Shadow Season (11 page)

BEING A COP, IT’S GETTING YOUR
guts kicked out by twin midgets who live inside your deepest place. You’ve got your good little fucker and your bad little fucker, both of them taking turns working your soft center.

It’s using your action, your gamble, your itch, and your edge every minute of the day. You press down your hate and your cool and let it seep into your thoughts and fists. You hate your gun and you love it. You understand why so many of the fraternal order go out of the game by eating their own pieces. Being a cop, it’s everything you’ve ever heard it was, and it’s nothing like that at all.

Your third week on patrol you catch the squeal to a liquor-store holdup.

The owner’s been winged and two armed punks are on the run through the neighborhood. Your partner’s an old roughneck on the slide, just drawing checks. He’s got nineteen of his twenty in and mostly wants to sit back and roust prostitutes, maybe break up the occasional backroom mahjong game because the Chinese humble themselves and slip a little cash.

Serpico’s been off the grid for thirty-plus years so you don’t rock the boat, but you don’t take a cut either. Not that it’s offered.

As you reach for the siren and turn the corner ahead the punks go running right in front of the patrol car and you’re on the move. The chase is over before it starts. You stamp the gas and are ripping up behind them when they both turn on a dime and fire, unloading full clips into the windshield.

You and the old man duck down together and try to hide under the dashboard. You say fuck and your partner says ahgoddamnittohell and you both fumble for the radio, getting in each other’s way so nobody makes the call.

After the shooting’s over, you both sit up, look around. The punks are gone, people are milling about like nothing’s happened.

Your experienced partner who’s supposed to teach you the ropes has taken one in the left side of his chest. A little hole there right over his heart, spritzing a looping arc of blood that paints the inside of the smashed windshield in slithering strands of red.

He doesn’t seem to notice, says something about the paperwork you’ll both have to fill out. You jam your finger in the hole and feel the pulsing muscle beneath.

You think, Holy motherfucking shit right here.

You work the radio with your free hand, trying to remember the code numbers, the proper phrasing, your own name. It’s not officer down, he’s sitting up, and now he’s talking about his Chinese girlfriend, the things she can do with a bottle of soy sauce. You really don’t want to hear about that, it may even be a tad more disgusting than your index finger jammed down into his aorta.

When the ambulance gets there, the paramedic tells you to keep your finger where it is as they load the
old man in. As you climb up into the back you think, Keep it there for how much longer? You’re starting to cramp. The ambulance passes a Chinese restaurant and you know you’ll never eat that shit again. In the emergency room they finally take over and give you your finger back and let you return to the station.

In the locker room, Ray sees you’re covered in your partner’s blood but you don’t have a scratch on you.

Shaking his head, the grin not a grin at all, he says, I don’t like how this is shaping up for the guys who team with you.

Nine months later you’re reassigned together.

He says, I’m ever shot in the heart, you keep your hands out of my guts, right?

You think, Right on, solid, hell yeah.

Being a cop, it’s climbing a tree in Chelsea and getting a kite out of a branch, the kind of family-values shit you see on pamphlets printed up by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The smiling officer handing out life lessons, the kid with rosy apple cheeks giving the thumbs-up, a nubby-tailed puppy at his feet, and Jesus with his arms around everybody.

But on the way down you tear the seat of your pants so you’ve got half your ass hanging in the wind, and the kid and his mother grab the kite and turn away without even saying thank you.

It’s wanting to rush up after them and rap them in the backs of their heads with your nightstick. The rage is there, trying to take over. Down the block, the kid starts flying his kite again and it dive-bombs onto 23rd Street and gets run over by a cab. The kid doesn’t even seem to care, but the mother is pissed at wasting eleven
bucks. Ray sees the look on your face and tries for some quip, but you don’t hear him, your temples are surging. Your left butt cheek is bleeding.

It’s watching as a father takes his own newborn son hostage and climbs up to the hospital roof, waving a scalpel and threatening to stab the kid or cut his own throat.

You’ve been on the job less than eighteen months. You look around at the hardware, the rows of sharpshooters perched on buildings across the street, the negotiator sounding weak and nervous. The father takes a running start and stops at the ledge. He’s laughing, insane, sobbing, because his wife had a heart attack ten minutes after delivery. You try to feel for him. You try to think what it would be like if it was Dani on the table.

The veins in your throat twist. The kid is wailing, but sleepily. You’ve been sent up to the roof to guard the stairway and told not to engage the father. It’s not a bad word to use in these circumstances, “engage.” Your lives will be as entwined from here on out as if you had gotten married.

You lack the clarity of vision that Ray has. He sees everything in black and white, makes his choices instantly, and sticks with them. He wants to rush the father and shoot him in the head.

You’re the one who has to say things like, But what about the baby?

It makes you sound whiny as hell, and Ray gives you the look.

He starts to walk up behind the father, who’s doing a jig out on the ledge, howling like a dog now. Ray takes aim knowing damn well that no one can possibly find
him at fault in this. They’ll give him a medal. He’ll have his picture in the paper for weeks and be crowned a hero. This is the way to a gold shield before you’re thirty. So long as the baby doesn’t go over the edge too.

Your mind is a blitzkrieg full of theatrics. There’s no calm, there’s only the action. You see yourself rushing forward, diving, and catching the infant. You can almost hear the cheers, see the kid coming up to you in twenty-five years to say thank you, trailed by his wife and two children.

Ray is trying to be silent, hunched and moving in a reptilian creep and crawl. He might as well be banging a kettledrum but it just doesn’t matter. The father is yelling so loudly he’s deaf to everything else.

You think of a dead woman in the hospital morgue two levels underground, her breasts full of curdled milk. You think what a fucking waste all of this is.

Ray isn’t even going to try to get close. He’s maybe forty feet away and gets into a proper shooting stance. You can tell he’s eager and rushing the situation because he doesn’t want some sharpshooter to get the credit. The negotiator’s plaintive voice sounds like nothing but sniveling up here. They should only know.

You make a tentative grab for Ray’s shoulder, but he shrugs loose and gives you the look again. This time with real heat. You say, Wait, wait. And he says, No. You watch events unfolding along a prescribed line and understand exactly what’s going to happen next. You think, There’s no way Ray can make the shot. If he pulls the trigger, the kid is dead. Ray is one of the worst shooters on the force, consistently in the lowest bracket.

He’s either going to miss the father and scare him off the ledge or he’ll put one right into the baby.

Maybe it’s the truth. You move like it is. You see a chance to do something here, whether it’s right or wrong, and you act.

The adrenaline darts into your heart. The rage is in full bloom. It’s been waiting for you to catch up.

You kick Ray in the ass and knock him down.

You holster your weapon and walk across the roof toward the father. The negotiator sees you and starts to squawk and squeak. There’s a chain of command you’re not following and that’s going to piss off a lot of people.

For an instant you wonder if the sharpshooters will sight on you. You feel as if you’re in the crosshairs already but you always feel that way, so it’s something of a relief to know it might actually be happening.

A glance back and Ray’s still on the ground, giving you the look, but it’s a different kind of look now. What the fuck.

Hell, right there the whole day’s been worth it.

Being a cop, dealing with the two little mooks drawing switchblades inside your gut, it’s like being constantly torn in half.

The father’s holding his child out in his arms like Abraham making an offer to heaven. You lift your hands up in a kind of
Come on, man, don’t do this
sort of gesture. You hear yourself as if from a distance. The voice is accommodating but not soothing, it sounds like you’re appealing to an older brother who you’re on the outs with.

The voice is chattering, jumping from topic to topic. It covers grief, envy, fatherhood, second marriages, Little League coaching. You’re annoyed with the
voice and tell it to stop, but it doesn’t. The father also tells it to stop, and it doesn’t. The negotiator below tells it to stop, and it still goes on.

The baby is crying. The father is crying. The mother is dead. Ray’s on his feet, watching. The edge is near and coming closer. The father rubs his wet face on the blanket wrapped around the newborn and sniffs deeply, smelling his child. He must be smelling his wife too because his eyes fill with an even more profound despair. You inch closer. He inches closer. The baby hums for breath.

The end is here and you know it. This moment will seal your fate in ways you’ll wish you could have avoided, all the while knowing it was impossible to do anything else.

You hold your hands out to take the baby, and the instant you touch the blanket the father’s face ignites with madness and he screams. He was dead the second he hit the roof, the only question was whether he would take the kid with him.

He’s going to try.

The edge is only eighteen inches thick. You fumble and try to grab the child, but there’s no point. The guy’s holding the baby like a football now, tucked under his armpit, and he’s flailing. He’s got his hands on you and grabs your shirt. His fist tightens on the material. You’re being tugged off your feet. The sky is very blue and there seems to be as much below you as above you.

You’ve got half a second to think about your obituary. Once you’re dead you’ll be a hero cop. The headlines will be kind. The pretty newscasters will pull sad faces. They’re usually courteous to the dead.

But in the locker room, in internal memoranda, they’re going to flay you for being so fucking dumb. They’re going to be lecturing rookies about you for the next decade. You’re going to be an object lesson on what not to do.

You shift your center of gravity, still trying to grab the kid. It’s the right thing to do if you can’t do anything else. You think, At least I can hold the baby on the way down. It’s not exactly comforting but it’s something.

Then there’s blood in your eyes.

The father, with only half a head, cocks his chin and his brains slew out to the left and pour over his ear in a gush.

He tries to speak, perhaps say a name. His own or his wife’s or the child’s, if the kid has one yet. But then his tongue just unfurls and hangs there as dead as he is.

You snatch the kid free.

The guy rocks back on his feet and topples over, venting explosively as he hits the concrete. The negotiator’s slacks will never be the same.

Ray stands there looking at you, still holding his gun out in front of him like he might pull the trigger again. The two of you face each other. He chuckles like he can’t believe this shit. He gives you the full-wattage charm. You think about how easily Ray’s shot could’ve taken off your head instead. Right after you thank him for saving your life, you want to break his jaw.

He signals the all clear. You carry the kid downstairs and then you catch hell from your sarge, your lieut, the captain, and the commissioner. After all the yelling they let you slide, because they have to.

There’s a million photographs and miles of video
of the scene. You and Ray are heroes. You get commendations. You both get medals. The orphaned newborn gets picked up by an elderly spinster aunt from Brooklyn who has no idea what to do with a baby. In all the photo ops she wears a dazed expression like she wants to throw up.

Dani is standing beside you, one arm around your waist, smiling perfectly for the cameras so that you feel, second by second, torn by pride and humiliation. The mayor constantly leans over to her and dips his lips close to her ear, sometimes whispering, sometimes speaking loudly enough for you to hear. He slobbers empty declarations of esteem. The mayor’s tongue is a wet, hungry leech seeking Danielle’s fresh blood. Your breathing hitches, sweat breaks out, and your face pales.

The mayor is saying, He’s got a bright future ahead of him. The leech almost reaches her, and you imagine it slithering inside her ear canal.

And Dani answering, He’s more driven than anyone I’ve ever met.

Everyone switches places on the stage a few times. The crime-beat paparazzi shout names to get you to look this way, this way, over here, over here. You wind up between Dani and Ray. It’s a strange feeling, like you’re coming between lovers. You wonder about drive, whether you really have any or not.

You scan the crowd but can’t find any faces you recognize. Later on, Ray fades off the stage but you know he’s still somewhere in the room. You don’t have to see Ray to know he’s there. You’ve never had to see Ray, will never have to see Ray, to know he’s forever there.

Reporters ask why you took such a risk and you can
think of nothing to say. You stumble over your words, coming out with something tepid and clichéd like, It’s my job to protect the innocent. It stuns the room into silence until your lieut cuts in front and starts talking. He’s good, articulate. He enjoys the spotlight.

The reporters eat it up. All of them invariably edit your few comments to make you sound much sharper.