ve been drinking strong coffee and missing too many shots for the past hour. I grab the phone, look at the ID, and say, “Good morning.”

“Are you awake?” Partner asks.

“Guess.” I haven’t been asleep at 6:45 in years. Neither has Partner.

“Might want to flip on the news.”

“Okay, what’s up?”

“Looks like our toy soldiers just botched another home invasion. Casualties.”

“Shit!” I say and grab the remote. “Later.” Wedged into one corner of my den is a small sofa and a chair. A wide-screen HD television hangs from the ceiling against a wall. I fall into the chair just as the first image appears.