by Robert Cea
I had him facedown in the embankment, which was kneehigh deep in muck and garbage. I tossed him quickly for a pistol; there was none. I was out of breath and covered in the same shit he was; I was hot, dirty, and paranoid; I wanted this part of my life to be over with, I wanted to find the answers I was searching for; I hated these streets, hated Conroy, and hated myself.
He did not resist and was quiet, too quiet. I dragged him up to the street and started to walk him back toward Hamilton Avenue. Conroy had made it across the avenue and was now flying down Smith Street to find me. I waited for him on Ninth Street, where it was desolate; I wanted complete privacy to question the man. After Conroy pulled up, I opened the rear door, threw him in the backseat without cuffs. He wasn’t armed, so I was not in fear of my life. I jumped in the front and pointed to an abandoned dry dock that ran parallel to the canal. It was far enough down the embankment to be hidden from the street. As we rolled, we didn’t say anything to each other. I can only imagine what this guy was thinking, though he did not try to run or talk his way out of this. He had to have known who we were; maybe he’d seen us in the Badlands. I turned to him when Conroy switched off the engine. “You know who we are, yes?” The man was shaking, and he wasn’t faking it—his teeth were chattering and his lips were caked in dried saliva. He nodded quickly in the affirmative. “So what’d you take off for?” I asked this calmly, but I felt a surge of anger building, I was hoping this would end quickly and that he’d have something more than lies and nonsense to tell me. I was a raw nerve and didn’t have time to fuck around.
“I had a little bag a coke on me—”
Before he’d finished the lie, I swung hard with an open fist, catching him squarely on the cheek. This was going to be an ugly display of every bad emotion that I had tamped down for the last six months—Cho’s murder, my duplicitous partner, the streets, all of it was ready to erupt out of me. I grabbed his ear and pulled him to me, so close our eyelids were touching. “Now before this goes any further, let’s stop the bullshit, okay? You know exactly what we’re about and you know you aren’t getting collared behind a bag of coke, so let’s start over or on Jesus Christ himself, I’m gonna throw you into that canal, you hear?”
I pushed him with such force into the backseat that he slammed off the rear window. Conroy looked at me, unsure. He had to know this wasn’t good cop, bad cop role playing; this was all bad cop, bad cop.
“Just tell us why you made us chase you. Don’t be afraid, we know everyone is running scared out here, we just want to know why.” Conroy asked this calmly.
The man nodded again, wiped his mouth, and dropped his hands into his lap, interlocking his fingers. He did not look at me, just stared directly at Conroy. I guess he thought he’d made a connection with the lesser of the two evils. He was wrong. “You right, man, I gots a bullshit bench warrant and—”
This is where I lost total control; reasoning, logic, any street communicating skills that I had developed over the years vanished. I had become as vacuous and dark as the streets I had patrolled for so long. All of the hatred erupted out of me like a hammer striking the primer of a .45. I was a perfectly placed .45 hollow point and this man was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Gun in hand, I leaped over the backseat. I felt my foot kick Conroy in the head in my need to get over the seat and at the man. I did not care, this was sudden-death play; there was no turning back. I struck him once on his forehead. The man tried his best to cover up, but I was too quick, I hit him with everything, my elbows, fists, feet; I had my knee jammed into his neck so I would cut off his breathing, incapacitating him further. “What did I tell you? You wanna play us like some third-grade boons?” The words came out like screeches you’d hear late at night in an insane asylum. My lips were caked with white foam and spit flew out of my mouth as I continued to pummel him. I wanted more, I wanted Conroy to see where I was and, more important, what I was capable of. Though everything that occurred here was not premeditated; it was all real, raw emotion; the action just gushed out of me, and there was no stopping it. I lifted my gun up close to my face, I opened the chamber, I dropped all the bullets except one to the floor, I screamed, “This is what it’s like, this is what it feels like, you little animal.” I placed the round back in the chamber and spun it before snapping it shut. My knee had the right side of his terrified face jammed into the dirty seat. He was able to see my incensed rage with his left eye; I noticed that he tried to close it; that is when I jammed the barrel of the gun into his eye, forcing it to remain open. “Tell me, you motherfucker, tell me why you ran.”
“Officer, please; please.” He was crying; he had to have known this was as real and as out of control as it could get. He had to have known that I would have killed him and dumped his body; I was not thinking at all.
Click.
The man screamed, I felt his body go limp, I heard Conroy scream something; I turned on him wildly. “You, you motherfucker, you, shut the fuck up ’cause I got something for you too.” I turned my attention back to the man; I cocked the hammer. “You still wanna play, huh, you cunt…”
“Everyone knows you two are hot…”
It was hard to understand him, as he was crying and shaking. “What do you mean hot?” I screamed.
“In the street, they be sayin’ you’s killed that German on the roof.”
“Who, who said it?”
“I don’t know, Officer, they just be sayin’ it, I just heard…”
“Which one of us?”
“What?”
I screwed my gun deeper into his ear. “Which one of us killed Cho?”
“I don’t know . . .”
Click.
The man closed his eyes as he wailed; Conroy was screaming at me, though all I could decipher were loud static noises from both of them.
“Was it me or was it him? Who are they saying did him?”
Conroy kicked open his car door. “Get out of the fucking car, Rob, or I’ll shoot you right there, right motherfucking now.” His words and his tone brought me back to the cold reality of what I had done. There was now a crying man underneath me and I was holding a gun to his head. I had to catch my breath. I jammed the pistol into my waist and jumped back into the front seat; I did not look back at the man. “Get out.” I said this quietly. I heard the door open and close, footsteps scrambling quickly away from the car. I flipped open the door and got out, leaned against the front fender, inhaling deeply. Conroy approached from behind, his footsteps heavy. “You stupid motherfucking psycho.”
I felt his big hand grab my shoulder as he spun me around, off of the car. I was spent, nothing left to fight with. He reached down, quickly relieving me of the gun. He then swung an arching roundhouse, glancing off the left side of my head. I didn’t care if there was more to come, and there was. He swung again, this one caught me just under the chin and I fell back into the car, hunched down, covering up. I felt both of his hands grab at my head as he screamed, “You could have killed him.” He launched me off the car and I hit the pavement hard.
“The gun was empty, the gun was empty,” I screamed back at him. I heard him step back. Conroy pulled the gun out: click, click, boom. His face said it all. Maybe there was the scintilla of hope that there wasn’t a bullet in the chamber, that it was all a well-executed charade to get at the truth, but there was, and he’d realized how genuine the last ten minutes had been, and how over the edge I had truly gone. I suddenly realized the same thing.
We watched each other for what seemed like an eternity. He then just shook his head. “No wonder Devlin dumped you…you’re out of control. It’s over, man, get yourself a new partner.” He tossed the gun at my feet as he walked to the car. Then he turned back to me. “Another thing. You think I killed that little German dope head, then have the balls to say it to me like a man. Don’t try and beat it out of some poor nigger.”
He sped off, leaving me on the dirty dry dock. The tide was low and the haze and the heat had made the stench stronger. I starte
d to heave and then it all came up. Maybe the ghetto was trying one last time to cleanse me, though I knew it was not going to be that easy to absolve me of the dirt I had ingested. I wiped the sweat from my face, though all I accomplished was smearing more of the sticky vomit, mud, and garbage on it. I was now one with the garbage. Garbage in and garbage out.
I was dried up emotionally, walking around in a catatonic state. Mia tried to talk to me, but when she would initiate any conversation, I’d turn away from her. I’d become accustomed to sleeping on the couch when I was at home, which was no more than two days a week. As bad as my life had become in the street, it was worse at home. Mia drifted away, becoming less and less inclined to want to have any conversations with me. We were living in a dark and cold world together, coexisting in a loveless and bottomless pit. I knew deep inside that I was wrong, wrong about everything and so wrong about not getting the help from her that I needed, but the truth was, I was ashamed by what I had become, and my hell would only get worse.
She needed help with the groceries. The doctor had warned her that her cervix was weak and that she would need to eliminate any excessive stress from her life. When she told me this, I don’t really remember, because I was living in my self-absorbed little cocoon and I was the only person who was hurting. She wasn’t facing the homicide charges that were sure to come. She wasn’t looking at twenty years of hard-core time for murder; I was. In reality, what was happening to me was happening to her and that beautiful little baby forming inside her.
I stepped out of the supermarket and did a 360 around the perimeter of the parking lot. I knew they were there and I was worried that the scumbags were going to arrest me in front of Mia. I was still living the farce that I could ride this out and things would return to normal between the two of us, but I was so far off the cliff with everyone and everything in my life that the simple task of breathing was day to day for me. She recognized my jittery paranoia. “What’s the matter?” she asked coldly as she walked by.
I held on to the packages tightly and gritted my teeth. I feel like I been bingeing on crack for five days and am stressing over a motherfucking come down, so leave me the fuck alone. I felt like screaming this into her well-appointed ear, but all I could do was scream it inside my own head, keep it for the rest of the psychotic internal monologues that I’d been having of late. “Nothing, nothing is wrong, let’s just get home.” Again I turned to check the lot; I did not see any PD cars or unmarked federal cars. Everything in the lot had a price tag well above what the year to date said on my year-end net paycheck. There were Jags and Benz station wagons, there were BMWs and a sweet, fire-engine red Alfa-Romeo idling behind Mia’s Volvo, blocking us in. A man of about thirty was sitting in the driver’s seat talking to a woman standing at his window; she was dressed like she was going for tea at La Goulue, on Madison Avenue. I looked at both the man, who wore tennis clothes, and the woman as I opened the trunk to the Volvo and threw the groceries in; then I slammed the trunk. I felt their eyes on me as I got in and started the engine.
I searched the lot once again for suspect cars, up in the air for suspect helicopters. I was ready to go in cuffs. I scanned the rest of the lot with the electric right-side-view mirror. I realized that Mia had been watching me carefully throughout this. I quickly looked away from her and saw that the Alfa had not yet pulled out to allow me to drive away. I beeped.
“What, you’re not going to check the undercarriage for bombs?”
“Oh, is it time for your comedy set to begin, Mi? Can we wait till we get home so I can pour myself a quart of Jack?” I beeped again.
“You know, there’s medication for the onset of OCD, Robert.”
I wiped the sweat from my brow. I did not take my eyes off the man in the red Alfa. I beeped yet again. “Yeah, well things are a little rough at work…”
She opened a magazine and turned the page roughly. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m very aware that things are bad at work, what else is friggin’ new.” She was angry, which made me angrier. I beeped again.
“Fuckin’ typical”—I whispered this—“bitch.”
I saw her head snap toward me. “What did you say?”
“You fucking heard me.”
Mia had changed from a soft-spoken and analytical person to one of fiery and spontaneous action, thanks to me. She grabbed hold of my face and I pulled away, opening a nice gash on my chin from her nail. The sight of my blood must’ve given her great pleasure, I thought, but there was a long line of people wanting some of my flesh and some of my blood. “Do you see what’s happening here, Rob, or are you that fucking blind…you’re blowing this, or do you even give a shit?”
I beeped again. “You knew exactly what it was you were getting in to, so if you’re looking for pity, stop off at Mortimer’s after work and tell it to someone who gives a fuck. That place is loaded with you Wall Street victims.”
“No! Bullshit! I had no clue this was what my life was going to turn out like; sleeping alone, no friends, I can’t even get laid by you. I try to talk to you, because maybe I see that there is a glimmer of light left in your eyes, but all that really is, is the sad reflection of what used to be there. You walk around like a goddamn zombie and I’m supposed to just sit back and make sense of it all, and now you’re going to vilify me for telling you how it really is. I’m done, Rob, so fucking done with it all. And I am not going to raise a child in this environment, I’m not. Goddamn you, I am not.”
“What is it that you’re saying, Mi, huh, say what the fuck it is you want to, stop talking in your Wall Street lawyeredup gibberish and be motherfucking assertive in your own quest for the truth, you fucking crybaby. Try it, Mi, the truth will set you free. It works for me.”
“You want the truth”—she pushed the rearview mirror toward me—“take a look, Rob, take a good look, because that person there is the person who is going to end it all for you. You’re on a crash course with yourself and I’m getting out of the way before I become just another dried-up fatality. I’m too smart and too good for that.”
While she ranted, I saw nothing but the man who was boxing me in, wearing his pretty little snow-white tennis suit and being jerked off by the Jappy North Shore socialite in training. I beeped for the last time, holding my hand on the horn. I heard the buzzing in my head explode into a cacophony of white noise. The blood rushed through my neck like a runaway locomotive, the throttle pushed to maximum. The last thing I heard was, “I don’t know who you are any longer, Rob.”
I slammed my hand on the steering wheel over and over, and squeezed my hands over my ears. I wanted to keep the train from hitting the wall, but there was no turning back. “I’ll tell you who I am. I am the asshole who gave you everything you wanted. I allowed you to lead me around like a little lapdog and I am fucking sick of it and sick of you. I am the asshole who allowed you to rope me into this pretty little house in the pretty motherfucking scumbag suburbs. I never wanted this life, never, but I motherfucking did it for you. I’ll tell you what motherfucking else I did not want…” The words came tumbling out. I wasn’t sure that I meant them, but they were said and she heard them as clear as a bell. I was so off the reservation that there wasn’t time to just stop, apologize, and try to get my shit together. All I saw was the dick blocking me, in the red Alfa.
Mia looked away from me. I saw her touch her stomach, but not consciously. She was cold, succinct, and incredibly sad when she said, “You son of a bitch.” Her head dropped, I heard her whimper, and she said it again quietly, to herself. “Son of a bitch.”
I felt the guilt ride up from deep inside my guts. I shook it off and slammed the steering wheel again, over and over. I screamed and wailed because of where I had ended up. All the promise had turned to diseased shit. I kicked open the door, and through the red veil that was before my eyes, I actually think that the man gave me the finger. I walked to him on a mission, ignoring the woman. I pushed her out of the way. The driver was stunned. These things just don’t happen in Great
Neck, Long Island.
“You scummy motherfuck, you want to die, don’t you…” I ripped open the door quickly; he did not have a chance. I grabbed his ear and chin, pulling him upward; I knew that if he did not remove himself from the seat of the car, his neck was going to break. A little trick I’d learned in the academy and used to pull perps out of cars. As I twisted with all my might, he lifted himself off the seat and fell out, hitting the ground hard. Mia was screaming, but again this was just white noise to me. There may have been people watching, but I was out of my mind. I screamed in his face, spittle hitting him. He was covering up. My gun was exposed, in my waistband. He was scared, but I didn’t care. He’d so blatantly defied my simple request to move his car and was now the black-dot focal point of all my rage. “You don’t wanna move your car, I’ll motherfucking move it for you.” I ran to the car, placed it in neutral, and pushed it forward; it picked up momentum and probably would have jumped the curb, hurting someone, had it not been for a speed bump that slowed it to a stop. I turned back and ran for the man. He raised his hands in a defensive gesture as I faked with a right uppercut, then I hit him flush with an overhand left. He hit the ground. “Now, you cunt, I’m gonna pull all the bitch out of you. I am gonna fuck you dry.” I pulled my leg back wide and was about to kick his head; had it not been for the screams of Mia I quite possibly could have killed this man. The tunnel vision was gone, my peripheral vision told me there were many people watching. Mia ran to the Volvo and dropped her head in her hands. I caught my breath and moved quickly to the car. Luckily, the car in front of the Volvo had pulled out, so I was able to drive forward without any of the bystanders taking down the plate number.
A utility van was parked in front of a power pole a half block from my home. I saw it the second I made the turn around the bend. I was tempted to ram it, go out in a fiery ball of semi-glory—Disgraced cop rams internal affairs OP van. Cop killed, but he got three rats on his way to hell, so it’s a wash.