The Sticking Place

by T. B. Smith

  Luke leaped and hopped over tree stumps and assorted garbage in pursuit of the tumbling officer.

  Denny started CPR on the boy.

  No way I’m going in the water after this guy, Luke thought as he ran. For all his athleticism, Luke’s hydrophobia had prevented his learning to swim. For the first time in his life, he truly regretted the lack of the important skill precipitated by his near drowning in Denver’s Sheridan Lake as a boy. He’d have drowned for sure had Tuffy not jumped in to grab the scruff of his winter coat and pull him to safety. Tuffy was a hero that day, but Luke knew the hero’s secret. Tuffy had pushed him off the pier to set up the heroic rescue.

  Ignoring his self-advice, Luke scooted toward a thick metal pipe jutting out from a concrete support and into the raging channel of waters. He clutched the pipe and waded in to extend his arm, grabbing wildly as Randolph tumbled in his direction.

  Luke first saw a head, then an arm, then a series of flailing appendages, but never the whole officer at once as he grabbed for a handful of curly auburn hair. He snatched a solid hold and yanked Randolph’s tumbling body from the wild waters and into a shallow eddy near the pipe.

  Both officers lay on the bank, Luke’s legs in the water with Randolph’s head bobbing against his hip. Nearly too exhausted to move, he remembered the child, struggled to his haunches, and crawled to Denny who knelt beside the boy about a hundred yards away. As Luke inched toward them, he saw Denny pushing down on the boy’s chest, then moving to the head to give a couple quick breaths into a gaping mouth.

  “I can help,” Luke sputtered as he got closer. He took a position near the boy’s head, pinched off the nostrils and breathed into a mouth with a gouge that extended into the left cheek. Blood spewed with every compression, but the officers kept up the rhythm until the ambulance crew arrived.

  The crew took over the CPR as they snatched the boy from the ground to throw him onto the gurney. They called a second ambulance to transport Randolph.

  Two rookie officers bailed out of the second ambulance. With a conscious and responsive patient, the officers started a primary first aid survey. Starting at Randolph’s head, they worked toward his feet, searching for any obvious broken bones, hemorrhaging or noticeable pain. Randolph let out a voluminous “ouch,” when the ambulance attendant touched the top of his head.

  “Sorry,” Luke said. He opened his hand to find several strands of hair pasted between his fingers and palm.

  Probing hands palpated toward Randolph’s knees. Randolph grimaced as fingers squeezed the left knee joint and howled in pain when they reached his lower back. “Can you move your legs?” the officer conducting the survey asked.

  Randolph moved his legs.

  “Things look pretty good,” the officer said. “Let’s just take you over to the hospital and let the doctor have a look.”

  Randolph nodded his appreciation and assent as his gurney was shoved into the ambulance for transport to Paradise Valley, the same hospital treating the boy.

  Luke and Denny walked briskly into the emergency room, soaking the floors and counters around them.

  Minutes passed before a doctor emerged through the swinging door to announce the child’s death and insist on examining the bleeding gouge in Luke’s crotch. He ordered a nurse to clean and bandage it and demanded that the officers go home for a shower and change of clothes before resuming their shift.

  “Th-th-th-th, thank you,” Nine-John Randolph said to Luke as they passed his gurney on their way to the car.

  Luke patted his hand.

  Neither partner spoke. A constant chatter of police jargon escaped the radio speaker and rattled throughout the cab. The metal of the car protected Luke from the rain pelting against the exterior, but couldn’t protect him from the parasitic pain eating away at his insides.

  Denny drove. Luke sat beside him, staring into the night, seeing nothing. The radio chatter rose like a wall between them. Luke felt physical pain gnawing at his insides. He knew Denny felt it too. They’d lost the kid. And now they were headed home to do—what? How did you let this go? The car seemed like a giant vacuum that sucked up time and any good feelings about saving Nine-John Randolph. Underscoring the point, the radio fell silent too.

  Once inside their apartment, Luke showered quickly and ran a cotton towel through his hair after putting on his spare uniform. His cracked and soaked gun belt had no replacement, but the warmth of the fresh underwear, neatly pressed uniform and dry boots felt good against his skin. He found Denny sitting in his robe on the couch. “Let’s get going,” Luke said.

  “My uniform’s in the washer,” Denny told him. “The other one’s in the cleaners.”

  “Want some hot tea?” Luke asked. Although irritated by Denny’s lack of preparation, he decided not to challenge him under the circumstances.

  “I’ll just sit here for a while,” Denny said.

  Conversation seemed impossible.

  Luke reverted to his bedroom, leaving Denny alone with his thoughts. He took off his uniform, squatted to the floor in his underwear and started a set of leg-lifts. He held his legs six-inches off the floor, refusing to lower them as a piercing pain seeped into his abdomen and seared his lower back. Sheer mental force kept his legs in defiance of gravity for several minutes. His teeth gritted and beads of sweat seeped onto his face until the pain reached a crescendo too intense to bear. He let his legs fall to the ground, but turned onto his stomach and pushed himself up from the ground. He grabbed a deck of playing cards from the top of his dresser and prepared himself for the ritual he’d initiated the night before his victorious wrestling meet against the Soviet World Cup Team.

  He’d assigned a point value to each playing card, fifty points for each of the two jokers, fifteen for the aces, ten for face cards and the other cards at face value. He set the deck face-down in front of him, pulled the top card and, when the Ace of Clubs appeared, started a set of fifteen pushups, one for each point value of the card. Each rest period lasted only long enough to turn the next card over. He worked his way through the deck and started another set of leg lifts.

  After a second shower, Luke walked into the living room to meet up with Denny who emerged from his bedroom, in full uniform this time. Denny announced their in-service status to the operator as the duo trudged toward the elevator fifty-feet down the carpeted hall from their third floor apartment.

  “Unit 5-King,” the radio dispatcher said. “All my beach units are 10-7. I’ve got a 415, possible 647 (f) male pounding on the front door at 1615 Garnet Avenue, refusing to leave. Subject is a white male about thirty-five to forty, wearing a gray suit. Can you handle that?”

  26

  A BESOTTED MAN LEANED AGAINST THE WALL. Pressing his forehead against a windowpane, he repeatedly slapped the screen door and bayed to be let inside as the police car pulled up. “Let me in. I got a question.” His head bisected a pink and blue neon sign with the words Palm Reader and Psychic in the front window. A second, painted sign, written in elegant calligraphy announced, Ten Dollars for the First Reading. Madame Gloria has the answers to all life’s questions.

  “I got an important question,” the man repeated. “Open up.”

  “Get lost.” The dismissive words came from a doe-eyed woman with hair the color of charcoal. She had opened the door to the extent the security chain allowed. “Here come the cops.” Open slightly at the top, her robe exposed portions of a bountiful chest.

  “What seems to be the trouble, mister?” Denny asked.

  “She won’t let me in to ask my question.” The man’s speech slurred with noticeable sibilance and his breath and body reeked of metabolizing alcohol. “I got the ten dollars right here in my pocket, but the bitch won’t let me in to ask my question.”

  “What’s the question?” Luke asked.

  “Where did I park my car? Can you ask her that for me?” the drunk said.

  “Sure,” Luke agreed, too tired to tell a sure-to-be-irritated Denny how the situation reminded him of a
scene from Macbeth. He walked silently to the door, jerked his thumb toward the drunk and told Madame Gloria, “He wants to know where he parked his car.”

  “How the hell should I know where his car is?” the psychic asked.

  “You tell me,” Luke said. “I’m just the wing-footed messenger.”

  “I can’t tell him where his car is, but I can predict his future,” the psychic said. “He’s soon to be arrested and taken away from here.”

  “Yes ma’am,” Luke said. “That’s just about the most accurate prognostication it’s ever been my pleasure to witness.”

  Madame Gloria reached into a pocket in her robe, pulled out a business card and handed it to Luke through the crack in the door. “How you do talk,” she said. “Come by for a reading anytime. On me.”

  “I don’t need her to predict your future,” Denny said as Luke cuffed their prisoner. “If you ever have the good sense to accept her invitation and come back here, that is.”

  “Really,” Luke said, playing the straight man for what he knew would be a joke at his expense. “What might that be?”

  “You’d get fucked is what,” Denny said. “She was letting off so much steam in your direction I could feel the heat from ten feet away.”

  “No way,” Luke said. He looked toward the business. Madame Gloria still stood in the doorway. The front of her robe had opened a little more and she waggled four fingers in a confident wave.

  “Are you blind, or just stupid?” Denny said. “‘Come by for a reading ON ME,’ she says. She wants something on her for sure, and that something is you.”

  “I just wanted to find my car,” the drunk interrupted. “Why couldn’t the bitch open up and tell me how to find my car?”

  “This works out almost as good,” Denny said. “Your car’ll be safe wherever it is, and you won’t have to stand out in the rain all night.”

  A few minutes of silence ensued until they pulled into the parking lot of the Detox Center. “Hey, Luke,” a man’s voice called out from the corner as the trio walked through the open door and headed for the sign-in sheet. “Luke Jones, wait a minute.”

  The Professor, who lay supine on one of the two dozen or so rubbery pallets littering the floor, propped himself up on an elbow, rested briefly, and rolled over onto his knees. He pushed himself upright and started toward Luke, a folded piece of lined paper in his hand. “I wrote this for you.”

  Luke straightened the paper. It contained an original poem scribed in number two pencil. Written in bold capital letters, the title dominated the top of the page: NEW PRAETORIAN GUARD. “That’s you, a member of the new Praetorian Guard,” the Professor told Luke.

  “Wait a second,” Denny said incredulously. “I know you. I took you up to the hospital from over at the Monroe a few months back. Man, I thought you’d die you were so...”

  “I don’t remember that,” the Professor said as Luke soaked in the contents of the poem.

  27

  WITH THE WEEK’S DELUGE FINALLY OVER, Hartson just wanted to finish his shift. This pistol of a hangover was bad enough to turn him into what the troopers called a “cherry picker.” Cherry pickers were cops who haunted specific locations to find easy numbers to fill up their journals so they could keep their number hungry bosses off their backs.

  Sergeant Biletnikoff wasn’t much different from Hartson’s other bosses when it came to numbers. He wanted a minimum of eight contacts a shift and the numbers had to represent what he called “well-rounded activity.” An ideal journal would list at least two “hazardous” traffic tickets for violations like going through a stop sign, and two “non-hazardous” tickets or traffic warnings for violations like driving with the front license plate missing or with a tail light out.

  The tickets needed to be accompanied by two or more misdemeanor arrests together with the occasional felony pinch when the opportunity arose. The remainder of the journal should indicate a minimum of two citizen’s contacts and two crime investigations.

  The truth was that getting eight numbers on most second watch shifts was like playing pickup sticks against a blind man. There was very little resistance, nothing to it except for the shifts when Hartson had to chase from one radio call to the next and never had time to do anything else. Tonight, he intended to spend an hour or so picking up his contacts with a spurt of enforcement activities on Horton Plaza and then go up to his beat to hide and sip coffee.

  The Plaza was the perfect place for cherry picking.

  If the City of San Diego could magically transform into a human body, Horton Plaza would definitely be the asshole and, tonight, like any other night, it positively crowned with opportunities for cops to generate numbers. It was a tiny park situated between the 300 blocks of Broadway and Plaza Street and boasted an art deco fountain that worked about as often as it was out of order. The two underground restrooms constantly flooded and oozed human excrement.

  Across the street, two adult movie houses stood next to a busy hot dog stand and a Western Union storefront where the chicken hawks liked to ply their trade. Chicken hawks were that disgusting genus of human being who recruited and trafficked in juvenile prostitutes. They’d find their “employees” among the runaways and stranded kids who waited near the Western Union for money arriving from home.

  Right at the moment, Hartson had his eye on the busy bus stop with the posted “No Right Turn” signs that were more than mere signs. They doubled as bonanzas for cops who needed to write hazardous tickets and as nightmares for the unsuspecting motorists who had to sign the bottom of the citations. City buses constantly idled in front of the signs and blocked them from the motorists’ views.

  Hartson’s headache pounded worse than usual as he rested a cheek against a sweaty palm. When he’d resigned from the Chicago Police Department, he’d hoped to support a new tee-totaling lifestyle with San Diego’s sunny skies and moderate climate. He knew his drinking was a mere by-product of working crappy hours in crappy weather.

  He’d quit drinking again when his wife came out and brought Ted Jr. with her. Until then, he’d let the amber glow of his tumblers of scotch and soda and San Diego’s golden sunshine provide the analgesic he needed for his psychological pain.

  A man approached and extended his hand through the open window.

  Hartson didn’t bother to look up. He assumed the guy was just another foot soldier in the rude infantry of citizens who believed wearing a police uniform was an invitation to ask stupid questions and make rude comments. His bellicose grunt was supposed to be a signal to this particular version of John Q. Citizen to go away and leave him alone. He picked his clipboard up and started writing an entry in his journal.

  Charles Henreid either missed the cues to go away or ignored them. “I’ve wondered about your name. Should I call you Officer Hartson?” Henreid asked.

  A taut smile tugged on Hartson’s lips. “Mr. Henreid,” he said. “It’s good to see you’re still alive.”

  “Can I buy you a cup of coffee?” Henreid asked.

  “I don’t see why not. I could definitely use some,” Hartson said.

  “I’d also like to talk to the officer who was your partner that night up at the parking garage. Is that possible?”

  Hartson called for Luke, who was working an adjacent beat, and started across the street with Henreid. They happened to cross directly in front of a sign that hung from a waist-high chain declaring “No Pedestrian Crossing.” Hartson definitely felt guilty about walking in front of the same sign he’d used as justification for writing so many tickets, but not guilty enough to trek all the way to the corner. His headache could only withstand so many of the thundering reverberations that started at the soles of his feet, shot up all the way through his body, and rattled around in his brain with every step he took.

  The duo marched in tandem into the busy Carl’s Jr. Restaurant. Hartson staked out a table while Henreid headed for the counter.

  “I wanted to say thanks,” Henreid said as he handed Hartson a cup.
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  Luke heard the comment as he approached.

  “Thank me? I didn’t do anything,” Hartson said.

  “Actually, I wanted to thank both of you for saving my life.”

  “We just told you not to be in a hurry to off yourself. You did the rest,” Hartson said.

  “Arguing about taking credit for my magnificent existence isn’t why I’m here,” Henreid told him. The irony in his voice was palpable. “I’m in a twelve-step program again and need to fix the hurt I’ve done to other people.”

  Hartson’s incomprehension showed on his face. “You didn’t do anything to hurt us,” he said.

  “You might not think so,” Hartson said. “But it feels like it to me. I couldn’t let it go after you guys threw me in jail and took my truck that night. Hell, I don’t know—it just seems like after you save a guy’s life, he should be grateful, not pissed off.”

  “I appreciate that, but.”

  A look of exasperation flashed across Henreid’s face.

  “You’re welcome,” Hartson said. “So, how are things?”

  Luke settled into the booth to listen, showing the maturity that accompanied his six months of patrol duty. With that experience under his belt, he found listening infinitely preferable to talking.

  “Better.”

  “Better than what?” Hartson asked.

  “I didn’t come here to bare my soul,” Henreid said. “Just to say thanks.”

  “You can thank me by telling us about yourself since you insist on giving us credit for saving your life,” Hartson said. He looked to Luke to support the assertion.

  Luke nodded. He could see that Henreid had come to bare his soul and he honored the struggle he saw behind the man’s eyes. He was intent on trying to do the right thing and take responsibility for his own bad decisions and actions. Luke had been on the job long enough to know almost nobody did that. People usually tried shifting blame onto somebody else.