Free Hero To Zero 2nd edition by Zach Fortier

wonder what the hell he was thinking, though. One night he got a call to a suspicious circumstance in an apartment building. He arrived and, unlike the usual Mike routine, he actually started to dig. He found out that a woman had been kidnapped and held against her will by a man in the apartment building. The man suffered from schizophrenia and had repeatedly raped and beaten the woman for days. He intended on killing her when he was done with her.
    Mike figured out where she was, and was able to rescue her from the mentally ill assailant. Basically, Mike saved the woman’s life by doing what he had dreamed about his entire childhood: being a good cop. This was, however, an anomaly. Mike had worked hard to become a cop, and liked the idea of being a cop, but he usually didn’t want to put in the work required to stay a cop, and a good one.
    Eventually, Mike’s lazy ways caught up with him when he stopped a guy for driving. He had the guy perform the usual FSTs (field sobriety tests), and he failed them all.
    Mike checked his watch; it was nearly time to get off shift, and he did not want to spend the extra time it would take to process a DUI and complete the paperwork. So, Mike being Mike, he told the guy to walk it off—take a hike and not come back to his car for a while.
    In Mike’s defense, this would have been an accepted practice twenty years before, when he had started his career in law enforcement. Today, however, it is not. Today it is considered dereliction of duty. Mike didn’t care; Dirty Harry wouldn’t waste his time on a mere DUI, so why should Mike?
    Mike left the area after making sure the guy had indeed left his car and started to walk away. What Mike didn’t know was that the guy died a short time later from the alcohol and drugs that were in his system. He was way too drunk to be out walking, driving, or doing anything without supervision. Mike had been negligent, and the department administration was fed up. He was told to resign or be fired.
    He resigned, and ended what he, at least, thought had been an amazing career. Mike did make a difference to those who had their bikes stolen, and he did save a kidnapped women’s life, so I added him here.
     
    SCOTT PRESTON
     
    Forget everything you know about Mike. Scott was the exact opposite. You could not have found two more different people raised by the same parents. Where Mike had to overcome the obstacles of not graduating high school, his narcotics arrest record, and a small gaggle of children trailing behind him, Scott had one major obstacle to overcome that haunted him his entire life. No matter where he went, or what he did, Mike had been there first—and, as you can imagine, made quite the impression.
    Scott grew up in the same environment but had no aspirations to be a cop. In fact, as much as Mike loved the idea of being a cop, Scott hated it. Scott grew up hating any authority figure. It was not that hard to figure out why, and probably to be expected, given that every authority figure he came in contact with thought they knew exactly what to expect from him based on their experience with Mike. To understand why Scott hated cops so much and yet became one, you have to, as usual, understand his story.
    Scott rarely talked to anyone about himself. He hated attention of any kind—again, just the opposite of Mike. Eventually though, I was able to gain his trust, and one day he opened up (just a little bit) about his strange hatred of cops and why he worked as one anyway. Here is what he told me:
    When Scott was maybe six or seven years old, the Watts riots were raging in California, and he watched on TV as a city was set on fire. He said he asked his mom why people were doing that. She replied that they were mad about how they were being treated, so they fought back against the people they saw as being in charge.
    Scott understood this at a gut level. It seemed to his seven-year-old mind like everyone in charge was an obstacle to him being