We didn’t mingle much with the officers at first, spoke only when spoken to. We listened and we watched. And we talked among ourselves, standing off to one side to compare notes about the calls we’d worked, the partner we’d been assigned.
“What’s she like?” Denux asked Richard. Denux was short, skinny, and nearly bald, but he’d flipped all of us with ease during takedown training at the academy. Richard was closer to him than anyone else in our class; they often ran neck and neck on the firing range and during PT, and both seemed to enjoy the good-natured competition.
“Good,” Richard said.
“Yeah?”
“Tough. Professional. She pushes hard. Like a drill sergeant.”
“She given you any push-ups yet, buddy?” This from Hawkins, a scraggly fellow with a huge Adam’s apple who was generally considered the academy washout. We all looked at him, incredulous.
Richard pushed his hands into his pockets and looked down at the ground. “Every moment’s a test. ‘Where are we now,’ she asks me twenty times a night. ‘If something happens to me, you need to get backup and you need to know where you are.’ Stuff like that.”
“Yeah, Boudreaux’s doing that to me too. Gets pissed off when I don’t get it right,” Denux said.
“She doesn’t get angry,” Richard said. “She doesn’t say a word.”
“Nothing?”
“Just moves on to something else.”
“Like what?”
“How to watch hands and eyes, see in the dark, how to hold a flashlight, how to approach a car, use your hands, the way to talk to people, stand in a room.”
Hawkins frowned. “Sanderson’s not telling me much of anything, except don’t touch the mike and stay in the car. Goddamn dyke, if you ask me.”
“That’s a bit off base, Hawkins,” Richard said.
We all looked over at Beth Sanderson, who was talking to a couple of guys from her squad, and wondered who had the rawer deal: Sanderson for having to ride with such a dipshit or Hawkins for having to ride with a woman who seemed habitually grouchy.
“Hell of a lot more interesting than the academy,” Denux said.
Richard nodded. “They both have their place.”
We were all silent for a moment.
“She ever mention Johnny?”
“Jesus, Hawkins!”
Richard shook his head, grimaced slightly. “No.”
“You gotta admit,” Hawkins pressed on, “she is something else.”
Richard nodded slowly and changed the subject.
By the third night we felt more relaxed and, through some unspoken invitation, became a part of the semicircle of six or seven units parked in an old run-down high school parking lot off Evangeline Street. It was warm and humid, as most nights are midsummer in Louisiana, and some of the officers had taken off their bulletproof vests, laid them on the hood of their cars beside their portable radios.
It seemed that when cops weren’t working calls, they’re telling stories. Sanderson was telling about Hawkins leaving his flashlight in the car on a burglary alarm (“You got night vision, boy?” Boudreaux asked.), and pretty soon the officers started telling stories about other officers, mostly the ones who’d done something funny or stupid like Hawkins.
“Remember that rookie Boudreaux had a couple of years back, Jack something or other?”
“Holy shit, that boy was a fuckup from the word go,” Joe said. He played a coffee straw around his broken tooth as he talked. “Fresh out of the academy and we’re chasing this 42 suspect down Acadian Thruway, and the boy asks me at what point do we load our guns. Shit! When do we load our guns. He’s running around with an empty goddamn gun.”
We all laughed, shot glances at one another, wondering at poor Jack something or other’s stupidity. Hawkins giggled like a girl.
“He didn’t last long after that,” said a corporal named Akers who looked like an eggplant, both in color and in size, and whose voice faintly resembled Darth Vader’s. “What, another couple of months?”
“Didn’t make it through probation,” Katherine said.
“Should’ve had you as his training officer,” Sanderson said. “You’d have gotten him in line.”
“Let it the fuck go, Beth.” Boudreaux’s tone was cutting, but his body language never changed.
“Fuck you, Joe.” Sanderson’s fingers curled tightly around the buckle on her gun belt.
“That’s a whole lot of goddamn fuckin’ going on,” Katherine said mildly, looking up at the night sky.
A short burst of air escaped Boudreaux’s lips.
“Hawkins.” Katherine looked at him, and his whole body lurched forward like a marionette. “Why’d you join?”
“Ma’am?”
“Why did you join the police department?” She spoke slowly, enunciating each syllable.
“Well, ma’am, my granddaddy was a Texas Ranger.” He looked everywhere but at Katherine as he spoke.
“Oh sweet Jesus,” Akers snorted.
“And he’s the one who taught you to call women less than ten years older than you ‘ma’am’?”
“Ma’am?” Hawkins squinted at her.
We all laughed, even Katherine. Hawkins smiled hesitantly.
“What about the rest of you boys?” Boudreaux asked. “Why’d you want to become the po-lice?”
Our answers, delivered mostly in a shy, offhanded way, hardly varied: to do some good, to give back to the community, to help people. Richard didn’t say a word.
Bemused smiles greeted our answers. The officers cut glances at one another, lifted eyebrows, nudged one another. Only Katherine watched us silently, her fingers playing with a small pearl earring in her left ear.
“Well, that’ll get shit out of you within the first couple a months riding the streets,” Joe said. He lit a cigarette and pulled hard on it, expelling the smoke in a sharp exhalation. “Doing good and helping people is crap, lemme tell you. All we do out here is answer calls, cover our asses, and try not to get hurt.”
“That’s about it,” Akers said, nodding, the flesh under his chin jiggling slightly.
“And what about you, Richard?” Katherine brushed a stray strand of hair behind her ear, and we caught a faint whiff of perfume, something fragile and sweet.
Richard looked around and smiled. “The adrenaline.”
“Now there’s an honest answer!” Joe reached over and slapped Richard lightly on the shoulder. “Katie, we’ve got us a keeper here.”
“Could be,” Katherine said. “You a fuckin’ cowboy, Marcus?” Her enunciation was just as studied as it had been with Hawkins.
“Do I look like a fucking cowboy?” Richard spoke quietly, but his tone was tight.
We all gaped.
“She only wishes,” Sanderson muttered.
Katherine inspected the toes of her boots, lifting one up slightly to catch the streetlight. “Beth, you want to start exchanging tales, you better ask yourself what I know.”
Joe pitched his cigarette. “Whether or not—”
“I killed a man when I was fourteen,” Richard said.
“Well hello,” Akers muttered.
The 5:00 A.M. train rattled down Choctaw in the distance. We all looked at Richard.
“Man broke into the house. Just my mom, my little brother, and me. My daddy’d disappeared not long before. Another woman, we figured.” Richard looked only at Katherine as he spoke. “He had a knife; I had my daddy’s shotgun.”
“Well didja now.” Boudreaux smoothed a thumb across his mustache, looked Richard up and down. “God bless shotguns. They’ll trump a knife any day. Sounds like a clean kill to me.”
“It was a mess,” Richard said flatly.
“They usually are, boy. But it felt good, didn’t it?” Boudreaux grinned at him.
“Headquarters, 1D-84.” The dispatcher’s voice was impersonal and no-nonsense.
Sanderson scowled, creating even more wrinkles than we thought possible, and pulled the portable radio o
ut of its case and up to her mouth. “1D-84, go ahead.”
“Got a signal 45, possible shots fired, Starling and 12th. Code 2.”
“10-4; enroute.” Sanderson moved toward her unit as she spoke, gesturing sharply at Hawkins to join her.
Boudreaux keyed his mike, moving rapidly toward his unit as well. “1D-79 enroute as backup.”
Starling and 12th—still a place that gives a cop pause. Back then there were pockets of danger—the Sip and Bite off Acadian that most cops called the Shoot and Stab; a pool hall off Greenwell Springs; Gus Young and 39th; a trailer park off Harding; individual houses and blocks off Plank Road and North Foster—there are even more spots today. But twenty years ago, Starling and 12th was the pucker-up zone: you didn’t go in there without backup, even in daylight.
So no one was surprised when Sanderson called for more backup as she and Hawkins arrived. Even with Boudreaux and Denux behind her, realistically she had only one officer as backup. Denux and Hawkins had no guns and little authority. But then Boudreaux’s voice came booming through the radio seconds later, calling for more backup now, a note of agitation so unusual that Katherine, already in her unit, flicked a look at Richard and told him to buckle up and hold on as she hit the red lights and siren. Four units followed close behind her.
When a second call for backup came from Boudreaux, most of us were only two minutes away. But two minutes can feel like two hours when you hear someone like Boudreaux shouting, “Signal 63, possible CU, Signal 100.” And in the background, behind Boudreaux’s words, a ragged mass of voices yelling and cursing.
Signal 63—the call that opens the adrenaline floodgates and shakes any officer’s gut. Not just that help is needed immediately, but that bodily injury or worse is imminent. Very few officers abuse this call for help—they don’t last long on the streets if they do—and someone like Boudreaux probably uses it only three or four times during his career.
The dispatcher’s calm voice came right back, clearing the frequency for emergency traffic only. “Headquarters all units, 10-33. Any units available respond Code 3, Starling and 12th. Possible riot situation, possible sniper situation. This frequency is 10-33.”
Starling and 12th is one of those strange intersections where five streets converge and create a weird geometric layout that no doubt some traffic engineer way back when thought was classy, brought a little élan to this then blue-collar, white neighborhood of wooden shotgun houses. It hasn’t been white in decades. Blue-collar either. The drug dealers like it because they can flee quickly in any number of directions, if they choose to flee rather than dropping their cache in the weed-choked ditches. The cops like it—if any cop can truly claim he or she likes that intersection—because there’s a fairly clear view, a quick snapshot of who’s where doing what, no matter which street you approach on.
Three blocks away we could see a crowd converged around the two police units and up in the yard of what must have once been a yellow house but now could only be described as dingy. A crowd of thirty-five to forty people, mostly black, of every age, the number growing by the second. It was not a friendly group.
Boudreaux stood on the steps, a shotgun in one hand, his other hand, palm flat, out behind him. Denux was up on the porch beside Sanderson, who was bleeding heavily from a gash in her cheek, her hand firmly gripping the forearm of an emaciated-looking young man the color of café au lait, who looked both frightened and defiant. Hawkins was nowhere to be seen.
Katherine squealed to a halt just on the edge of the crowd, along with the other units. She slid a shotgun out of the dip between door frame and seat, handed it over to Richard.
“Use it if you need to. You’ll know. Stick close and do not—DO NOT—get hurt.” And she pulled another shotgun, the department-issued shotgun, off the rack on the wire mesh screen behind her.
What we would learn that night, and in the years to come, is that you get thrown into a situation without understanding all the pieces—like entering a movie already in progress—and all you can rely on is your gut, instinct, experience, and, if you’re lucky, the officers around you. And only after it was over could you piece together what exactly had happened and why.
At the time, the next eight minutes were mostly a blur, a series of quick snapshots, impressions, and sensations barely coherent for us cadets.
We pushed out into the crowd, Katherine holding her shotgun perpendicular to her body, saying, “Clear the way, move back, back up” as she walked, her voice devoid of emotion but clear and authoritative even over the angry hive of noise. Richard walked sideways behind her, the top of his head just even with the back of her neck, shotgun pointed somewhere between the night sky and the crowd of people folding back around him. Two officers on each side moved forward parallel to them, cutting a small path that additional officers tried to hold open along with a few of us cadets who also held guns, although not shotguns, that our partners had suddenly slapped into our hands as we arrived on the scene, cautioning us to use them only if our lives were in danger.
Up on the porch, Sanderson was swearing profusely. Denux held a small .38 at his side, his mouth a tense line as he sheltered part of her body with his. He looked out at us with a mixture of glee and alarm.
Boudreaux shouted, “One round fired, not sure from where. Chipped out a piece of the railing and hit Beth.”
The eight of us moved into a semicircle on the steps, Richard just one step below Katherine as she leaned into Boudreaux. “The neighbors don’t look happy, Joe.”
“Perp shot up the house,” he said. “Didn’t hit anyone. Took a swing at Hawkins.”
“We got to get off this porch,” Akers growled.
The crowd pressed in, shouting, “Let Clay go, man,” and “Damn police fuckin’ with people.”
“Where’s Hawkins?” Katherine said.
“Inside,” Sanderson yelled. “Gonna whip his pansy ass.”
“You, with me,” Akers said, pointing a finger at Richard as he moved past him up the steps.
“I’m with her, sir,” Richard said.
“Boy, move your goddamn ass.”
“Sir, I’m not leaving my partner.” Richard never took his eyes off the crowd as he answered Akers.
“It’s okay, Marcus,” Katherine said.
“I’m not leaving you.”
“Denux,” Boudreaux shouted. “In the house with Akers.”
Within seconds Akers and Denux returned to the porch, each with a hand on Hawkins, pushing him forward. Hawkins squinted, lifted his elbow away from Denux.
“I’m gonna kill you,” Sanderson snapped. “If we get out of here.”
“We’re moving, now,” Boudreaux yelled. “Everyone.”
Wood spit up from the side of the house as the sound of a shot cut through the crowd. Everyone ducked. Except Katherine. She racked a round into her shotgun, pointed it in the direction from which the shot seemed to come, and yelled, “GO!” For several seconds she stood alone, upright, like a single reed in a field of flattened grass.
Then Richard stood up, pulled Katherine in front of him and pushed her shoulders down as she stepped off the porch. He fired off a round into the air, cracked that night sky wide open with a KA-BOOM, racked another one into his shotgun, and waved it across the crowd. “MOVE BACK NOW.”
“Here we go,” Boudreaux shouted, grabbing Richard by the arm, nodding down at him for one brief instant.
We pushed forward slowly, steadily, a tight phalanx with guns drawn, pointing outward, as we crab-stepped toward units, shoving back against sweaty bodies, ignoring spit and worse hitting our faces and uniforms.
And then it was over. More officers arrived as we tumbled into our units, but we shook them off with the universal sign for okay and twirling index fingers, Code 4’d the call, pulled away, and headed to the holding cell at the precinct. Two units remained on side streets to make sure that the crowd dispersed, that they didn’t take their anger and frustration out on property or people, hoping to find a possible h
int of the sniper’s identity.
On the sweaty, jittery ride to the precinct, we were counseled not to mention one goddamn thing about having guns or Richard firing off a round, at least not around supervisors, and never ever to the academy training staff.
“Didn’t happen, understand,” we cadets were told. We understood. Cops would lose their jobs, and we’d be out of a career.
Most of the shift arrived back at the precinct, pumped from the aftereffects of adrenaline, high on the sweet rush of being alive.
“This damn sure calls for a choir practice,” Boudreaux said to vigorous nods all around as Sanderson left for downtown booking. Her cheek would require stitches, but only after she’d processed and booked the perp. She left Hawkins behind, and the Lieutenant suggested, none to kindly, that Hawkins go ahead and check out for the night.
And so we attended our first real cop choir practice in a sparsely furnished one-bedroom apartment off Woodward. It’s an old practice, still common today. An apartment complex manager makes a deal for extra security and a police presence in exchange for an empty apartment. Usually a cop, and sometimes his family, will live in it, but back then, more often than not, a group of officers, generally on the same squad or shift, used it as a second home—whether during shift as a place to kick back, eat, or use the bathroom, or off shift as a place to sleep during turnarounds or for what’s vaguely referred to as “fooling around” and specifically means cheating on one’s spouse.
The apartment housed the basic necessities: liquor, sodas, and coffee; a couple of broken-down couches; floor pillows, a boom box, and giant bags of pretzels, chips, and cookies. Toilet paper seemed to be in short supply. Gun belts, shoes and boots, uniform shirts and bulletproof vests were discarded; we walked around in T-shirts, socks, and uniform pants. Beer flowed. The storytelling—and retelling—began. We talked in loud edgy voices, eager to hear what happened to Hawkins (he panicked with the first shot that ricocheted into Sanderson and retreated into the house), to learn more about the perp (he struggled, and his girlfriend ran out into the street screaming that the police were beating him up), to speculate about the sniper (calls would be made to Narcotics to shake down a few confidential informants), to relive Katherine standing on that porch wide open to whoever was taking potshots at the police (“hell of a thing to see”) and Richard pulling her down in front of him (“gonna make a hell of a cop”).
Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You Page 5