City of Crime

by Warren Court

  “Dispatch, this is cruiser twenty-two,” I said.

  Coolie rolled his eyes. “Two two.”

  “Correction: two two.”

  “I understood you the first time,” the dispatcher came back. She was a bored-sounding female with a hint of African American in her voice.

  “Just asking for a radio check. Over.”

  “It’s working just fine,” she said. “Is that all?”

  I signed off and Coach laughed again. At least he didn’t fart. The air was just beginning to get breathable.

  I wasn’t the only other rookie going on shift for the first time that morning. There was also Imelda Journey, pale, blonde, and sassy. Skinny. Lesbian. Earlier that morning, during our first parade and inspection, the duty sergeant had asked the new recruits to introduce themselves and tell the rest a little bit about themselves. Imelda had gone first.

  “I’m Imelda Journey, and I am a pussy-eatin’ motherfucking lesbian. I’ve eaten more pussy than all you faggot dicks put together.”

  That broke the ice like a sledgehammer. Everyone laughed, the old-timers especially. In a single sentence, Imelda had worked her way in tight with her new colleagues. Then they came to me. I don’t remember what I said, and most of them didn’t listen. They were still chuckling over Imelda.

  I looked across the garage and saw Imelda with her coach, going over things. Then they pulled out and left the garage. First again, I thought.

  The rest of the day was uneventful, but still exciting for me. We drove around a specific quadrant of the city where middle-class people eked out a living. There were homeless people here and there; they took on a new, sinister look for me. We stopped to get lunch and talked to a wino that Coolie knew. The guy stank of piss and booze, but he did make me laugh with his toothless grin and his unusual outlook on his life. Coolie asked him what was happening on the street, making the guy feel like a confidential informant, but most of the garble that came out of his mouth was unintelligible nonsense.

  “Get to know them,” Coolie said to me.

  “Who, winos?”

  “Street people, Rook,” he said. “They’re your intelligence net.”

  “Don’t they commit crimes?”

  “Petty stuff. But they see and hear things that sometimes lead somewhere. A spicy meatball is what you’re after.”

  “Spicy meatball?”

  “Yeah, a hot tip. Got a lot to learn, Rook. Let’s get back to the office; you got paperwork to fill out. And boy, do I mean paperwork. Hope you can type.”

  When we got back to police headquarters, I was running on fumes. I wanted to think that in that one day, I had settled into the routine and the culture and knew pretty much what I was doing. I was kidding myself. And when I saw Imelda, she was sitting on a desk with her feet up on another one, joshing with a bunch of uniform cops and two plainclothes. She was holding court, on her first day. She saw me and winked.

  After two hours of pounding away on a manual typewriter—the few personal computers were reserved for the detectives—I put the final stack of paper on a pin and stood up to stretch. Coolie came over.

  “How’d I do? Okay?” I said with a grin.

  “You drive too fast.”

  “I do the speed limit.”

  “You gotta cruise, keep your eye out. You’re too busy obeying traffic rules and not trying to pick up on the street vibe. Try and spot something. Twice you almost ran into a car whose plate you were running.”

  I looked dejected but still smiled a little.

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s information overload. I think with my expert coaching you’ll do all right.”

  I hung around the division, seeing if the guys were going out for a beer. I saw Imelda go off with a number of them but I wasn’t invited. My coach belched one last time and left the division with just a “See you tomorrow.”

  The next day was more eventful. I was tired and had not slept much that night. The wino we’d talked to—I couldn’t get the stink of him and the sight of those black, rotting teeth out of my mind.

  My second day on shift, Coolie had us set up a speed trap. He sat in the car while I put the radar on cars and flagged the offenders down. I pulled over a dozen and finally Coolie said to pack it in; lunch time. I was still struggling with analyzing radio calls coming into the car and what they meant. We had grilled each other relentlessly at Aylmer, but they seemed to go out of my head the instant I sat in a cop car. That’s when the call came over the radio.

  All available units, ten-seventy-eight to one-one-three-two Livingston. Officers on scene. Shots fired.

  “Here we go,” Coolie said.

  “What is it?”

  “Livingston. That’s only ten blocks from here.”

  “I know where it is,” I said. I had spent my spare time memorizing a map of my division and driving around it when I could. I started the car and stepped on the gas.

  “Are you forgetting something?” Coach said after I went a block. “The roof—light it up.”

  “Oh—right,” I said.

  “My god, Rook.”

  I flipped the two switches and the siren and lights on the roof started up. I stomped on the accelerator and smiled from ear to ear.

  “Not too fast. Don’t kill anyone,” Coolie said, and I dialled it back just a bit.

  We could see other flashing lights from a block away. I pulled up behind another cruiser and followed Coolie’s lead.

  The action was centred around a convenience store. There were six cruisers out in front, all with lights going. An ambulance was weaving its way through the growing crowd, and cops with their night sticks out were making a path for it. You could see that they were growing impatient with the rubberneckers.

  The store’s glass door was punched out completely and green glass crunched under our shoes.

  I heard moaning coming from inside. Two paramedics rushed past us with a stretcher and Coolie held me back from entering. I could see a dozen cops in there. They didn’t need two more, especially a rookie, getting in the way.

  Coolie waited at the entrance; I stood next to him, stuck to his side like glue. The paramedics were manoeuvring a prone officer out of the store on the stretcher. His badge was in the pocket of his jacket. He was holding his wrist. There was blood on his shirt.

  “Just a scratch,” Coolie said, after the ambulance had roared off. We stepped through the broken door.

  The scene inside was chaotic. Racks of potato chips and candy bars had fallen over on each other like dominoes and smashed up against the glass refrigerators along the wall. Several cartons of milk had been punctured and their contents had run out onto the floor.

  In the centre of the chaos was a pool of blood, and then further down the aisle a body lay on the floor. There were half a dozen plainclothes detectives standing around it and most of them turned to Coolie and nodded.

  “Take a good look, Rook. Not often a guy as green as you gets to see a body so fresh. Look—blood is still coming out of him.”

  The guy was lying prone. The back of his head was gone and there was a gurgle of blood still spitting out. I thought maybe the guy was brain dead, but the heart was still beating. The cops kept stepping back so the blood wouldn’t get on their shiny shoes.

  “Who is this maggot?” I heard one of the cops say. He was grim faced, with a smooth, strong jaw and his hair cut short on a blunt head like a bullet; he was built like a linebacker. He had his hands on his hips, exposing his Glock pistol in a belt holster; his gold detective’s badge was pinned next to it.

  One of the plainclothes knelt down and rolled the dead guy over. Then the men started laughing.

  “Well, hello, Frank. How’s your day going?” one of them said, and they all laughed harder. Even the grim-faced lead detective, the one who seemed to be in charge, smirked for a second.

  “Hey, Jack. What gives?” said a woman’s voice behind me.

  I looked and it was Imelda Journey. She had sidled up next to me. Her own coach
was in the corner talking to two other uniformed officers.

  “This guy got taken out by one of ours. Minor wound to our guy; he’s on the way to the hospital.”

  The lead detective started to leave. He didn’t notice me and Imelda, the two rookies, standing there. Not until she spoke to him.

  “Hey, Mike, what’s the deal here?”

  The detective stopped and stared Imelda up and down, and then realized some greenhorn rookie was addressing him in the familiar. Thankfully, he didn’t see me. I think I even unconsciously took a couple of steps back.

  “Who the fuck let you in here? Travers, what the hell is wrong with you? Get your carpet-munching rook out of my fucking crime scene!”

  He pushed past us and the rest of the officers and departed. I didn’t need Coolie to tell me to scram. I beat him to the door.

  I spent the next four hours keeping onlookers back as the meat wagon showed up to haul the departed away. I saw Imelda over on the other side of the street doing likewise. I didn’t make eye contact with her. I’d seen her humiliation, her place in the new division having evaporated in an instant. I was betting she had gone out drinking with that detective, maybe gotten permission to call him by his first name, and thought the bonhomie carried over into the working world. No such luck.

  After we got pulled off crowd dispersal and were on our way back to the division, I asked Coolie about it.

  “Who was that guy?”

  “Just some drug-dealing punk who’s been plaguing this city for years.”

  “No, I mean the detective. The one Imelda called Mike.”

  “Did she call him that? Stupid thing to do. Mike Macintyre. Lead detective, homicide.”

  “You know him?”

  “Everyone in the HP knows him. All the crims like that one back there do, too. Tough son of a bitch. You stay out of his way. He tells you to jump, you don’t even ask how high: you just jump. I once saw him rip a rook’s arms off and beat him to death with the stumps.”

  I laughed once, then shut up for the rest of the shift.

  Chapter 20

  I lit up my cruiser’s roof and slowed down, matching the speed of the car in front of me. I left the normal ten feet from its rear bumper as we pulled over and then I just sat there and waited, watching the exhaust from the car bloom out on a cold November day. It was an older-model car, a mid-eighties Caprice. Four-door. The guy had made several quick lane changes without signalling and I had sidled up behind him. One more and I pulled him over.

  Now I ran the plates. Car came back registered to an Edna Stone. Seemed right, seemed like the kind of car the seventy-two-year-old Edna should be driving. But the guy behind the wheel with the close-cropped hair didn’t seem like an Edna at all.

  I radioed my position in and request for backup to swing by. Then I waited, and waited a bit more. Let the guy calm down, stew in his own juices, as Burt Coolie would say. I was on the job three years now. Seasoned in my own opinion, but still a rook to others.

  I got out and approached the car slowly. It was the middle of a Wednesday. Traffic from rush-hour hot spots had tapered off. Cars in the other lane of traffic crept by slowly, checking out the action.

  I focused on the driver. As I got up to him, I saw a long sideburn down his left cheek. He kept staring straight ahead but already had his window down. A seasoned pro at being pulled over.

  “License, registration. Proof of insurance,” I said.

  He handed over a license.

  “What about the other stuff?” I said. I notice his look, that thousand-yard stare that criminals and other tough guys usually had. Seasoned cops as well. I wondered if I had it at times. If not right now, when would I get it?

  “Left them at home,” he said, and smiled. I saw nicotine-stained teeth and caught a whiff of cigarettes on his. No smell of booze, though, that I could tell. I quickly glanced at the license: Don Kitcher.

  I took the license back to my car, my ears attuned to the sound of a car door opening as I turned my back on him.

  I ran Don’s license number and the computer went to work. I sat and waited.

  Dispatch asked for status; I gave it. I now formally requested that backup. A car reported in, said it would be there in five. I said there was no immediate danger but that I thought I had a possible ten-forty—stolen vehicle.

  Don Kitcher’s license came back valid; the picture on the screen, grainy and green tinted, matched his. Only a minor conviction on pot possession two years before. The guy was one year older than me. Cigarettes must have aged him. The records showed a registration to a ’73 Corvette but no Caprice. But the car had not been reported stolen. Interesting.

  “Know why I stopped you?” I said when I got back up to the window.

  “I made a lane change there without signalling.”

  “You made four,” I said. “You got a problem with the turn signal on this car?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “You probably wouldn’t know because it’s not your car, is it?”

  “I’m borrowing it.”

  “From who?”

  “Friend of mine.”

  It was then that I noticed, just slightly, the sickly-sweet smell of marijuana. Out of my peripheral vision I saw another cruiser pull up behind mine.

  “How much you carrying?” I said.

  The man named Don looked at me, then slumped a little. Recognized his mistake and squared his shoulders again.

  “Not much. Just for my own personal use.”

  “Out of the car,” I said, and I reached in and flicked the door lock. I opened the car for him as Imelda Journey came up behind me.

  I firmly but not forcefully took Don to the front of the Caprice and made him assume the position. Legs back, hands on the hood. He did so compliantly. He’d done this before. A quick frisk produced nothing of interest—a lighter and cigarettes. I put them on the hood and then cuffed him.

  “For my own protection,” I said.

  “What you got, Jack?” Imelda said.

  “Possible stolen vehicle. Drug possession. Here—stuff him in mine, would you?”

  “You bet. Let’s go, sir.”

  I watched Imelda until she had put him in the back of my car, and then I went to work on Don’s car, or Edna’s, or whosever it was. I didn’t take me long to find the packet of marijuana under the passenger seat. It was just lying there. I guess Don hadn’t figured on getting pulled over.

  I put on a latex glove and fully removed the package, walked back with it to my car and set it unceremoniously on the hood. I was unable to hide the smirk on my face. All this from too many quick lane changes. I would never have even run this plate otherwise. I was supposed to be going on lunch, and I could feel my stomach growling even now.

  I looked through the glass at Don. He was staring at me. Then he turned away and looked straight ahead.

  This was a significant bust for me, and all for improper lane changes. I was tickled pink. Coolie swung by, as did another copper on my shift. Then the drug squad came in and I was introduced to Estrada, the team lead. He ordered the car hauled in on a flatbed trailer to HQ for a thorough going-over. I was reassured by Coolie that the bust would be under my name. The druggies just wanted to make sure the car wasn’t loaded down as a mule.

  Imelda and I finished the bust and I prepared to take Don Kitcher into the station for processing. He sat there silently in the backseat as I completed my notes. I looked up and saw Estrada and Coolie conversing. Estrada was very animated, and I saw spittle fly from his lips. He was doing all the talking and Coolie was standing there taking it. Finally, Estrada walked back to his own car and Coolie came past my cruiser to get in his supervisor’s car. I could see his face had gone red and the veins were sticking out on his forehead. Behind me, Don cleared his throat.

  Chapter 21

  Don was out on bail within twenty-four hours, just like in the movies. The trial came up four months later, rather fast for Hamilton.

  Of course, I was t
he star witness for the Crown. I was the one who’d pulled him over. It was my first time in anything more than just a traffic court ticket fight. I had done a dozen of those over the years; guys who get caught running a red light or driving too fast almost always fight the ticket. Dashboard cams were just starting to get rolled out on the cruisers, but the day I pulled Don over, the car I had signed out was not equipped with one.

  Before the trial, I went out for lunch with Coolie and he briefed me. He did a much better job than the assistant Crown attorney, who’d also had a chat with me. That broad had just wanted to lord it over me, make sure I knew that she was making about fifty thousand dollars a year more than me. She looked good, though, in her tight grey pencil skirt and nylons.