by Joe McKinney
Paul.
“Please don’t touch me,” Paul muttered, staring into the dead girl’s white eyes—the eyes that weren’t just hers any longer. “Please don’t.”
“Hey, Paul!”
All at once, Paul’s attention was pulled away from the dead girl’s face. He glanced up at Mike, their eyes meeting over the wreckage. Red and blue lights licked across the twisted metal and the fluid on the pavement.
“You have any luck with her ID?”
Paul looked down at the girl. She was dead again, empty brown eyes staring up into nothing.
He looked back at Mike and shook his head.
***
Several hours later, after they had written page after page of reports and the driver had been booked for Intoxication Manslaughter and Possession with Intent to Deliver on the ecstasy, Paul and Mike were back in their district.
They sat in their car, watching a group of three black men who were standing near a pay phone in the parking lot of a convenience store on the edge of the Witherby Courts Housing Project. Mike had the car blacked out, no lights, the radio turned down low. He had backed it into an alleyway choked with mesquite shrubs and scraggly hackberry and straw colored alkali grass. From where they sat they had a clear view of the intersection of Wedding and Hall Streets, the entire parking lot and two sides of the store, and a good part of the Courts, which was basically a sprawling complex of battered white concrete buildings splashed with graffiti and riddled with cracks and pocked by bullet holes.
Mike had leaned the driver’s seat back as far as the plexiglass prisoner cage would let it go and was slouched down, his arms crossed over his chest, eyes nearly closed. Paul sat in the passenger seat, trying desperately to push the image of the dead girl in the Escalade from his mind while he fingered his badge and thought about what the Latin on the ribbon over his badge number meant.
I bet Rachel would know.
Mike coughed quietly to himself, but never took his eyes off the three men. So far, they hadn’t seen the patrol car and Paul hadn’t seen them do anything strange.
“What does this mean?” Paul said.
“What does what mean?”
“This ribbon Sarge gave me.” He tried to pronounce the words, but couldn’t get the last one out.
Mike glanced at him out of the corner of his eye and said, “It means, ‘Nobody provokes me with impunity.’” Then he went back to watching the three men.
Paul thought about that, wondering why the translation made even less sense to him than the original Latin did.
“Why are you so interested in those guys?” he said.
“Garwin told us to shake down the junkies in our district for information. Those guys are junkies.”
“Those guys?”
“Yeah.”
At the Academy, one of Paul’s instructors, a former Narcotics detective, told his class that while there was no place for racial stereotyping in police work, there was some truth to it when it came to racial preferences for certain kinds of drugs. Everybody smokes pot, he’d said. But beyond that, blacks usually go for cocaine. Mexican guys like heroin, and the white guys are the sluts of the drug world. They’ll do just about anything they can get their hands on.
Paul studied the three black guys and felt like he was missing something. Why would they be messing around with heroin? If he’d been by himself, he’d have driven right by them and not given them a second thought.
Unable to figure it out, he said “How do you know they’re junkies?”
“Because this is the Witherby Courts, the flea market of heroin sales.”
Paul laughed, but Mike didn’t even smile. Evidently, he was serious. And, evidently, he thought that was explanation enough.
Paul watched the men. He saw three dirty looking guys drinking oversized beers, but nothing like what he’d expected a heroin junkie to look like. Weren’t junkies supposed to be famine refugee skinny with stringy hair and tattoos all over the place? He had expected to see a listless, comfortably numb sort of haze in their eyes. That was his picture of a heroin addict. But these guys, none of them were skinny, and one of the guys looked to be pushing three hundred pounds easy. They laughed and joked with each other and seemed fairly animated. All three watched the streets and the buildings around them carefully, constantly scanning every vehicle in the sparse parade of beat up cars that rolled by.
He was about to ask Mike what he was missing when Mike suddenly spoke up. “That guy in the green shirt—the fat one—I’ve hooked him up before. It was about eight months ago, on the other side of the Courts. The other two I don’t know, but I doubt seriously they’re hanging around with fat boy there for the pleasure of his company.”
“Are they selling or trying to score?”
“Selling.”
“Oh.”
They had the windows down. It was hot, the air dusty. The alleyway smelled liked scorched vegetation. Paul could hear cicadas close by.
Mike said, “You see them with those beers, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Have you seen them drink any since we’ve been here?”
Paul thought about that. “No,” he said slowly.
“Most of the time they package heroin in little colored balloons. They keep the balloons in their mouths. The beers are in case we show up. If we get too close, they swig the beer and swallow the dope.”
“Oh,” Paul said. After a moment, he said, “Then what?”
“What do you think? They wait for us to leave, then they go behind the store there and get their dope back.”
“They...”
Mike smiled. “It comes out one end or the other.”
“Oh God.”
“Heroin’s a nasty business,” Mike said, and shrugged.
“You ain’t kidding.”
“I’m waiting for them to make a sale. When they do, we’ll take them down.”
“We’re gonna arrest them? Didn’t Garwin say—”
“Paul, we’re not gonna waste time talking to these clowns without anything to hold over their heads. Collins was right about that. Look at those guys. Do you really believe they’d tell us all about life as a heroin dealer if we just walked up there and started shooting the shit?”
“No, I guess not.”
“You’re damn right. These guys, they’re not gonna talk to you unless they think they can get something out of the deal. As it is, we’ve got nothing to bargain with. But if we’ve got them in handcuffs, well, that changes things, doesn’t it?”
Paul thought about that. “Yeah,” he said, “I guess it does.”
Out on the street, a dark blue Chevy Monte Carlo rolled up to the three heroin dealers. One of the dealers walked up to the passenger window and leaned in. A few seconds later, the man walked back to the other two men and the car drove off.
“That’s it,” Mike said.
“What?” Paul said. “What happened?”
“The guys in the Monte Carlo just scored. That’s what I’ve been waiting for.”
“Okay,” Paul said. “Now what?”
“Now we go take them down.” Mike was sitting up in his seat now, his eyes sparkling with anticipation. “This is what I want you to do. We’re gonna roll up on them as fast as possible. When we do, you jump out, knock down the closest one to you, and grab him by the throat and squeeze. Don’t let go until he spits out the dope, you hear?”
Paul looked at Mike like he’d just grown four heads. “You’re kidding?”
“Do I look like I’m kidding?”
Paul decided that he didn’t. Of course, with Mike that didn’t necessarily mean anything one way or the other.
“Can we do that?” Paul said. “I mean, just start choking people.”
Mike grew very serious, and suddenly there was no doubt that he meant exactly what he was saying.
“Look,” he said, “we play dumb jokes on each other all the time, but when it comes to dealing with the dope dealers, the fun and games stop. Those guys ove
r there don’t give a rat’s ass about you, and they don’t care whether you go home in the morning or not. If they can kill you and get away with it, they will. Do not let your guard down for a second. I mean that. You keep choking that motherfucker until he gives up. If you don’t, he’ll know you’re weak, and not only will he swallow the dope, but he will proceed to fuck your world. We clear on that?”
“Yeah,” Paul said. “We’re clear.”
“Don’t think it’s like the Academy, where you let the other person tap out because you think they might get hurt. Out here, you go full tilt. You hear?”
“I hear you.”
“Okay. You ready?”
No, Paul wanted to say. Suddenly things were going way too fast for him. But he nodded. “Yeah, I’m ready.”
That was good enough for Mike. He dropped the Crown Victoria into gear and charged out of the alleyway under full acceleration, closing the distance to the dealers in a matter of seconds.
The three men scattered. They were already running by the time Paul and Mike jumped out of their car, but they were hardly a match for Paul. Paul had played college football for a Division II school, and you don’t make it to that level without being graced by a few rare gifts. He had size and raw physical strength and agility and above all speed. Plus, he was still close to his physical peak. The heroin dealer was not. One of them tried to feint left, then veered right, cutting a diagonal across Paul’s track. Paul wasn’t fooled for a second. He moved quickly and overtook the man within a few steps. Paul grabbed him around the neck and slung him face first into the asphalt.
He rolled the dealer over and dropped down on top of him so that he was straddling his chest. Paul pushed his hand under the man’s chin and found the windpipe. His fingers closed down around it and he squeezed. He squeezed as hard as he could.
The man grabbed his wrist with both hands and tried to pull his hand away, but Paul kept up the pressure. He could feel the resistance in the muscles and the tendons beneath the man’s skin. The man’s jaw was clenched so tightly it seemed like his teeth might shatter in his mouth.
“Spit it out!” Paul yelled at him. “Mother fucker, spit it out.”
Paul didn’t even realize he was banging the back of the man’s head on the asphalt with every word. There was too much adrenaline coursing through him for him to do anything else but squeeze.
The man was trying to speak, but no sound came out. Finally, after what seemed to be forever, the man rolled his head to one side and spit out four small, brightly colored balloons. They looked like gumballs.
“All of them!” Paul said, and squeezed harder.
Two more balloons came out.
The man wasn’t breathing. His eyes looked as if they might turn up into his skull. Paul let go, and the man sucked in a huge lungful of air. His eyes regained their focus. But before the man could completely regroup, Paul flipped him over and forced one arm behind his back.
“Put your other hand behind your back,” he shouted. “Sir, put your hand behind your back.”
“Fuck you,” the man wheezed.
Paul dug his knee into the man’s back. “Put your hands behind your back. Now!”
The man kept his left arm tucked under his body, using his weight to keep it from Paul. There was no way he could get up, because Paul had him pinned, but he was still fighting to stay out of the cuffs. Paul rose up a little and then rammed his knee down into the man’s spine.
“Give me your hand. Now!”
The man just grunted. He kept his left arm hidden under his body. Paul twisted the man’s right arm further up behind his back, wrenching it so hard the man had to arch his back to fight against the pain.
“I’ll break it,” Paul said. “I swear I will. Now get your other hand—”
The high-pitched, metallic-sounding pop pop pop pop pop pop of a small caliber semiautomatic pistol erupted somewhere to his left. It was like a car backfiring, only faster, more purposeful.
Paul looked in the direction of the shots. His grip on the dealer slackened. The man jumped at the opportunity and started fighting. By the time Paul could regain his hold, the man had already squirmed out from beneath him and was up on his feet. He took off running, the cuffs still dangling from his right wrist, and didn’t look back.
Paul started after him, but stopped after only a few steps. Even as the man was breaking away from him, Paul heard the sound of an engine revving up, and a moment later a beige Cadillac Deville skidded around the corner. It turned toward them, but the driver slammed on the brakes at the sight of the police car. The driver put the car in reverse and burned out backwards down the street. As Paul stood there watching, too startled to move, the car spun around and took off the other way.
“Come on, dammit!” Mike yelled at him.
He had already let his guy go and was running to the car.
***
Paul followed him. He jumped into the passenger seat as Mike threw the car into gear. They crashed down over the curb and fishtailed onto the street, the Cadillac’s taillights disappearing around a corner two blocks down.
Mike keyed up the car’s radio.
“44-70,” he said.
Mike sounded perfectly calm, like he was ordering a cheeseburger at the drive-thru. Paul was shaking like an epileptic.
“44-70,” Mike said again.
“Go ahead, 44-70,” the dispatcher answered.
“44-70, we got one running. Westbound on Wedding from Hall Street. Approaching Ash Street now. Still westbound.”
“10-4, vehicle description?”
“Beige four door Cadillac. Late model, rear end damage. Texas plate four-whiskey-golf-hotel-three-nine.”
“Copy that, 44-70. What’s he running for?”
“On Ash Street now, going southbound.”
“10-4,” the dispatcher answered. “Southbound on Ash Street from Wedding. 44-50, 44-60, start that way. What’s he running for, 44-70?”
“We’re westbound again. On Clarke Street now.”
Paul noticed the way Mike’s voice got much quieter when he was excited. As he worked the car through the neighborhood, all the way on the gas, then all the way on the brakes, then back on the gas again, shuffle-steering around the corners, hitting the apex of every curve with surgical precision, he still managed to call out their position with perfect clarity. And then, somewhere between watching Mike work the Crown Victoria like a race car and holding onto the dashboard for dear life, it dawned on him that he was in the middle of his first bona fide car chase.
At the Academy, Paul had taken eighty hours of performance driving training. The cadets learned how to take corners at high speed, how to shuffle steer so the radio cord doesn’t get tangled around your hands, how to use the car’s weight and power to your advantage. There was even a twenty-four hour long segment on how to do the Pursuit Interdiction Technique, or PIT maneuver.
But the most important lesson the instructors had tried to convey was the need to stay calm. Think about fist fights you’ve been in, the instructors had said. It doesn’t matter how good you are, everybody gets scared. Everybody. We all feel the same sense of nausea, the same tightening of the muscles, the same tunnel vision. It’s completely natural, even when you’ve done it before. The same thing happens in vehicle pursuits. No matter how much training you have, or how many times you’ve done it, you still feel that giant fist squeezing around your belly, taking your breath away.
The trick is to use that feeling, channel it, focus it, make it work for you and against the bad guy. You start by breathing slowly and regularly. You keep your head moving, your eyes scanning the road in front of you and beside you. That way, you avoid tunnel vision, and you decrease the chances of running headlong into an accident.
Paul was dimly aware of all that somewhere in the back of his head, but he was a long ways from applying it. He kept his eyes on the Cadillac’s taillights, oblivious to almost everything else that was going on.
They chased the Cadillac thro
ugh a maze of smaller streets, but Mike stayed with them, calling out street names and directions of travel without ever having to look at the signs. Paul wasn’t able to keep up with the course they had taken. He occupied himself with holding onto the dashboard, ready to bail out when the foot chase started.
When they turned onto Wintertime Avenue from Vance Alley, Mike said, “He screwed up. If he doesn’t turn off before the bridge, he’ll end up in the train yard.”
The driver of the Cadillac seemed to realize it, too, though he couldn’t stop in time to make the turn. He rocked the car to the left and then tried to make the right turn, but he was going way too fast for that. The back end kicked out and he started to fishtail. He locked up the brakes, which was the wrong thing to do, and the car spun up over a curb, landing in the grass about twenty feet to the left of the street where he had planned to turn.
Mike brought the patrol car up to the curb near the turn off, blocking the Cadillac from cutting through the grass and getting to the street that would have taken them out of the area. But the Cadillac wasn’t done. The driver put it in reverse and backed up, grinding the tailpipes on the pavement as his back end went over the curb.
“Continuing eastbound on Wintertime,” Mike said into the radio. “Looks like he’s gonna go into the train yard.”
“10-4, 44-70, still eastbound. What’s he running for?”
“He did a drive-by at the Witherby Courts. Somewhere around Wedding and Hall.”
“10-4,” the dispatcher said. “I’m getting that call now. 44-100, are you monitoring, sir?”
Garwin’s voice came over the radio.
“10-4, 44-100. Speed and traffic conditions?”
“Speed and traffic, 44-70?” the dispatcher asked.
“We’re going over the bridge now,” Mike said. “Speed’s about eighty miles per hour. No traffic.”
“Copy that, 44-100?” the dispatcher asked.
“I copy,” said Garwin. “See if we can get Hawkeye Bravo overhead. Pursuit is authorized.”
Mike laughed. “Way to go, Garwin.”
“Copy that, 44-70?” the dispatcher asked. “You are authorized to pursue.”