The Zone (2 page)

I must have gone out, because the next thing I remembered was white ceiling, bright lights, and a woman in a surgical mask telling me to count backward. I tried to tell her to
get bent, but she sucker-punched me and things went away again. I recall she had very beautiful eyes.

There was a bed, and beeping, and faces over me, and voices that sounded like Charlie Brown’s teacher, or a TASER cam recording. In and out, out and in. I still hurt all over, but while the pain was there, it was unimportant, far away. Whatever they had given me was working pretty damn well.

I finally surfaced enough to see the IV stand and some gizmo with a green LED screen, and a guy in blue scrubs looking at me. He started in on the day and President shit; my tongue felt like a dried sponge, but he gave me some crushed ice, and I managed to give him his answers. I kept asking him about my team, and he said he wasn’t the one treating them, but he would send someone to find out. He told me I had a tissue damage laceration to my side from a grazing hit, a through and through bullet wound in my left forearm that broke the bone but did not appear to be serious (I wiggled my fingers on command), lacerations to my right cheek which were being watched for infection but otherwise were not serious.

My serious wounds were a couple buckshot which had clipped the side of my skull producing a concussion; the MRI had shown no damage to the skull, but there was minor irritation or swelling or something under the area of the impact, which was why I felt so dazed. The big issue was a bullet lodged in my left knee; as soon as somebody said my brain was back to normal they were going back in after it. The first surgery had gone well, but had been done for life-saving only. He explained I had lost a great deal of blood, and would feel weak for a while.

I told him I had no idea I had gotten hit in the head, and then for some reason bitched about my P230 jamming.

Things stayed very fuzzy for a long time; I drifted in and out, and saw people by my bed, including Sheila whom I was pretty certain was dead, or at least too screwed up to be visiting. I remember being taken for surgery, where I apologized to the lady with the pretty eyes for my language earlier and explained that it was the backup jamming on me that had put me in a foul temper. I don’t recall what she said.

I finally came to for real, clearest I had felt since the shooting started, with my left leg in a sort of cast-sling thing, elevated, thirsty as hell and feeling very mellow, even though I knew I was in pain. A nurse gave me crushed ice and took my vitals, along with the questions about Presidents; I blinked at the walls and ceiling for a while, before exploring and finding my head had a bandage, as did my cheek, left arm, side, and of course my leg. I started sorting out my memories of the incident, wishing I had something to write with.

Things were just getting to feel a shade of normal when Deputy Inspector Breed, the head of Anti-Crime, came in and sat by my bed. He was in his usual suit, but it was rumpled and he needed a shave.

I managed to get through the greetings, and ‘how are you feeling Sergeant, helluva job, helluva job’ formalities. “Sir, how’s my team?”

He sighed. “Master Patrolman Stabros died on the table a couple hours ago. Reynolds and Barr were dead at the scene. Sergeant Cooper is still alive, but its touch and go. We’re not real sure…he’ll make it, I believe, but…he’s hurt bad.”

What he wasn’t saying was that Cooper lost a kidney, spleen, and some other stuff, and that he was going to use a walker for the rest of his life. Of course, he wouldn’t have known all of that at the time, and nobody knew that Cooper would blow his own brains out six months to the day after the shooting.

My father wouldn’t have cried, but he never lost his entire friggin’ team on a volunteer job, either.

“What about the shooters?” I managed as soon as I could.

“None of them made it.” There was a look to him that suggested that none of them really had had much hopes of making it. “Your team accounted for five, and the backup team got the sixth and two outside security they had. None lived long enough to make it to the ambos. The snitch is dead, too.”

It took me a moment to figure out he was talking about Sly. “They had us boxed.”

“Ambush, pure and simple,” he agreed.

“Straight up, boss, how deep am I in it?”

“You?” He looked surprised. “Hell, you’re not even on the edge of it. The shooting is straight, an ambush, there was no problem there. Its clean from start to finish. There will be the usual investigation, Grand Jury review, that sort of thing; we’re bringing in a Ranger team to show its being done fair, but its clean.” He rubbed his face. “Cooper’s Lieutenant signed off on the op; trouble is, he did it verbally, not by request memo, and so Narcotics has issues there. It was a cowboy op, too damned rushed, and now we’ve got three dead police officers, three wounded officers, one dead citizen, and eight dead criminals. There’s people in it up to their necks, but you’re not one of them. Don’t waste a second thinking about that. Once the Grand Jury stamps the paperwork, we’re going to hang a medal on you in front of City Hall.”

He was too professional to say it, but I knew that losing an entire team would certainly not be giving his career any extra momentum. We made polite chit-chat, and he left to perform desperate damage control.

The shooting team guys and the Rangers walked me through it; from them I learned my P230 had not jammed: I had emptied it. Goes to show how disorienting a firefight can be.

Cooper, Stephen, and Sheila had not gotten a shot off, although Sheila had gotten her sidearm out of its holster. Pat had, like me, been alerted, and in fact had saved my life by blowing away Five, who had narrowly missed talking my head off with a shotgun; I had caught a couple pellets of the shot, but apparently Pat had shot him just as he was pulling the trigger, throwing him off just enough. Otherwise my brains, such as they are, would have been on the floor.

Turns out Two wasn’t shooting at me, he was shooting at Pat; I was hit in the arm and knee by Four, who had a MAC-10. He had gotten Sheila, and likely clipped me on the side, and hit Pat twice, and definitely got me in the arm before he emptied the mag. Pat had put a couple in Four’s vest, but Two hit Pat twice until I got him. Four got another mag off, hitting me in the leg and Pat twice more.

Meanwhile, the back up team had seen two armed guys closing in and had moved before I had hit the buzzer; they had their own firefight, with a guy from Patrol catching two in the vest and one in the jaw.

I had distracted Four from finishing Pat by going for my P230; his burst missed, but splinters from the floor and fragments of shell jacket was what hit me in the face. I never came close to him with the .380s, but it held his attention long enough for Pat to reload and hit him four times in the legs as the back up team came through the door.

Four made a furtive gesture, and was shot eleven times by two A-Crime guys, and bled out before the EMTs could get a good look at him. Ditto for Three, who found out Kevlar won’t stop an ice pick.

It was no surprise to me that to learn that there was no meth, and never had been.

My knee was in bad shape; the surgeon told me they had done spectacularly well, that I would walk again, and so forth, but I had visions of bedsores, addiction to pain pills, and medical retirement haunting me, and paid little attention. Turned out bed sores were not an issue, they had me in physical therapy before I was fully over the knockout gas, and that hurt so damned much I never even noticed the pain pills.

Of course, I had my family to take my mind off my problems. Turns out that instead of visiting dear old Dad after said Dad took a variety of wounds in the pursuit of the common good, my son decided to buy some crack, and despite being raised around police officers, purchased it virtually at the elbow of a narc. Then pulled a box cutter on said narc.

So my loving wife came storming down to the recovery room demanding that I pull some strings and get the charges drastically reduced, as the moron was sitting in Central Booking with a six-figure bond. I made a couple calls, and told her the Chief’s kid would have trouble beating an Aggravated Assault on a Public Servant, much less that of a Sergeant who had just been part of an operation which embarrassed the Narcotics Division. I had just enough juice to keep it out of the press, and to get him into a minor offender’s pod in the jail.

Then I flatly refused to sign mortgage papers to raise the bond, figuring that a taste of the baby tank might convince the idiot that prison would not be fun, and got served with divorce papers. Four days after getting shot.

She wanted it final fast so she could get the spawn out of lockup, and I was too pissed off to delay things, and for once my ‘hero’ status helped a bit; I was living in a therapy facility when the judge signed on the line. My shyster was instructed to defend my pension to the death, so she got the house (paid for), her car, my truck, the daughter’s Kia, half of the savings, all the furniture, her travel agency, the whole nine yards. I got my pension untouched, no child support, my clothes, guns, and half our meager savings, a chunk of which ended up being used to pay my attorney.

Two guys I
was in Patrol with went to my ex-home and got my effects, which one kindly stored for me. My son got bailed out, no thanks to dear old Dad. I got to try to rebuild my leg without a home to go to when the PT place cut me loose. Not that I really wanted to go home, but it pissed me off not having a choice.

As expected, the Grand Jury cleared us of any wrongdoing; Sly’s family got a quiet settlement from the City and a citizen’s award in public. They propped me and Cooper up in a conference room with the back-up officers, one of whom still had his jaw wired up, and hung medals on all of us, plus Pat’s, Stephen’s, and Sheila’s next of kin. I was promoted to Lieutenant (made easier by Cooper’s name quietly dropping from the list, and the unplanned retirement of a Narcotics Lieutenant and Captain), and speeches were made. Cooper was medically retired the next day.

My uncle, my only blood relative, dropped dead a week before I left PT; he left me everything, which wasn’t a lot and saw me completely devoid of any blood ties. Pretty much any family ties, for that matter, as my daughter wasn’t speaking to me and my son was pretty much missing in action since birth.

I took a room in a rent-by-the-week hotel because I couldn’t deal with finding an apartment at the moment; it was two block’s limp from Admin 2, where I was spending my days, and I needed the exercise. I was assigned a light duty job, and probated my uncle’s will in my spare time. He left me a pawn shop he used to run, and a double-wide on a rented plot; it cost me the cash portion of my inheritance to bury him and have the trailer emptied out & hauled to the dump.

Up to my sixteenth anniversary I got up every weekday and gimped to work, where I monitored communications division paperwork and instant messaging, which was actually a viable job, albeit dull and isolated. On my sixteenth anniversary date I got a party, a watch, plaque, retired officer shield & ID, and a hearty farewell. They cut me loose; my knee was recovering, but I would never be fit for street work.

The Sergeant’s and Lieutenant’s Association had a beer bash weekend, and about twenty off-duty cops spent a weekend gutting and re-doing the apartment over my uncle’s pawn shop; the City even hooked up the utilities for free. The Patrolmen’s Association had a group do the store level.

I moved in the day after the department tossed me out. It was supposed to be a fresh start, but it felt more like crawling into a hole to die after being gut-shot.

I try not to think about things, because none of it makes any sense, but the little girl at the next picnic table had a brand new box of Crayolas and a roll of butcher paper and was having a fine old time. Her mother was sipping a soda and periodically admiring the artwork; she had glanced at me several times, but did not seem to be overly concerned. It was a pleasant day and the park wasn’t known for trouble. I was unshaven but clean, and my jeans, photo-hog’s vest and tee shirt were unwrinkled and laundered. If she knew I had four guns on me it would have been different, but people rarely really pay attention.

The damn crayons set me off; usually I can avoid thinking about things for hours, but it can sneak up on me, especially at night when I can’t sleep. The doctors prescribed sleeping pills which I didn’t fill, and suggested shrinks which I declined. I’m toughing it out-I am alive, the only one from the House (which is how I think of that fiasco: the House) that is still drawing breath since Cooper shot himself. I try to rationalize the chain of events, and part of me knows that my marriage was just waiting for one more piece of melodrama before it imploded, and that I was hardly the first officer let go for physical disability. After all, they waited until I was healed up before they cut me, and it wasn’t like I was thrown out onto the street: I got the full honors send-off, and a medical retirement worth fifty per cent of Lieutenant’s pay for the rest of my life, full medical and dental, and I can draw my regular pension at age sixty. I draw SSI, and the State will let me have four years at any State university, books included, for free.

But I can’t make it stick. I can’t get the logic to win. I can’t deal with starting completely over at forty-two. I can’t help feeling betrayed by family and profession, can’t help feeling utterly diminished by the loss of my position. I went from Police Sergeant to…nothing. I still can carry, and the retired badge is heavy and looks real. But its not, and I’m not. I’m surplus to requirements, unnecessary, useless, empty, invisible.