by Mark Johnson
Now from the cage behind me, I hear a low snarl, a warning.
“You best be watchin’ your back when I bond out. A man could follow you home from work some night, follow you right up into your driveway, and slit your throat befo’ you even get outta your car, befo’ you even see it comin’. Uh-huh, be easy to do. And then a man could go knock on your door, call out all your family—your wife, alla your chilluns—so they could watch you bleed to death, right there in y’own driveway. Yeah, a man could do dat. It’d be real easy.”
“Just to clarify: is that a threat?”
“Hell, ain’t no threat. It’s a promise,” he says.
“Well, that’s not very nice.”
There comes no retort to my rapier-like repartee, and we continue to Metro in blessed silence.
Signal 39—domestic violence: our most frequent type of call. I used to get all psyched up when I got dispatched to one, because it seemed like it would be a great opportunity to be heroic. There would actually be a damsel in distress at my destination, and I could arrive like a blue knight in a shiny squad car, eradicate the brute, and save the day for the ever-grateful fair maiden and her frightened, innocent cherubs. I would almost always run code to the call, my imagination conjuring hysterical toddlers trying to pull a savage off their bloodied mother. The cavalier attitude toward domestics of my more experienced squad mates baffled and bothered me. Far from getting excited and hurrying to a domestic, most would groan. Some seemed to dawdle. Though we were trained—and ordered—to never enter a scene before our backup arrived, especially a domestic with “disorderly background, both parties still on scene,” I could not simply sit a block away from the mayhem awaiting the arrival of a pokey partner. I had to ride to the rescue, and if backup was slow to arrive, then let the chips fall, I figured.
The problem, of course, is that it almost never plays out the way I imagine it while speeding to the scene. Domestics are usually messy, illogical, chaotic, and crowded with multiple parties, twisted in their own ways with alcohol, drugs, jealousy, and rage, who are shouting their versions of who should be arrested and why. An extremely high-bullshit level distinguishes most domestics. The arrival of police is often unwelcome by the supposed victim, who may have simply made the call hoping the aggressor would get scared, stop the beating, and flee, but whom the caller has absolutely no desire to see actually arrested. Such callers often turn on police as soon as we put hands on the boyfriend/baby-daddy/husband, will deny ever making the call, or say it’s really all their own fault, or actually become combative with police. Or the caller may not be the victim but instead one of the other parties on the scene, whose motives are unclear and whose allegiances are uncertain and changing depending on what stories are being shouted to police by whom. These might be adult children of the disputing parties, or parents, aunts, or uncles of either side, or current or previous boyfriends or girlfriends, or neighbors from the next apartment. There are multiple accounts of what happened, who should go to jail, who saw what, and who’s lying. Physical evidence—injuries, blood, bruises—is often ambiguous, mutual, subtle, faked, self-inflicted, denied, or nonexistent. A woman with a black eye and a fat lip will tell us she’s clumsy and walked into a door. A man will have scratches, a ripped shirt, and bite marks on him that a “witness” swears he did to himself just before our arrival. Children—usually honest witnesses—are often mute or hysterical with trauma, or have clearly been coached. Domestics rarely offer the opportunity to be the good guy, much less the hero. Instead it’s more like being the high school principal breaking up a slap fest in the girls’ room, or the parent wading into a tussle between squabbling siblings. You want to just say, “You’re all grounded! Go to your rooms! No TV for a week!” and drive away.
But every now and then a domestic is different. It’s real, and violent, and tragic. Or really creepy. LaDarius Jones and I responded to a call from a woman who had fled her house to a nearby fire station (the same one whose fence I had taken out in a pursuit) because her ex, against whom she’d filed a protection order, had popped up in her driveway as she loaded her kids in the car for school one warm April morning. As she drove her kid-laden Navigator across the street to the fire station, she saw him run behind the house, but she had not seen him emerge from there.
She has kept watch on the house from the fire station until we arrive and is convinced he’s gotten inside, although she says she changed the locks when she threw him out months ago, and all the doors are locked.
“He mighta kicked in the backdoor or busted a window,” she says, trembling. “The last time we was together, he ’bout kilt me to death!” Her three young ones in the backseat giggle and wiggle among themselves, oblivious to mama’s fears and the unfolding drama. “He pult my hair right outta my head, hit me all up in my face with his fistses, choked me. I like t’a died, I ain’t lyin’!”
LD and I circle the house on foot. No sign of forced entry. We check all the bushes and hiding places in the backyard and the exterior laundry room in the attached carport. Nothing. We return to the lady across the street and report our findings. She pushes the front door key into LD’s hand and orders us to check inside. Mumbling to each other about this being a goddamn waste of time, LD and I cross the street again and enter the front door. We clear the house, guns drawn, checking every room, every closet, under all the beds, behind the couch, behind the huge fifty-inch TV in the living room. No wifebeater jumps out at us. Back at the fire station driveway we report to the woman that her home is secure. She insists it’s not and demands to know if we checked behind the shower curtain. We assure her we checked everywhere, and there’s nobody lurking in her house.
“You check the attic? I betcha ain’t look up there!” I start to tell her we did, but LD says, “No ma’am. But if he ain’t got inside the house—which he ain’t—then how he gone be in the attic?”
“He tole one of my boys once about a secret way he can get up in there th’oo the carport laundry some kine a way. I don’t know, I just ain’t goin’ back inside till you check it, an if you ain’t, I’ll call for some other police dat will!”
We cross the street for a third time, muttering about this paranoid bitch. In the kitchen there’s a pull-down trapdoor with a fold-out ladder to the attic. I go on up while LD steadies the rickety ladder for me. The attic is low slung—the only standing room is at the center, where the roof peaks, but even there, cross struts will require a crouch. It’s hot, which all attics are, and the air is thick, with an unexpected whiff of locker room to it. The entrance to the attic is ringed with the typical jumble of stored boxes, Christmas decorations, old luggage, unused toys and the like, balanced on rafters and blocking easy access. I climb up the ladder just enough to peer over the top of the clutter, quickly scanning all four corners with my flashlight. Just as I’m about to climb back down, I light up what appears to be a couple raggedy pieces of plywood propped up or nailed to vertical two-by-fours, blocking a clear view of the eastern gable. I climb to the top step and train my light on the gaps between the vertical pieces of plywood and see, beyond the barricade, what appears to be a platform lying on the rafters, no bigger than a single four-by-eight sheet of plywood. On the platform is a pile of blankets or sleeping bags. Alongside the bedroll, lining the edge of the platform, folded clothes are neatly stacked, next to a couple pairs of men’s sneakers. Some coke cans, beer bottles, and jars are lined up like little soldiers, and a few bags of pork rinds, beef jerky, and potato chips are scattered nearby in the insulation between the rafters. I push a couple boxes of Christmas decorations out of the way, step up into the attic, balancing in a crouch on a rafter, and play my beam over the pile of blankets and sleeping bags some ten yards away. The edge of a pillow is visible at the far end of the platform, mostly obscured by the thick, lumpy pile of blankets and the plywood barricade. Then I spot the toe of a white sock sticking out the end of the blanket nearest to me. I step a rafter closer and study the sock. It appears to be occupied by a foot. It dawn
s on me that I’ve discovered a crude pallet on which somebody’s lying, perfectly still and silent, beneath the pile of blankets. I jerk upright, bonking my head on a crossbeam, and draw my weapon.
“Let me see your hands!”
The bundle of blankets remains motionless.
“Y’a’ight, Johnson?” LD yells from the below. “Whatcha got?”
With one hand full of flashlight, the other full of Glock, and my chest full of pounding, I advance toward the pile on the pallet, carefully stepping from rafter to rafter. The adrenalin rush is in full force; I have no free hand to steady myself on the overhead struts as I pick my way across the two-by-sixes and cannot, dare not, even for a second, interrupt my fixed gaze on the pile of blankets twenty feet away. Then the white-socked foot disappears under the pile of blankets, which begins moving. Still no hands or head visible; I quicken my steps, my chest heaving.
“Show me your hands!” I bark. My right foot slips off a rafter and crashes through sheetrock. I sink balls-deep, my right leg dangling, kicking in thin air, my left knee hitting hard on a rafter when I drop. The sharp pain of my knee and wrenched left leg is nothing compared to the shock to my ’nads. I’m straddling a two-by-six, dizzied and doubled up in sick testicular agony, madly swinging my leg in the room below. I hear LD below, yelling again, “Y’a’ight?” and I wonder, does it sound like I’m a’ight, LD?
I prop my foot-long Streamlight in the direction of my target and push down hard on a rafter to take the weight off my battered crotch, wriggling and kicking my leg up through the sheetrock and out of the room below, all the while yelling, “Hands! Hands up, motherfucker!”
A pair of palms and a head with bugged eyes poke from beneath the bedding. I holster up, scramble on my knees and shins across the remaining rafters, gain purchase on the pallet, and jerk the bedding off the terrified man in a T-shirt, boxer shorts, and white socks. I flip him on his belly and cuff him as he whines “I ain’t did nuthin’! Whuzzis all about, sir? Sir? Whuzz gwine on? I ain’t did nothin’!”
I walk the attic dweller across the rafters, down the ladder, and turn him over to LD in the kitchen to take out to his backseat cage. Returning to the attic dweller’s pallet to check for weapons and contraband, I sit to catch my breath and wait for the wave of smashed testicle pain to subside. As the throbbing eases, I examine my surroundings. Among the neat piles of folded jeans, shirts, and underwear, and the cans, bottles, and snack sacks lining the edge of the platform I observe a flashlight, a pocket-size New Testament, a half-empty pack of Newports with a Bic lighter tucked in among the smokes, a jar-lid ashtray full of butts. I help myself to a smoke and continue the inventory: a toothbrush, stick of Axe deodorant, wads of used Kleenex, a skin mag full of split black beavers, and a wide-mouthed jar half full of urine. I feel a fleeting pang of pity for my quarry, then heave myself up to retrieve my Streamlight. Before leaving the attic I peer through the hole my leg had made and observe the living room below. Downstairs, I pace the distance and the direction of the pallet from the hole in the living room ceiling; the attic dweller had made his nest directly above his ex’s bed. I return to the living room and estimate the ceiling damage in the hundreds of dollars.
Outside, our victim is telling LD how she knew he’d been up there, because he would call her on the phone sometimes, demanding explanations for things she had said that he had no way of knowing about. “An’ y’know, they was times I be layin’ in bed at night, when I’d swear I could smell ’im! I know his smell, y’know’m sayin’? An I could smell his smell an I couldn’t get how I could be smellin’ him when he ain’t be in my house fuh months! He a sick mothafucka, you feel me?”
Sarge arrives, looks quizzically at the white sheetrock powder covering one leg of my uniform, and I confess my misstep into the living room. Our victim overhears me and goes inside to look for herself. Sarge is telling me not to worry about it, asking if I’m okay, and assuring me I won’t hafta pay, and neither will the City if he has any say in the matter, when Miss Victim comes striding out, wagging her finger, doing that ghetto-girl side-to-side head-nod thing, and demands my name and badge number for when she sends the bill to “da Chief, or da muthafuckin Mayah” for her ceiling. “What I’m gone tell da rent man? I be damn if I gone pay fuh dat shit! Dey’s a hole as big’s his ass in my ceiling! Po-lice gone be payin’ fuh dat, or Mobile, or somemuthafuckinbody, but it sho’ ain’t gone be me!”
Sarge tilts his head to her and in calming, measured tones says, “No ma’am. The one responsible will be the one who pays the damages. That would appear to be your baby-daddy there.” He points to the attic dweller, slumped in LD’s cage. Miss Victim is outraged. “Him? How dat worf’less muhfucka gone pay? He ain’t got a pot to piss in!”
“Oh, but you’re mistaken,” I hear myself say. “It’s a jar, actually, and it’s in your attic, ma’am.” Sarge shakes his head to silence me, waves her off, and turns back to LD and me as I stub out the attic dweller’s Newport in the driveway.
“Switched brands?” Then, before I can answer, he addresses LD. “Draw a case number for burglary and violation of protection order, and take him on to Metro.” Then he puts a steadying hand on my shoulder.
“Go home. Change your pants.” He nods at my hand, which I discover has been cradling my scrotum. “And while you’re at it, check your balls. I’ll handle this.”
En route to Metro another day, with another prisoner, from another signal 39, who taunts me from the cage. (Some hands-on persuasion, and eventually tasing, had been necessary to peel him off of his bloodied beloved and bring him into custody. His girlfriend was taken by ambulance to the ER, her jaw likely broken, her hair ripped out of her head in big hanks.)
My charge speaks to me in a singsong falsetto from the backseat. “Punk-ass bitch. You think you’re so tough. You fuckin’ pigs ain’t nothing but punk-ass bitches. Without that badge you ain’t jack shit.” Then he switches to a low-register menacing growl: “In a fair fight I’d break you in half. I’d make you my bitch in less’n a minute. Y’ain’t nuthin’ but a weak-ass, limp-dick, gray-haired old bitch. Hear me, old man? ’Thout a gun, you just a weak-ass pussy bitch.”
I pull off on a quiet side street and remove my duty belt. “’Sa matter, you gotta stop and pee, old man? ’Fraid you might piss your pants? Ha! I done scared the piss outta you, man! Yeah, you better stop and dribble out some old-man pee, so’s you don’t hafta change your Depends before we get to Metro, you punk-ass old bitch.”
I step out of the car and lock the front seat with my weapons inside, then open the backdoor. “Turn around so I can take off your cuffs,” I say calmly. He sits mute, motionless.
“Turn around. Let me uncuff you, you sorry shit stain.”
He doesn’t move, or speak.
“C’mon, motherfucker! You want a piece of this? Fair fight: no cuffs, no backup, no gun, no Taser. Step on out. Step out, you pussy! Come on!”
He won’t even look at me. I bend over and scream into his ear, “Just what I thought, you fucking half-wit: all talk. You’re all badass when you’re fighting a hundred-pound female, or you’re safe in this cage. One more word and I’ll drag your sorry ass out and stomp it into the dirt! Then I’ll take out my old man pecker and dribble some old-man piss right into your crooked, rotten trailer-park teeth, motherfucker!” I slam the door and we proceed to Metro in blessed silence.
There comes no smart-ass retort this time either, although I remain enraged and twitching with adrenalin long after depositing Mr. Shit Stain in Metro.
10
Love and Anger Management
Love is a perky elf dancing a merry little jig and then suddenly he turns on you with a miniature machine-gun.
—Matt Groening
It’s a predawn domestic and I’m backing LD. The caller’s location is in one of the Woodlawn Apartments off Dauphin Island Parkway. Woodlawn is a cluster of half-vacant, ruined, and uninhabitable hulks that have been stripped of all plumbing fixtures, piping, and ele
ctrical wiring for their scrap value, currently around three bucks a pound at any of a dozen local scrap yards who never question the origin of perfectly good plumbing and copper cable delivered to their scales daily by hundreds of crack addicts and other petty thieves. The few remaining occupied apartments in Woodlawn, rundown roach-crawling Section 8 federally subsidized hovels, are inhabited almost exclusively by baby-mamas and their babies, which means they are frequented by their alternately robbing, ripping, and raping baby-daddies. Hence, Woodlawn Apartments is visited several times a day by police responding to domestic violence calls, with your occasional running gun battle between feuding baby-daddies over cuckold/cocksman conflicts. Often you get a combination of both types: the genesis of a baby-daddy versus baby-mama drama will have been some kind of gunplay with a would-be suitor who got away, leaving the aggrieved baby-daddy no satisfaction until he takes it out of his cheating baby-mama’s hide.
It was just such a call that LD and I were dispatched to on a cold gray February morning, and we were both worn out from the extra parade duty we’d been pulling due to Mardi Gras. Dispatch tells us while we’re en route that earlier that night police had been called to the same address by the same caller who reported two black males fighting, both of them brandishing firearms, but both males were gone by the time officers arrived. Now seven hours later, at about 5 a.m., the complainant is awakened by breaking glass, to be confronted by her baby-daddy, gun in hand, reaching through the broken window of the kitchen door demanding to be let inside or he’d shoot her and their child. “Both parties still on the scene, shots fired, very disorderly background,” Dispatch cautions. Subject black male Finest Odom, twenty-three years of age, dark “skinded,” approximately 5 foot 7, 150 pounds, wearing a black hoodie, drives an older blue Cutlass Supreme with fancy rims. Caller’s in a bedroom, and subject has not yet made entry.