Red Man Down (3 page)

‘I kind of want to say he does,’ Sarah said. ‘But I’m not sure … number-five male, maybe forty, give or take? Thinner than average. And missing several teeth … maybe a tweaker, what do you think?’

‘Could be. Or a far gone alcoholic.’

‘Medium brown hair going gray, nondescript clothes. But he doesn’t look homeless, does he?’

‘Not quite dirty enough for that. Very shabby clothes, though.’

‘Looks like any guy down on his luck, and with a couple of bad habits.’

Cifuentes said, ‘Yeah, long-time unemployed is how I’d peg it. I know I’ve seen him, though. I just can’t say where.’ When the sergeant ended one of his many phone calls, Oscar repeated Ollie’s question to Delaney. ‘Doesn’t this guy look familiar?’

‘Kind of,’ Delaney said. ‘Probably got a local sheet.’ He turned to Spurlock. ‘You looked for ID?’

‘Yes. I couldn’t find any.’

‘He must have a driver’s license on him somewhere.’ A couple of them gloved up and searched the body. ‘Nothing, huh? How about the pickup? No? Did you look in his shoes?’

A stiff breeze had sprung up. Greenberg said he wanted to bag up his John Doe and get out of here before he turned stiff himself. For once Sarah agreed wholeheartedly with the doctor. She had her warm coat on and didn’t care about the cold, but she wanted to get Spurlock downtown. He had calmed down considerably during their walk but now Delaney’s rapid-fire, impatient questions were making him nervous all over again.

The crime-scene specialists were still going over the lot but the fingerprint lab tech was finished. The impound guys were working on the Dodge, getting it ready to tow. All the detectives had closed notebooks – there was nobody around to canvass – they were making phone calls, turning toward their cars. Then Jason Peete, who had been making an inventory of the items in the truck, came back, walked around the body one last time and said to Delaney, ‘Boss, I can’t remember his name but I think I know where I saw him last. Man, he’s really changed, though.’ His face crumpled into a huge grin and he crooned, ‘You are so going to hate this!’

Delaney, who did not appreciate Peete’s lapses into street behavior, said fiercely, ‘
What?
’

Suddenly serious, Jason said, ‘This man used to be a sergeant on the Tucson Police Force.’

‘What? Nah. Come on, Jason, that’s crazy.’

‘Can I help that? He musta been around for a while, too, because he was on the training crew for recruits when I went through the academy.’

‘Jason, now, that can’t be, I’m sure you’re wrong.’ Delaney hustled over to where Greenberg had just zipped up the body bag. A crime-scene specialist was standing ready to help him hoist the body onto the gurney, and as Delaney approached they squatted, Greenberg counted to three, and together they settled it onto the narrow cot. ‘Wait a minute,’ Delaney said, as they began to raise the securing straps, ‘I need to take another look.’

‘Oh, Sergeant, for God’s sake, what now?’ Greenberg yelled.

Delaney raised one hand in magisterial silence, bent, grasped the metal tab and pulled. When the bag opened enough to reveal the face, he motioned all his detectives over to stand beside him. ‘Once and for all now, anybody else think he looks familiar? Because I’ve been in this department a lot longer than you, Jason, and I certainly don’t remember this man around the academy.’

Leo Tobin, who had been on a hike far up in the Tortolitas when the call came, had just parked in front of the half-dozen other department cars. Getting out, he saw the entire detective squad lined up in a row, bending forward and occasionally straightening, like toy birds by a water dish. Curious, he strolled up to their backsides and said, ‘What’s going on?’

‘Oh, Leo, you made pretty good time down the mountain, huh?’ Delaney said.

‘Yup. This the alleged thief?’ Tobin peered at the weathered face. ‘Aren’t we being a little extra punitive on this poor hard-working wire stripper?’

‘He drew down on Officer Spurlock, who did exactly what he was supposed to do,’ Delaney said.

Beside her, Sarah heard Dan Spurlock suck in a breath.

‘But now, Leo,’ Delaney said, ‘stand over here by me and take a good look, will you? Jason claims he remembers this man – used to be a Tucson cop.’

‘Jason is right. Just this once, of course.’ Leo turned his crusty half-smile on Jason Peete, who flipped him the bird. Leo turned back to Delaney. ‘Come on, you remember this guy. Man, he’s really gone downhill, though, hasn’t he?’

‘Downhill from what? I don’t remember him at all. You’re sure he was in the department?’

‘Think a minute. You’d have been long out of training by the time he joined that crew. But before that, he worked graveyard out of East Side for years and years, so you must have known him there. Name is …’ he clasped his forehead, ‘… come on, brain, you can do it … Ed Something.’

‘Yeah!’ Jason said, lighting up again. ‘Ed Lawson … Lewis? No, Lacey.’

‘That’s right, Ed Lacey. Whose specialty on the training crew was putting on that red padded helmet and beating the bejeesus out of dozens of would-be street patrolmen.’

‘You see? Now I’m not so crazy, huh?’ Jason grinned around the circle of his fellow detectives. ‘That’s why I remember him! Because the year I trained, Lacey was a Red Man, one of several who beat my black ass around that gymnasium more times than I can stand to think about.’

T
hinking about the first time she met the Red Man, the most feared and respected trainer in the academy, Sarah felt the wind grow colder. It was almost ten years ago – no, longer, closer to eleven.
Man, time really rips along.

She’d been warned. Recruits in the class before had told her, ‘Watch out for the Red Man. He’s not kidding when he says you have to fight.’

But she was a ranch kid, raised to think townies were softies. And this was law enforcement, right? There might be some tough tests to pass, but they weren’t going to chain her in a dungeon and turn the ravenous dogs loose. And it wasn’t as if she’d never felt pain – growing up, she’d fallen off a horse plenty of times and, as her father always insisted, got right back on. A steer had knocked her down once, and she’d broken her arm calf roping on her junior rodeo team.

None of that had any malice in it, though – animals just did what they did and you learned to live with it. It was a whole different thing, she found out, to be attacked by somebody who really intended to hurt her. She’d held her own in her first fight test – paired off with another student, kneeling on the mats in the exercise room with gloves and helmet on, whaling on each other. Each of them secretly thought they’d won, and nobody got a broken nose.

But the man in the red helmet was a whole different can of worms – one of the elite. She’d walked into the gym and confronted him as she’d been told to do. The man on the door had said, ‘You’re in a fight for your life now, you understand?’ When she’d nodded, smiling, a little cocky, he’d smacked her lightly on the rear and said, ‘Good luck.’

She remembered walking across the mats, aware of the several observers standing around the walls. The Red Man had stood in the middle of the space, his face showing nothing through the mask. He hadn’t worn a red padded suit any more by the time Sarah did her training – just a padded red helmet and gym clothes. But they still called him the Red Man – partly, she suspected, because it made him sound more awesome. Playing policeman as she’d been told to do, she’d said, ‘Put your hands above your head and turn around!’

He’d hit her in the face. It hadn’t been a little tap; it’d hurt like hell. And the force of it had knocked her down. Lying on the floor at his feet, she’d felt her confidence drain away like water down a sink drain. It was all she could do at the time to get up, and as soon as she was back on her feet he’d hit her again. The merciless man with the toneless voice had landed two more solid punches and a hard shove before she’d suppressed enough of the fear to begin to fight back. She’d yelled, ‘Stop resisting!’ and swung a roundhouse. He’d deflected it and hit her again, in the ribs, hard. She’d kept punching at him, but it was like punching a wall, hard and unyielding. Soon she’d been on the ground again, with the hard man on top of her. A couple of ludicrous minutes had followed in which she’d yelled, from underneath him, ‘Stop resisting!’ There’d seemed to be no way to get at this monster, who’d clearly been bent on taking away the career she’d set her heart on.

The other thing she hadn’t known much about till that morning was rage. She’d learned a great deal about it in the next five minutes. Red hot rage had flooded her brain and helped her to go on fighting till she’d somehow rolled out from under him, jumped up and landed a couple of well-placed kicks she’d learned in Tae Kwon-Do. They’d been good enough to earn a welcome grunt of surprise and appreciation from the Red Man, and one of the observers had said, ‘That’s more like it. Now get the cuffs on him, Sarah.’ She’d been awkward with that, too, but she’d done it, and finally got to walk out of that terrible room, past the observers with their straight faces and amused eyes.

It hadn’t been pretty, but it must have been good enough, because she’d got to stay and try it again later. He’d been patient the next day when he said, ‘Let me show you what you missed at the beginning …’ and began pointing out the behaviors to watch for: the tense shoulders, hostile or dead-looking eyes – ‘And if he turns like this, making a wedge shape, see? That’s to protect as much of himself as possible when he clobbers you.’

Before she was done she’d had to learn how to respond effectively without the anger – to fight like a savage while staying perfectly calm. Rationalizing the battle had turned out to be one of her strengths, and she’d graduated with high marks from the academy. But she’d never forgotten the pain and terror of that first day’s battle.

‘And that’s what it’s for,’ Dietz had said when she’d told him about it. ‘Every time you ever think about it, you’ll remember that you didn’t curl up in a ball and try to hide. It costs a lot of money to train a cop. We have to spend it on people who aren’t going to quit in a fight.’

A homicide detective when she met him, Dietz had been on the training crew earlier and taken his turns as the Red Man. He had put in many hours pondering the best ways to train a cop. ‘Every time you think you’ve got all the answers,’ he’d told her, ‘something changes.’ Training would always be a work in progress, probably, especially in border cities like Tucson with constantly shifting populations – and now with technology that never stopped evolving.

They tried to spend the money on people who could keep their wits facing firearms, too.

‘You can’t just point and shoot,’ the Red Man had said to Sarah. ‘You gotta stay focused, but you don’t have time to hesitate.’ If Will Dietz hadn’t kept his head and fought back quickly in the totally unexpected gun battle he happened to walk into two years ago, he would have been dead in the first two minutes. No question, he had told Sarah, that his many hours of training had saved his life. All that drilling, over and over and over again, fixed target to moving target to running gun battle with a trainer shouting in your ear, was to develop the quick reaction to a threat that Dan Spurlock had displayed today.

Spurlock told Sarah and the IA man, Jeffries, everything he could remember about it that day, after she took him to their headquarters at South Stone. First they listened to the recording from Spurlock’s car, and the other side of the traffic from his dispatcher at the West Side station. Then they asked him to review the shooting as he remembered it.

‘Everything seemed to slow down,’ he said. He looked like he might be going into shock, not quite ready to puke but not in the market for snacks either. ‘All the rest of the world went, like,
away
someplace – there was just me and him with that gun in his hand. Like we were alone together in a tunnel – even the traffic noise went away.’

Sarah nodded and saw Jeffries nod too – involuntarily, she thought; he didn’t mean to be encouraging, but like her he remembered how it felt. There was never going to be anything again quite like the first time you saw a weapon aimed at you and knew this was it, The Big One, your ultimate question about your ability to do this job, getting answered
right now.

‘Over and over during shooting drills they tell you, “You don’t have any time to think.” And oh, man is that ever true …’ He looked at Jeffries, whose square face showed nothing during these interrogations, and then at Sarah, who nodded, wanting to keep making eye contact so he’d know she was paying close attention. ‘You see the threat, pull your weapon and fire. It doesn’t take thought, it just happens. I mean, what else are you going to do?

‘In class, the trainer always says, “And when you shoot, you shoot to kill, understood?” Like we might be tempted to fire a warning shot over somebody’s shoulder. But shit – you’re never going to fire that Glock unless you have to, so if you have to fire it you sure as hell aren’t going to dick around. I mean, what? Knee-cap this bad guy while he shoots your head off? I don’t think so. I didn’t think about it at all. Soon as I saw that gun in his hand I slid sideways to get behind the door again, and I aimed for that kill zone each time.’

‘You hit it, too, didn’t you?’ Sarah said, letting a little glint of admiration show. They didn’t have the autopsy report yet, but they had retrieved the digital recording from the camera in his squad car and were playing it, over and over, on Sarah’s desktop. It showed Lacey standing beside his truck, his right hand pulling a weapon from behind his head while his left hand followed it forward, getting ready to support the gun he was already firing. He’d got his feet apart, almost braced, before the first of Spurlock’s bullets slammed into his throat. The video showed just the tip of Spurlock’s Glock firing, at the left edge of the screen.

There was one electric moment, after Spurlock’s first shot caught Lacey under the chin, when the man stood perfectly still – stopped in his tracks by that first bullet. His inertness lasted long enough so Spurlock’s next two shots went through-and-through in his upper chest, the bloody spray of the exits showing plainly in the video.