Dogfight, A Love Story

by Matt Burgess

  He passes to the front of the car, where he will be most visible, and leans against the hood. Hot sauce dribbles down his wrist. On top of each wooden skewer a golden dinner roll sits speared. Lopez decrowns one of the kebabs and tosses the bread into the street. A gift for the birds when they wake up tomorrow morning. Next he’ll throw away the meat, sliding it off the skewer piece by piece. Needless to say, this particular shish kebab—extra hot sauce, extra BBQ sauce, extra lemon juice—belongs to Wright. The passenger’s side door swings open.

  Inside the car, Lopez distributes the bounty. Because Wright and Hutchison are Coca-Cola enthusiasts, and because Lopez can be a consummate ball-buster himself, he gives them each a can of Sunkist.

  “Come on!” Hutchison says through a mouthful of meat. He is the heavier of the two bullies, and the less cruel. “Orange soda?”

  “Yeah, sorry about that,” Lopez says as he pops the tab on his Coke. “I woulda got you one of these, but the Afghani only had one left.”

  Orange, incidentally, is the color of the day.

  Before the shish kebabs, Lopez, Hutchison, and Wright ate some slices (pepperoni, cheese, Sicilian) at Gianni’s, and before the pizza they ate some arepas (cheese, cheese, cheese) from the arepa lady on Roosevelt Avenue, and before the arepas they risked cliché and went to Dunkin’ Donuts (large coffee, Boston Kreme; large coffee, jelly; large coffee and that’s it, Wright’s alcoholism having long ago obliterated his sweet tooth). It was at Dunkin’ Donuts that they ran into the skinny little Hispanic runt of a drug dealer from the night before. When he saw them approach, a grin broke across his face and Lopez couldn’t shake the feeling that the kid had been there a long time, sitting at a table by the window, nursing a Coolatta and waiting for them to show up.

  “Where’s Ringo?” the kid said.

  While his partners waited on line for coffee, Lopez sat down at the drug dealer’s table. The kid carried some serious luggage under his eyes, pouches of skin that looked as if they concealed more pouches of skin, the way good suitcases have secret zippered compartments. Lopez put the kid in his late teens, long overdue for a growth spurt and already unfairly old; he was probably one of those babies who hit the delivery table looking exhausted, knowing full well the best sleep of his life was behind him, left in the womb. His face, shiny with oil, reflected the weak light of the donut shop. His legs shook under the table.

  “Nice jersey,” the kid said.

  Lopez nodded, unsure if the kid was fucking with him. Earlier in the evening, Wright and Hutchison, both of whom wore Piazza jerseys, had taken umbrage with Lopez’s outfit: a time-worn blue and orange Knicks jersey from the mid-1990s. You ain’t wearing a Mets jersey? they asked. On today of all days? Lopez didn’t know what to tell them.

  “What’s the name on the back?” the kid asked.

  “Starks.”

  “That’s what I thought,” he said. “That’s what I was hoping. You know, I used to have a Starks poster up in my bedroom. The one where’s he dunking on Jordan? A lot of people never forgave him—Starks, I mean—for that game seven in ninety-four. You know the one I’m talking about? Against the Rockets? Where he missed all them shots? But the thing that people forget was that he was so money in game six that we never would’ve even have gotten—”

  “I’m sure,” Lopez said, “that you’ve got other people you can talk basketball with. Right? People who care?”

  The kid rolled his eyes. “Friendly as always,” he said. “Shouldn’t there be four of you? Where’s the other guy at? The Habib. He in the car? No offense or nothing, but I wanted to talk to him.”

  Lopez wished he’d asked, Talk about what? But instead, his vanity easily punctured, he said, “You don’t wanna talk to me?”

  “Well, the Habib last night—he wasn’t nice or anything. But he wasn’t an asshole, you know?” He let that make its way across the table. He was probably the kind of kid who thought he got away with more than he actually did. Too loved as a child, parents trying to compensate for those heavy black bags under his eyes, no one around to call him on his shit.

  “You wanna get paid?” Lopez said. “Is that it? You wanna get on the official CI list? Sing your song for cash?”

  “Can you please keep your voice down?” The kid stared out the window into the parking lot. “Forget it. This was a mistake.”

  “Okay,” Lopez said. “Let’s start over.” He put his hands flat on the table. He’d always been too aggressive, pushed too hard. Before joining the world’s greatest police force, Lopez—who, like this kid, is a tad undersized—spent his mornings sucking down protein shakes, his Tuesday and Thursday nights in kung fu classes, his Saturdays out at a range on Long Island, firing thousands of rounds of ammo. Since becoming a police officer, however, faced with the day-to-day realities of the job, dismayed by the frequency (one might call it the eagerness) with which he unholstered his firearm, Lopez ditched the Wing Chun and the target practice, met secretly with a department-sanctioned therapist, and, just as secretly, started reading communication books. (His favorite—People Skills: How to Assert Yourself, Listen to Others, and Resolve Conflicts—is sitting at the bottom of his gym bag, the book’s cover wrapped up in brown paper.) He hoped the therapy and textbooks would make him a better, less gun-happy police officer, and not only has that proved true, but they’ve steadily strengthened his marriage as well. Sitting across from the drug dealer, Lopez tried what the textbooks call a reflective listening exercise. “Let me get this straight,” he said, his voice stripped of all its hard, constabulary edges. “What I heard you say is that you’ve got something you want to talk to one of us about. Did I get that right?”

  The kid scratched nervously at some dried-up custard on the tabletop. “I’ve gotten myself into trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “The bad kind.”

  “Yeah, well,” Lopez said. “That’s the kind I see the most of.”

  “I’m fucked, man. Jesus fucking Christ, I am fucked,” and his hand flew to his forehead, his stomach, lengthwise across his chest, all four corners of the cross. He groaned, desperate and angry, as if he’d been up all night whipping his own back. Lopez sat up in his seat. He’d originally assumed the kid wanted to rat on somebody—most likely a rival drug dealer—but now things were looking significantly more promising. The kid didn’t look like he was about to drop a dime on somebody else; he looked like he was about to drop a dime on himself. He had a confession to make. While the kid scratched at the tabletop, Lopez could almost see the Hughes homicide shimmering under the surface, golden scaled, ready to bite. Could almost see his long-coveted promotion to detective, his wife pouring him a congratulatory glass of Guinness when he got home, his mother’s face when he called to tell her the news, the guys in the locker room whispering amongst themselves: You hear? Lopez collared the Hughes homicide. Lopez? Yeah, brought the guy in all by himself. There it was, right in front of him, legs jiggling under the tabletop. Did the kid look like a killer? With the exception of his two young daughters, everyone as far as Lopez was concerned looked like a killer. If he just sat here, let silence work its interrogative magic, kept his line still in the water, then the kid would come swimming toward him. Lopez put on his most neutral, most nonjudgmental face. A face designed to take on your burdens. To absolve all your sins. The kid frowned, as if he already had Lopez’s hook caught fast in his mouth.

  “The comedian drug dealer!” shouted Officer Hutchison. He stood over them, his round stomach hanging over the table’s edge. “How long has it been? A whole day, maybe? Where’s your boyfriend? He got you running errands? Jesus, kid, not to be critical or anything, but you look like shit. You’re getting enough sleep, I hope.”

  Sergeant Wright, the skinnier and the meaner of the two bullies, sat down next to Lopez. He gave him a large coffee and a Boston Kreme, angling for shotgun privileges. Then he looked at the drug dealer and blew him a kiss.

  Hutchison pointed under the table. “What the hell y
ou got on your feet, kid?”

  “Bowling shoes,” Wright said without even having to look. Lopez dipped his head under the table to confirm; he hated that Wright had noticed this before he had.

  “Bowling shoes?” Hutchison said.

  “Don’t you know anything about fashion?” Wright said. “Red pleather is the new shits.”

  “Let me ask you something,” Hutchison said, but the drug dealer wouldn’t even look at him. “Come Christmastime, my kid’s gonna be begging me for a two-hundred-dollar pair of bowling shoes. But by then they’ll be outta style, am I right? Save me some grief here. Six months down the line, what’s gonna be the new shits? And don’t tell me cowboy boots. I’d think you were messing with me.”

  “Kid tells me he’s gotten into some kind of trouble,” Lopez said.

  “Tell him to call the police,” Hutchison said. He took a bite of his donut, and like pus inside a zit, red jelly squirted all over his hand. “Number’s nine-one-one. Think you can remember that?”

  For the first time, the kid looked up at Hutchison. “You didn’t want to get a whole box of donuts? Is that because you guys are undercover?”

  “The comedian.” Hutchison smiled. After he licked powdered sugar off his fingers, he took the kid’s Coolatta and threw it in the trash.

  Wright grabbed the baton. “If you’re not eating or drinking anything,” he said. “If you’re just sitting here, at an empty table, staring out the window—”

  “Then that’s loitering,” Hutchison said, sounding almost sorry. “And loitering—”

  “Is against the law,” the kid said. He pushed himself out of his chair. “I get it. I understand.”

  Lopez followed him to the door. “Just tell me if this has anything to do with the Hughes homicide,” he said softly. He felt the line about to snap, his future promotion about to dive back under the sea. “Just nod yes or no.”

  “This was a dumb idea,” the kid said without turning around. “I didn’t want to talk to any of you. I wanted to talk to the Habib.”

  Officer Ramsaran—the quartet’s fourth, their Habib, their Ringo as the kid would have it—had taken the night off. He called the precinct, cashing in his emergency day, and then he called Lopez, providing the details. He’d been robbed. A humiliating experience for anyone, it is particularly hard on an officer of the law. I would love to have caught ’em doing it, he’d said, his voice shaking. He was taking the e-day, he explained, because he wanted to do some investigating himself, without departmental distractions or guidelines. He was going to ask the neighbors if they saw anything, ask pet store owners if they had any new customers, post some flyers on lampposts that would most likely be ripped off by tomorrow morning. I’ll do whatever you need, Lopez promised. A Gulf War veteran with twelve years in the department, Officer Ramsaran was the kind of cop Lopez wanted to become: competent, well respected, an overall nice guy who was willing—and here’s the big thing—to get ugly when he had to. Take for example an incident last year when, due to a contract dispute, the union delegate told all the men on the ground to go on strike. Nothing formal. No picket lines or hand-printed placards. Violent crimes were to be stopped—the union didn’t want to invite chaos into the city—but the delegates did call for a moratorium on summons writing. There was to be no police work that generated revenue for the city. At least not until the contract dispute got settled. But an Egyptian officer named Kandil crossed that informal line and gave a woman a disorderly conduct ticket for calling him a pig. Everyone deferred to Ramsaran, Kandil’s best friend on the force. And what did he do? In one heaping armful, he took everything out of Kandil’s locker—sneakers, jeans, CD player, family photographs, a gym bag that may have concealed some secret book wrapped up in brown paper—and he dumped it all into the hallway. It couldn’t have been easy for Ramsaran—he didn’t seem too happy doing it—but like Lopez tells his daughters when they complain about brushing their teeth or doing their arithmetic homework, Hey, that’s life. A series of crap you have to do, even if, especially if, you don’t want to. That’s what it’s all about. So if Ramsaran wanted Lopez to ask some questions, keep his ears open, turn over some rocks—then Lopez was going to do it. Even if it meant establishing a line of inquiry away from the Hughes homicide and toward a low-grade larceny. Even if it would never lead to a promotion, that much-coveted gold star pinned to the inside of his wallet.

  “Hey, kid,” Lopez said in the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot. “You know anything about a stolen pit bull?”

  Lopez, Wright, and Hutchison are all plainclothes patrolmen who belong to the NYPD’s Anti-Crime Unit, the department’s version of chemotherapy, poisons injected onto diseased streets in order to kill deadlier, more dangerous poisons. They have the simplest job description—drive around and harass—and it’s this watery vagueness that Lopez will miss least about the job if he ever makes detective. (When he makes detective. Power of positive thinking, Lopez.) Detectives have specific problems to solve, files to open and files to close; Anti-Crime drives the same streets night after night, harasses the same people, eats the same greasy food from the same greasy places. The lack of a concrete agenda can drive a man mad—it’s driving Lopez mad—but it can also have its uses. With nothing to do, they can do anything they want. They can sit in a car outside a bodega and tear lamb meat off skewers and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait for a skinny Puerto Rican to come out into the street with the thumbs-up, the green light, the A-okay.

  “He ain’t coming,” Wright says.

  “He’s coming,” Lopez says.

  Originally the kid said he’d call them when Ramsaran’s dog showed up. He said he didn’t know where the dog was currently, but he knew where the dog would be: in the basement of a bodega in East Elmhurst. If they waited there, parked across the street, the kid would call them as soon as the dog—and the thug who stole that dog—arrived. When he asked for the number to one of their cell phones, Hutchison laughed out loud. Sure. You got a pen? My number’s 1-917-GO-FUCKYOURSELF. The new plan: as soon as the dog shows up, the kid will come out to the car, like a dinette waitress on roller skates, and deliver the message in person. Then Lopez & Co. swoop in and take back the pit bull. There’s a couple of ways to go about this. They apply for a warrant, wait a couple of days, get it, storm into an empty bodega, make zero arrests, retrieve zero dogs, and finally explain to Ramsaran that they failed to retrieve his pit bull (which, most likely, would be dead by then) because they failed to react quickly enough; or they call up a judge, apply for an emergency warrant, drive over to the courthouse in Kew Gardens, pick up the warrant, drive back to East Elmhurst, storm into the bodega, make some arrests if anyone’s still there, and scoop Ramsaran’s dead dog off the ground; or they just go in and grab the motherfucker. After delivering the message, the kid’s supposed to leave the door open. Because God forbid they’re ever separated, Hutchison and Wright go in together. They enter through the front—under the pretense of grabbing a cup of coffee, because you don’t need a warrant for that, do you?—and once inside the store, they hear some ruckus down in the basement and they decide to investigate. Lopez, working alone, will go around to the back and seal off the exit in case someone tries to sneak out the dogs. They’ll even make some arrests for the overtime. And if they can’t get prosecutions—any public defender able to find his own dick would use it to piss all over their probable cause and get the arrests thrown out of court—then so what? They will have pushed some assholes through the system. They will have harassed. They will have rescued the dog, which they will then deliver to a grateful Ramsaran, who doesn’t even know they’re out here, who will be so overwhelmed, so impressed, that—and this is Lopez’s secret plan—when Ramsaran gets promoted to some elite investigative task force, he’ll hand-select Lopez to be his partner. Why not? Why can’t he think that way? Why can’t he let his imagination go wherever it wants? All he’s doing is sitting here and staring out the window and waiting for a fucking drug dealer, the world’s
scrawniest bouncer to lift the velvet rope and invite them inside.

  “You know there ain’t no way he’s coming,” Hutchison says. His skewer picked clean, he javelins it out the window. “You know we’re just sitting here with our thumbs up our asses.”

  From the backseat Wright says, “He likes sitting with his thumb up his ass.”

  “Is it true?” Hutchison says.

  “Hey, Lopez,” Wright says. “Let me ask you something. You shave that space in the middle of your mustache? Or is that natural? How’s that work, cause I’ve always been curious.”

  Lopez stares out the window, as if it renders him invisible. If he doesn’t look at them, they can’t see him. The bodega across the street is disconcertingly dark. Bodegas aren’t supposed to be dark, Lopez thinks—not in this neighborhood, not at this time of night. He doesn’t like it any more than he likes opening up his fridge at home and having the interior lightbulb stay dim. He blames the kid for some reason, as if the bodega’s darkness were his fault, just as he always blames his wife for leaving the refrigerator door open too long. He adjusts his passenger-side mirror. Two figures have appeared in the glass: one a man-sized white guy, the other black and as big as a house. They are closer than they appear, the mirror warns.

  “Hey, Lopez,” Hutchison says. “You wanna stop them? Let’s stop them. Ten bucks says they’ve got guns.”

  Wright sticks his head into the front seat, his face a few inches from Lopez’s. “Let me guess,” he says. “You think they’re smuggling Chihuahuas in their pants. Is that right? For the big bad dogfight?”

  “We gonna stop these guys, or what?” Hutchison says.

  Lopez knows that both Hutchison and Wright have already assumed this night is going nowhere—no dog, no arrests, no overtime, no fun—and so they’ve put all quarterbacking responsibilities on him. The decisions are his to make, the fuckups will be his to bear. That way, when they go back to the 115th Precinct having done nothing all night but sit on their asses in a car without air-conditioning, Hutchison and Wright will be able to direct the full force of their prodigious ball-busting powers onto only one set of nuts.