Sons of the City

by Scott Flander

  “unit?” the dispatcher asked. She sounded as worried as I was.

  There was more crackling, an unintelligible yell, then silence again. I pictured cops throughout the district, one or two in a car, listening. Probably some had stopped, like me, waiting. It seemed like forever. Finally, there was a burst of static, then: “Officer down! Officer down!” It was definitely Nick’s voice. “5-8-4-3 Tyler. Call Rescue! Officer down!”

  I was fifteen blocks away. I took them as fast as I could, sixty, sixty-five, seventy mph. At that speed, trees and houses rush past in a blur, you don’t notice your siren or the flashing blue and red lights on the buildings as you pass by. All you can do is concentrate on the next intersection: if it’s a green light, you try to go even faster; if the light is red, you slow a little, just enough to see whether you’ll be hit, then you step on the gas and pray.

  I had the green light at a wide intersection a few blocks from Tyler, and I knew I’d be there in a moment. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw another patrol car screaming toward me from the left. I jerked the wheel as hard as I could to the right, spinning the car in a tight circle. Whoever was in the other car did the same thing. Two cop cars, spinning like pinwheels in the middle of an intersection, inches from each other. We both came to a stop at the same time. I didn’t recognize the guy—he was from another district—but we sat there for a moment, looking at each other in relief.

  I could hear on my radio that the first cars were arriving at the scene, they were yelling that a cop was down. I shot out of the intersection, and the streets flashed by, and then I was in front of the crackhouse, and out of my car, running up the sidewalk toward the cluster of cops gathered on the wooden front porch.

  Steve was sprawled face up, next to the open front door. Michelle was already there, kneeling beside him, pressing her hand to the side of his head, blood seeping out between her fingers.

  “Please,” she said, taking deep breaths, “God, please!”

  THREE

  Donna was on the porch, too, and she bent down and gently pulled Michelle back. Michelle’s hands, covered with blood, kept reaching toward her brother. In the light of a streetlamp I could see dark red blood oozing from a bullet hole in the right side of Steve’s head, matting his hair, creating rivulets on the wooden porch planks. His police radio, still turned on, echoed the chaos around him.

  Nick was reeling around the porch, dazed, like a confused dog over its fallen master. “Where’s Rescue?” he shouted into the air. “Where are they?”

  Michelle fell back on her brother again, and again Donna had to pull her away. It was awful. Through the front door I could see cops searching the dimly lit living room, and I heard the thumping of feet going up and down stairs. Buster came through the doorway onto the porch.

  “Place is empty,” he said, holstering his gun. “We checked upstairs, the basement, round back in the alley.”

  Nick was still pacing the porch, and I grabbed his shoulder to stop him.

  “Nick, what happened?”

  His eyes were full of anguish, and he stepped back, breaking my grip. “Where’s Rescue, Eddie? Where’s Rescue?”

  I was beginning to wonder that myself. There was no sign of one of the Fire Department’s boxy red ambulances. I looked back at Steve. The porch floor was covered with blood. We didn’t have time to wait. I glanced at the street and spotted V.K. and Larry’s white police van.

  “Let’s get him in the wagon,” I yelled to the cops around me.

  Four of us picked up Steve and carried him down the steps and then to the van. We opened up the rear doors and put Steve in, laying him on the cold metal floor. Michelle, her blue shirt red with blood, climbed in and cradled her brother’s head in her lap. She was talking to him, saying something softly over and over, I couldn’t hear what it was. Donna got in the back with her and we closed the door. V.K. and Larry got in front, and the wagon took off.

  All I could think of was that this was somehow my fault. I’m the fucking sergeant, I should be able to keep my cops from getting shot. Maybe there was something I should have said to Steve, something I should have taught him, that could have prevented this from happening. Wasn’t that what I was supposed to be doing out here, keeping my cops safe?

  I felt like throwing up. I wanted to go somewhere, to-just get away and think about what a fuckup I was. What made me believe I could be a sergeant, be responsible for other people’s lives?

  But I knew I couldn’t leave, I had to stay and do my job. Focus, I told myself. Focus on what you have to do now.

  Nick was standing a few feet away, still dazed.

  “Now, what the fuck happened here, Nick?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I was around back, I heard a shot …” He paused to steady himself.

  “Take your time,” I said.

  “So I came through the back door, through the house, when I got to the front, the door was open, there was Steve …” He broke off again. “You see anybody?”

  “A black guy, running down the street … but I didn’t go after him, Eddie. Steve was shot, I got on the radio, I didn’t know what to do.”

  “You did the right thing, Nick, you called for help.”

  That seemed to calm him a little.

  “This guy you saw,” I said. “Any flash at all?”

  Nick shook his head. “Just a black guy, I really couldn’t see anything more. I should have gone after him, Eddie, I’m sorry.”

  “No, Nick, you stayed with Steve, like you should have.”

  I got the attention of a handful of cops standing in the front yard. “Start knocking on doors, see if anybody saw anything.”

  They fanned out on both sides of the street. The block was lined with trees and wide three-story row houses, all with porches that were divided off from one another by metal or wood railings. This had once been a prosperous black neighborhood, but it was falling on hard times, and people were moving out. A crackhouse in the middle of your block can do a lot of damage.

  Bowman, the lieutenant, was coming up the sidewalk. “Captain’s on his way in from home,” he said.

  Bowman had been transferred from the 26th in North Philly about three months before. It only took us a couple of days to peg him as one of those cops who become supervisors so they can rest. He usually hung around the operations room reading his hunting magazines, and he wouldn’t go out unless something big happened. Then when he got to a scene he’d be pissed at us, like his attitude was, Why can’t you keep things quiet? Tonight he had a real worried look on his face, and I think he knew he wasn’t going to be getting back to his magazines anytime soon.

  I told Nick to tell us what happened, from the beginning.

  They got the call about the woman screaming, he said, and when they got here, Steve knocked on the front door, and Nick waited by the back door.

  “That’s the way we usually do it at this place,” he said.

  “Usually?” I asked.

  “Yeah, we’re always hoping that one of these days, when Steve knocks on the front, some guy with the stuff is going to run out the back, we’ll get a drug pinch.”

  I was furious. “Without any fucking backup?”

  Nick looked at the ground.

  “That is so fucking stupid, Nicky,” I yelled. “What the fuck were you thinking of?”

  “Usually nobody answers the door, so we just leave. We never go in.” Nick’s eyes pleaded with me to understand.

  “So this time,” Bowman said, “some crackhead opens the door and blows your partner away.”

  Nick looked at the ground again.

  Buster was coming up to us. “Hey, Sarge, we got a neighbor, real good witness. She heard a shot, looked out her window, saw a guy running down the sidewalk.”

  “Any flash?”

  “Yeah, lotta detail.”

  “All right, put it out.”

  Buster tilted his head to talk into the mike clipped to his shoulder. A moment later, the dispatcher’s rapid but cont
rolled voice came back across a sea of radios.

  “All units, flash information on a founded shooting of a police officer, 5-8-4-3 Tyler, approximately ten minutes ago. Looking for a black male, twenty-five years of age, five eleven, 160 pounds, wearing a black baseball cap, red T-shirt, dark pants, and white sneakers. Last seen running west on Tyler from that location.”

  Cops were streaming back to their cars and squealing off into the night. Everywhere there was movement, lights, sirens, people yelling into the radio. When an officer gets shot, his squad moves through the grieving process quickly, and right now we were in the stage of being very fucking pissed off.

  Cops were still inside the crackhouse—that was stupid, they were stomping all over the crime scene. I climbed back on the porch and stepped through the front door.

  “I want everybody out of the house,” I yelled.

  The place was pretty disgusting. The living room floor was covered with all kinds of trash, newspapers, McDonald’s wrappers, balls of tin foil, beer bottles, a box of kitty litter filled with cat shit. There were a couple of old couches, half the cushions gone, and a battered wooden coffee table covered with junk.

  I knew from Nick and Steve that a man and a woman actually lived here. But it wasn’t really their house anymore. They had started letting other people use the place in exchange for drugs, and pretty soon the whole house got taken over by crackheads.

  Marisol Cruz, one of my cops, was standing by the door.

  “Look what we found, Sarge.”

  She pointed to a gun lying on the floor. A snub-nose, probably a .38.

  “Don’t let anybody touch it until the detectives get here,” I told her. She nodded OK.

  I went back outside, found Bowman, and told him about the gun. Detectives from Southwest were on their way, he said. Bowman was staring out onto the street, and I followed his line of vision. A TV news van was pulling up, the first, I was sure, of many. I told a couple of cops to stretch some tape—the yellow kind that says ”police line—do not cross“—from tree to tree in a big circle around the front of the house.

  I wanted to call the hospital, see how Steve was doing, and I remembered there was a pay phone in front of the bar on the corner. As I headed down the sidewalk toward the bar, I saw the white shirts arriving: captains, inspectors, chief inspectors. Commissioner’s son gets shot, they start calling everybody in.

  The phone was all beat up, and I was amazed I even got a dial tone. I called HUP, the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, and got through to the emergency room. I identified myself, and asked if there were any 20th District cops around. I was surprised when Michelle came on the line.

  “He’s just going into surgery,” she said. “I keep asking how he is, and they won’t tell me, they just say they’re doing all they can. I don’t know what that means. Do you know what that means?”

  I said I didn’t.

  “My father’s on his way here, maybe he can find out.”

  I told her everyone was praying for Steve, and hung up.

  When I got back to the crackhouse, a small crowd was gathering, and three or four television crews were standing in the street filming the porch with their harsh bright lights. Just in time for the fucking eleven o’clock news. I was glad the TV cameras were too far away to see the blood.

  Buster’s voice suddenly came over Police Radio: “We got ‘em!”

  Typical of Buster. Forgets to say who or where he is.

  “Unit coming in?” the dispatcher asked.

  “This is twenty-oh-seven,” said Buster, out of breath. “We got ‘em, Six-two and Locust. Matches the flash perfectly.”

  That was about nine blocks away. Was it possible we had actually got the shooter? I got on the radio and told Buster to bring the suspect to Tyler Street, we’d have the witness ID him here.

  A couple of minutes later, Buster pulled up. There, in the back of his car, was a young guy in a red T-shirt and black Yankees cap, angry as hell. There was something wrong, though. He didn’t look like a crackhead, he didn’t look like he belonged in that house. His eyes were too clear, his clothes were too nice. But I didn’t care, I was excited, we all were. We all wanted the asshole that shot Steve.

  Two of my cops were escorting a middle-aged black woman down the steps of her front porch. With the description she had given us, obviously her eyes were good, but there was something else I was worried about. She might get intimidated by the suspect and change her mind, and I didn’t want to lose our only witness. We had to keep the suspect from seeing her face. I told the cops to bring her directly behind the patrol car, and then about four of us stood in front of her, so she could sort of peek between us. As Buster got the guy out of the backseat, we shined our flashlights right in his eyes. He came out blinking, blinded by the lights.

  I could hear the woman gasp. “That’s him,” she said. “That is definitely him.”

  We had the motherfucker cold.

  “That’s my son,” a woman somewhere yelled. “That’s my son you got there.”

  Now what?

  A thin, haggard black woman was coming toward us. “That’s my boy you got there,” she yelled. “He didn’t do nothin', why you got him?”

  “Ma’am,” I said, “we have a witness.”

  “What witness?” She spotted the older woman. “Now Miss Jones, don’t you recognize my boy, this is my boy Charles.”

  So much for keeping the witness anonymous.

  “Ma’am,” I said, “this woman saw your son running from the crime scene.”

  “What crime scene?” she yelled. “He was just walking out the house, he didn’t no sooner get out the door when we heard this loud bang. We thought it was a firecracker.”

  “How long from the time he left the house until you heard the bang?” I asked.

  “Wasn’t no time. Happened in the same second, the same second.”

  “Was there anybody else in the house with you?”

  “Everybody was there. Cousins, aunts, uncles … listen, Mr. Policeman, you got to let my boy go.”

  I turned back to the older woman and asked, “Ma’am, where did you first see the suspect?”

  “Right there,” she said, pointing to the sidewalk in front of a house three doors down from the crackhouse.

  “And that’s right where we live,” said the suspect’s mother.

  Miss Jones came out from behind us and walked right up to the suspect. “Oh, it is Charles,” she said. “I’m sorry, child, I didn’t know it was you.” She turned to me and added, “I watched this boy grow up. He’s a good boy.”

  Buster and I looked at each other with the same thought: we were screwed. Our only lead was wrong, which meant we now had no idea who we were hunting for.

  Now, we’d be stopping every black guy who looked even a little suspicious. And it’s not like it’s done politely. You see a guy walking down the sidewalk a few blocks from the crime scene, maybe acting a little nervous, you can’t just roll down your window and say, Excuse me, sir, are you by any chance the gentleman who discharged a firearm in the direction of one of our police officers?

  If he’s the shooter, he’ll run. And if he’s got a gun, he may figure he’s got nothing to lose, and all of a sudden you’ve got another cop shot. So you have to get the drop on him. You jump out of the car fast, with your gun in your hand, and before he knows what’s happening you push him up against the hood and pat him down. Then you can ask him where he’s coming from and where he’s going.

  All this meant that a lot of black guys were going to be very unhappy with us. And that meant, I knew, the black community was going to be all over our asses.

  I told the cops to take Miss Jones back home, and then I turned to our former suspect. Donna switched off her flashlight, but Buster was so frustrated he kept shining his light in the guy’s eyes.

  “Damn, why you blinding me?” he said. “I didn’t do nothin'.”

  “Buster,” I said, and made a motion with my thumb like I was s
witching off a flashlight. He finally turned it off.

  “Why were you running?” I asked.

  “Hey, when shooting starts in this neighborhood, you don’t stand around, you get as far away as possible. Them bullets don’t have no names on ‘em.”

  “You see anything?”

  “I didn’t see nothing. My feet were doing the seeing for me.”

  I turned to Buster. “Get the cuffs off, but take him to Southwest anyway.”

  “You arresting me?” the guy asked, as Buster fished out his handcuff key.

  “No,” I said, “but you’re a witness. The detectives are gonna want to talk to you.”

  “You’re just doin’ this because I’m black.” “You can shut up now,” I said.

  “I ain’t shuttin’ up. You motherfuckin’ cops violated my civil rights.”

  His hands were free, and he was rubbing his wrists like he had been manacled for the last ten years.

  “All you cops are fuckin’ racist.”

  The TV crews heard the commotion and started over.

  “All right!” someone in the crowd yelled. “Go, Homicide!”

  I stared at the guy. “Your nickname is Homicide?”

  He took a step forward so he could see my nameplate. “Your name is North? What are you, a fucking compass?”

  All of a sudden we were blinded by television lights. I quickly turned and walked away, and I could hear him saying, “That’s right, they violated my civil rights. A black man can’t walk down the street without getting harassed.”

  Captain Oliver Kirk, the only guy who could legitimately wear one of Steve’s nameplates, pulled up and got out of his black Plymouth. He was in uniform—white shirt with the badge on the breast pocket and double gold bars on the shoulders—but he had a rumpled look, like he had got dressed in a hurry. His curly red hair was sticking out in all directions.

  Bowman walked up, and the two of us filled the captain in. We told him that all we had so far was the gun. Detectives had already bagged it up and brought it out.