Tracking Shot

by Colin Campbell

  “102, your return.” Rick was in dispatch by himself; it was Caroline’s day off and Eileen had called out sick. Rick was fast and accurate; both those traits were as good as any tool on a duty belt.

  “Go ahead.”

  “427 David King Sam, December of 2019, comes back on a 1987 Buick LeSabre to a Gertrude Brown of Basin Row. No wants or warrants.”

  “Copy.” Barros exited his vehicle and the air stole the warmth from him before he shut the door. A cold front had moved in a little after eight that night, and that was hours ago. Snow wouldn’t be far behind in the week now.

  Behind them was a more commercial section of town. In front were neighborhoods, and rough ones at that. This car, at this hour of the night, leaving the city proper and going into these neighborhoods, they were all little red flags. The fact that the headlights were off also helped. As the car drove by Barros—who was idling in a parking lot, facing the flow of traffic—the two occupants glanced at him for a moment before sitting bolt upright, staring straight ahead with the driver correcting his hands to ten and two.

  “I smell something,” Barros said, and shifted into drive.

  Now, Barros stood at his door for a second, decided he’d mix it up, and while keeping an eye on the car, he walked around his own to the rear and got up on the curb. The grass was dead and stiff underfoot.

  The academy taught the passenger side approach as an option for situations where traffic was heavy on the driver’s side. Or the officer might want to keep the driver off-guard as best as possible on a suspicious stop. Three years prior a highway patrol trooper had been hit and killed by a semi while he was doing a driver’s side approach. Two months after that at a DUI checkpoint an officer speaking to a driver was killed by a drunk trying to skirt the line. Barros’s PD strongly suggested they get used to the idea of passenger side tactics.

  But cop deaths pass by and are forgotten by all but a few once the black bands come off the shields, and the in-vogue status of passenger side approaches cooled off.

  Still, Barros was getting tired and wanted to keep himself on his toes. He came along the passenger side of the Buick and slowed his roll, observing as he went. The back windshield and rear windows were so darkly tinted it was impossible to see inside the back, even with the extra light from his flashlight crawling along it. The tinting itself was such a shoddy job there were enough air pockets in the material to make it spotted like animal print.

  He could see better as he got up to the front passenger side and its lack of tint. Two young men, both intently looking to the driver’s side window, waiting for him. Waiting for his silhouette to puncture the glare of the spotlight aimed in their mirrors.

  Their guns at the ready.

  “Pig! On J’s side!” Shout from the back seat. The driver and front passenger spun. Startled. All at once everyone knew the score.

  Barros reacted; took a shocked step back, right hand going for his gun while his left hand dropped his light and scrambled at his radio. The high-intensity beam of it cut through the shadows around as it spun and fell, rolling off. Time did that odd thing time does and it raced at quadruple speed while slowing down to a crawl. Dilation.

  Barros clicked the transmit button. And both those guns swung right up at him, ravenous to kill a cop. On his second step back, his ankle rolled.

  The driver didn’t really aim. Just shoved the gun in the direction of his target and squeezed. The arc of the gun pendulum-ed to the window, unaffected by the fact the passenger’s head was in the way as the driver pulled the trigger. Undisciplined. Raging on adrenaline.

  Barros fell back onto the stiff dead grass, his own gun coming up as the passenger’s face came out in a spray through the shattering glass.

  “Holy shit!”

  “What the fuck, man? What the fuck!?”

  “I dunno!”

  “J! You fuckin’ shot J!”

  “I didn’t mean—I didn’t—”

  “Shoot the motherfuckin’ pig! Shoot ’em!”

  But the driver froze, his eyes wide and gun hand trembling as the passenger slumped over against the door, his skull pumping out what red it had left.

  “Shots fired! Shots fired!” Barros shouted. He was squeezing his mic’s transmit button as hard as he could. Mind racing, fight or flight. He pulled his own trigger, never saw where the bullets went. The panic had taken hold and even though he’d trained for stuff like this, it was up in his face now. Jumped. He was being jumped.

  But then the backseat door opened and as he saw a muzzle exit the door Barros just started shooting at it. The car rocked; more glass burst. The rear lights on the car changed; dropped in gear. The muzzle dodged, hidden behind the car door. It was far from bulletproof, but concealment is, in part, peace of mind. Any port in a storm.

  When Barros paused for a split-second, that muzzle shoved out the door and barked with flashes of fire, and then Barros couldn’t breathe. He tried to back up further, get cover. He was already on the ground. Out in the open, trying to radio and shoot and crab walk and breathe and get up and communicate and live. He shot and shot again. The concrete under the car sparked. A chunk of dirt kicked up a foot from his thigh. The muzzle coming out of the car spat again and Barros’s radio hand went hot and numb. He slumped backwards, the cold of the ground grabbing hold of his spine. His radio was chattering hard and fast but he couldn’t make out the words. It was the strangest thing; he recognized the voices, recognized the words. Didn’t process any of it. It was getting numb, though. Everything burned but was still getting really, really numb.

  “Get the fuck back in here!” from the car.

  “Hold up.” The back passenger exited fully—taking the split-second he needed to shrug his hoodie over his head—took a huge step toward Barros, and squeezed off three rounds. Barros bounced with the impact, his vision a dazzling display of electricity and colorful spots. The gunman spun, whipped open the passenger side door, and yanked the dead guy out, tossing him like an empty soda bottle onto the curb. He jumped in the seat. “Ah, fuck, man.” He said, holding up his bloody hands from the mess. “Just roll, motherfucker! Roll!”

  The 1987 tan Buick LeSabre, license plate 427 David King Sam, roared to life and charged off down the road, not turning on its headlights until it took the corner of Bales on two wheels and disappeared.

  Officer Barros lay in the street, hearing sirens approaching. His entire body on fire, tasting blood, paralyzed by pain or impending death or all of it or something else entirely. His vest did what it could, but he knew he was filled with lead. Why the backseat gunman didn’t skull tap he didn’t know.

  I pulled that car over because he didn’t have his headlights on, Barros thought as the first cop car rolled up to the curb and the next two raced after the LeSabre. Fucking headlights. Oh, Lindsey. I’m sorry, baby. Then he stopped thinking so much.

  0127 hours, Carcasa PD

  Officers Beau and Sri were docked in the parking lot of a burned-down fried chicken joint, their cruisers facing opposite directions allowing their driver’s side windows to line up. Heaters blasting, both men sat in the darkness.

  “Anyway, that’s the dream, man.” Beau said. “Nothing fancy, just something big enough to fish from and give tours on.”

  “You should probably leave the force and get a job making real money if you want all that,” Sri said, a cup of coffee next to his lips.

  “My wife does alright. Better than me, actually.”

  “You gonna go for corporal?”

  “I thought about it. You?”

  Sri shrugged. “I want off dog watch. That spot is for dog watch. If I got it—and I hear Kolbe is putting in for it so I doubt I’ll even be in the top three—I’d be stuck here until a corporal spot opened elsewhere. Could be a few more years.”

  “Kolbe is putting in for it? I didn’t hear that,” Beau said, smelling Sri’s coffee and thinking he should get some.

  “Yeah. I’m not gonna beat him
. You might, though.”

  “Sure,” Beau said with a laugh. “Hey, where’d you get that coffee?”

  “The Gas Stop on 128th and Bucannon.”

  “I thought they closed at midnight.”

  “They usually do. The one on Trevor and 4th, and the other one on the Boardwalk, they do. That one on Bucannon is trying twenty-four hours now. See how it goes.”

  “Oh, so they wanna be robbed more often, then?”

  Sri smiled at that. Then their radios blared to life in stereo from both men’s cars.

  “102, PD, 10-45.” Barros’s voice filled the parking lot.

  Sri reached over and turned his radio down a little bit, said, “Always the go-getter.”

  “Yessir,” Beau said.

  “Copy, go ahead.”

  “Stop location is westbound 139th at Rainbow, vehicle is an older model tan Buick LeSabre, license plate 427 David King Sam. Appears to be occupied two times, unknown race and gender.”

  “10-4.”

  “I wonder what he pulled ’em over for,” Sri said.

  Beau laughed. “He’s got a problem on quiet nights. He’s got to do something.”

  “Yeah. Dude, the first time I heard him say boy, it sure is quiet to try and jinx us into a good call, I almost kicked his ass.”

  “Almost?”

  “Oh sure.”

  “Did it get busy?”

  Sri chuffed. “It was New Year’s Eve.”

  Beau laughed. They settled down for a moment, then Beau asked, “You think he’ll go for corporal?”

  Sri shrugged. “He should. Barros would make a good one.”

  “He said 139th and Rainbow?” Beau asked. When Sri nodded, Beau put his car in drive. “I’ll head that way. Just in case.”

  “Roger that, bro. If you need anything, just holler,” Sri said, holding his coffee cup up like a toast at a wedding. Beau could see the heat snakes rise off the cup and his mouth watered.

  “Yup.” He drove and pulled onto the street.

  “102, your return.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “427 David King Sam, October of 2018, comes back on a 1987 Buick LeSabre to a Gertrude Brown of Bates City. No wants or warrants.”

  “Copy.”

  Beau got to the four-way stop light at Rainbow where he waited at the red wanting to turn left. His blinker’s chime dinged in the car and his world was consumed by the darkness outside being invaded by the irritating, penetrating glow of the dash inside and the single monotonous tone of the turn signal. He started thinking about the coffee, about his dream of a boat, about how he wasn’t good at tests and how that was probably going to scuttle him if he went for corporal, about how earlier Campbell told him he was being complained on by a driver he ticketed the previous week and about how this red light was never-ending and that red turn arrow just stared at him and—

  “—fired! Shots fir—” across the radio. Panic. A distorted blast in the background.

  “Fuck!” Beau shouted and jammed on the gas. His thumb flicked at the overhead lights and his engine growled as it climbed past sixty miles an hour. Those two words had a way of occupying all available brain space. No coffee, no boat, no promotion, no complaint, no red arrow. Only Barros.

  “PD to 102.”

  The radio was silent and that had a way of sinking into someone’s guts like a cancer diagnosis for a child.

  “102. PD to 102, do you copy?”

  “Signal 13, Dispatch,” Sergeant Campbell said over the radio. Officer in emergency distress. “100 is in route from 110th and Bleaker. Tone out all the info you have, and then contact all the surrounding agencies.”

  “104, responding from Rainbow and 147th,” Beau said into his mic.

  “Copy.”

  “103, responding, same location,” Sri said.

  “Copy, units in route at 0135 hours,” Rick in Dispatch said. The radio pulsed with the alternating high/low tone that was reserved for exigent information. After it stopped, Rick transmitted, “All available units, be in route to a signal 13 at 139th and Rainbow. Officer 102 has reported shots fired. Unknown description on suspects or any causalities. Suspect vehicle is described as an older model tan Buick LeSabre, license plate 427 David King Sam. Radio traffic is reserved for information about the signal 13. PD out.”

  Rainbow was virtually empty this late at night, this time of year. Beau tore down it, seeing Sri’s reds and blues in his rearview as they raced south along the street, the crossroad signs getting smaller from 147th until 139th came eerily into view.

  Barros’s cruiser sat on the side of the road, empty. Haunted. Overhead lights still on, exhaust still smoking into the night, his spotlight aiming into the nothing down the road. Beau came flying up, saw Barros’s feet sticking out of the grass, one twitching. He swung his car and jumped out. He saw Barros. He saw blood.

  He saw a lot of blood.

  He saw a young man, facedown and slumped like a rag doll tossed against the wall. By the size of the mess around his face, he wasn’t a threat.

  Beau grabbed his mic, said, “Officer down. 102 is down. Get an ambulance times two to the stop location.”

  “Copy, already in route.” Rick was good. He could read the tea leaves over the radio static.

  Sri blasted past them, taking the next corner on two wheels. Over the radio, Beau heard him say, “103, in pursuit of suspect vehicle, southbound on Bales Avenue off 139th.”

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