Apprehensions & Convictions

by Mark Johnson

  I take a quick glance around the corner at the back side of the house before making a dash to the shed: no open doors or windows on the house, but he wouldn’t have tried to go inside, anyway, not here, not so close. He’s wanting to get the hell away from here to hide, as far away from here as he can get, quick, without being spotted by alert citizens or cops. He knows it’s fixin’ to get real thick here with cops, real soon, thanks to that cop car’s damn tracking unit.

  I figure he’s probably still on the move but can’t be certain, and I sure as hell don’t wanna risk having him behind me, so I gotta clear the backyard. In a low fast-moving crouch, I run to the south side of the windowless shed, my eye on the shed door all the way. I see the door, on the shed’s east side, has an exterior padlock on it, so he’s not in there. I flatten against the south side of the shed, between the shed and the rear of the house, and move to the shed’s southwest corner, slicing the pie around the corner. Nothing.

  Creeping along the back side of the shed, in a narrow passage between the shed and the wooden fence at the left (west) side of the yard, I reach the next corner and slice my way around it. Nothing.

  There’s a loud squawk in my ear and I flinch. Damn Dispatch is repeating, “All units, hold your traff—” and I turn the blasted thing off, for silence at least till I clear this cluttered cluster of a backyard. Why creep around like a ninja if the damn radio’s gonna give me away?

  The open-sided carport on the north side of the locked shed is stacked with lumber, wheelless old bicycle frames, an ancient riding mower, plumbing fixtures, and barrels, buckets, and boxes. I creep through it scanning every spot big enough to hide in. Nothing.

  A short distance away are the hulks of the two old cars, one on blocks, both nearly overgrown with weeds, and nearby are the scooters, the go-cart, and the cement mixer. They’re all kinda out in the open, exposed, but I’m not gonna turn my back on ’em before going over the rear fence. I sprint across to the rusty hulks and scramble around them looking high and low, checking that their trunks are locked down, checking the engine areas under the hoods, checking inside front and back, checking underneath. Nobody. Behind the one closest to the rear fence, an old box-style Caprice, I crouch down and lean back up against it, my arms on my thighs in a triangle, both hands gripping my Glock. I do some tactical breathing to settle and try to figure out my next move. Where the hell are Frank and Bailey, I’m wondering. They’ll be here any second, I answer myself. The main question is where the hell’s the damn thug?

  I’m scanning the rear fence looking for a good spot to clamber over it when I spot a gap near the corner that I hadn’t seen from previous vantages. I push off from the old Caprice and creep up to it to study things more closely. Two slats have been pulled out, making a gap just wide enough for somebody not too plump to squeeze through. The torn-off slats are lying nearby, their nails sticking up, still shiny and slightly bent. They haven’t been lying there long enough to rust or get cruddy. The fence’s three cross supports—the horizontal two-by-fours that the pulled-out slats had been nailed to—are now exposed where the slats had been, and they’re a clean bright blond on their inside surface, almost like fresh lumber, not weathered and darkened to a dull gray like their other surfaces.

  Bingo! The bad guy’s just gone through this fence, right here, I deduce.

  I peek carefully through the gap in the slats and scan the empty backyard of the house directly north. No escapee from Metro is running around, and compared to the yard I’ve just cleared, this one’s tidy and neat as a pin, although there are a couple places he could be hiding. There’s a small windowless shed, at least from what I can see of it, to the left, some bushes along the west side chain-link fence line, and a car parked snug up to the back of the house by the backdoor, next to a central AC unit on a concrete pad. The house is raised up on cinder blocks, as are most down here on the parkway where flooding is frequent, but there’s corrugated tin skirting around the bottom of the house, blocking off the crawl space beneath it, except for a three- to four-foot-wide gap near the air conditioner.

  But even if I can squeeze my fat ass—made even wider by all the damn gear on my duty belt—sideways through this narrow two-slat gap in the wooden fence without getting shot at, there’s a damn chain-link fence just inches beyond the wooden fence on the other side, the top of which doesn’t match the height of the wooden fence’s middle cross board, and is too far away from the wooden fence to straddle both at once. There’s just enough room between the fences to stand with both feet in order to hoist myself over the top bar of the chain link, but it’s gonna take some doing. Some contorting, and some luck.

  And where the hell are those guys, Frank and Bailey, anyway? I could sure use a little cover as I try this, and maybe a shove to squeeze me through. I look back for the cavalry. Nothing.

  Here we go. Putting my left foot on the lower horizontal member of the wooden fence, I grab the top cross piece with my left hand and attempt to straddle the middle cross piece with my right foot. This ain’t gonna work, not one-handed anyway. I step back down and scan the yard on the other side of the fence one last time, reluctantly holster my Glock, and hoist myself up once more, grabbing the top cross board with both hands. I think for a second maybe I should just forget about squeezing through and climb on up and over the top. But I’d make an easy target at six feet off the ground. Best to keep a low profile.

  I step up on the lower cross beam with my left foot, lean away from the fence sideways and feed my right foot and leg through the fence over the middle two-by-four and put my right foot on the bottom horizontal board, then sorta snake my way sideways through the fence, ducking my head sideways to get beneath the top horizontal two-by, my crotch—my ’nads—just barely clearing the middle cross board and my spare mag pouch on the front of my belt damn-near hanging me up.

  Managing somehow to clear the wooden fence, I step into the narrow space between it and the chain-link fence on the other side. I hafta place my feet parallel to the fences—there’s not enough room to put them perpendicular—and I grip the top cross bar of the chain link after trying to sorta flatten those damn little triangular links that stick out above the top bar with the jagged-pointed twists sticking up to stab you in the wrist or the heel of your hand, and with a herculean effort I vault myself over the second damned fence into the next backyard.

  Before I even get a chance to take a deep breath or to even glance back through the wooden fence gap and wonder, just what the fuck are Frank and Bailey doing all this time, a noise and movement to my right captures my attention.

  A couple of guys have just come out of the house next door and are climbing into an SUV in the driveway. I bark, “Freeze! Police!” and draw my weapon, striding quickly toward them. They comply, putting their hands up high, their eyes popping. They’re on the other side of the east leg of the same chain-link fence I just struggled over. No way am I gonna holster up and vault the thing again. I steal a glance to my left, to the north, and see the gate of the fence is open; that’s how the car parked by the AC unit at the back of the house got there.

  “Stay right there, keep your hands up and don’t move,” I command, not taking my eyes or my gun off them as I walk through the open front gate, round the fence, and approach them on the other side. Neither of them looks like a desperado just escaped from Metro after stabbing a cop, but I check the SUV they were getting into to make sure he’s not crouched down in there having just ordered them at gunpoint to take him somewhere. The car’s clear.

  “What’s wrong, Officer?” the older one, a guy about my age says. The other one is maybe thirty-five or forty, likely the older guy’s son.

  “You live here?”

  “Yes sir,” they reply in unison.

  “Let me see some ID with this address on it. What the hell is this address, anyway?”

  “F-ff-ffourteen eleven Daytona D-ddrive, three six six oh fffive,” the old guy stammers, digging for his wallet.

  “Never mind
the ID,” I bark. “You seen anybody come through here? Through that fence back there, maybe wearing a Metro jail inmate uniform?” (Sometimes they’ll strip down a prisoner at HQ and dress him for Metro before transporting him there.)

  They both nod vigorously. “We did just see a guy come from back there, don’t know ’bout no Metro clothes, though,” the older one says, excited. “He run across that yard there toward the front, didn’t he, son?”

  The younger one says, “Yeah he did, Pops. Musta went on up between them two houses . . . wudn’t but a minute ago, was it?”

  Old guy, still nodding, says, “He be damn sho in a hurry!”

  I turn on my heel and begin jogging back toward the front of the house next door, saying over my shoulder, “Y’all need to go on back inside and lock your doors. And keep your heads down—don’t be lookin’ out your windows.”

  Circling around the front of the house, I scan the neighborhood in both directions, looking for somebody—anybody—running away, or crouching behind a parked car or at the corner of a house. Nothing.

  But I’m incredibly relieved to see MPD officers, guys I know, some with combat rifles or shotguns, sweeping the area on foot and rolling up in cruisers. Some deputies, too, are rolling up in brown Crown Vics. I see one whom I FTO’d when he was a rookie, before he jumped to the County for better pay and less work. Blue and brown uniforms are saturating Daytona Drive.

  I call out and gesture to anyone within earshot, “He came this way, from back there. Neighbors over there saw him runnin’ between these two.” I crouch to scan under the house next door, also raised up on blocks but with no skirting. I can see clear through the crawl space to daylight on the far side. Nothing.

  Continuing on to circle around into the backyard I’d first landed in from the rear fences, I finally catch a glimpse of portly old Frank Black trying to squeeze his way through the two-slat gap in the six-foot wooden fence. He sees me and calls out, “I can’t get through!”

  “Don’t even try, Frank,” I yell. “Just come on around the block—we already got guys over here, an’ he’s prob’ly somewhere on across the street by now.” Frank nods and disappears from the two-slat gap.

  I spot the gap in the skirting by the AC unit that I’d first seen through the back fence, and throw myself down to the left side of it, behind a cinder-block footing. Lying flat on my belly, I peek around the cinder block and squint into the darkness, trying to force my eyes to penetrate the gloom, my weapon pointed in front of me.

  About a dozen or fifteen feet directly ahead, about halfway into the shadowy crawlspace, I perceive what might be a wide pile of rags, maybe old sheets or a bedspread, spread out perpendicular to me in the darkness. It looks to be a tangle of something, maybe even crumpled-up old newspapers, I can’t be sure. It’s about six feet wide, maybe eight inches or a foot high, about a third the height of the crawl space, and I can’t see its depth or anything that might give it definition. I crane my neck and stare hard, trying to discern what it is I’m looking at. There’s just not enough light coming in from behind me through this three-foot-high, four-foot-wide opening in the tin skirting.

  The winter sun is waning and the air has turned brisk. Downtown they’re shutting the traffic down on Government Street, starting to form up the parade by the Civic Center: towing cars whose drivers have failed to heed the No Parking–Parade Route signs, lining up the marching bands and the floats, unloading the PD and SO Mounted Units; the vendors of funnel cakes and chicken on a stick are heating up their deep friers, the masker-flaskers are mounting their floats.

  As I lay on my belly in the weeds, my eyes adjust slightly, and I can make out other cinder-block pillars spaced in rows at uniform intervals receding under the house into the dark, and I see narrow slits of light at the far-forward right corner, where the skirting is apparently composed of loosely laid bricks or blocks instead of long tin sheets, but the light there does little more than silhouette the unevenly stacked bricks. It does nothing to diminish the blackness that shrouds the center of the crawl space.

  I wiggle back to my left, fully behind the cinder-block footing, and pull out my Streamlight, gripping it up near the neck where the on-button is with my left hand, my right hand still filled with Glock.

  Behind the cinder block I roll onto my right hip and crook my left knee forward as a counterbalance to prevent rolling over to the right, out from behind the cover of the cinder block. I press my left forearm firmly against the cinder block about forehead high, further stabilizing me.

  This is awkward, to say the least. And painful, for a guy with a right shoulder that’s been frozen since high school, severely limiting that arm’s upward and lateral range of motion. I work the Streamlight’s lens around the corner of the cinder block with my left hand, lining it up parallel with the business end of the Glock, and then sorta scooch to the right and rock up onto my right elbow in order to see around the cinder block.

  My right hand is now gripping the Glock at a sideways cant—but not as the gangsta boys do in the movies, thumb down and knuckles up, but the opposite, since I’m leaning hard onto my right elbow. Then I press the barrel-mounted on-button of the light.

  Three or four ear-splitting cracks fill the air, and I roll back to my left for cover, thinking, what the fuck? Did that just come from under the house? I never even saw the muzzle flashes, much less whatever my Streamlight’s beam may have revealed.

  But there’s not any doubt in my mind. That wasn’t some old pile of dirty sheets. That was It. This is the Shit. And it just got real. The bastard saw my light and tried to take me out.

  Guys are yelling at me, “Mark, pull back! Get outta there, Mark!” Nice of ’em, I think. Glad they’re looking out for me, but I’m not real eager to move in any direction at the moment. The tin skirting to the left of the cinder-block stack isn’t gonna stop a round. I’m best off laying right here behind this stack. I make myself real skinny and consider sticking the Glock around the corner to return fire blind. Suppression fire, I think they call it in the war movies. I could lay down a little suppression fire, just to rattle the sonofabitch a little, make him slither around on his belly in the dark like the damn serpent he is. I might even get lucky and sting the little snake, or at least brush him back long enough to push away from this narrow cinder block and get the hell outta here.

  I raise my weapon to poke it around the corner and notice the raggedy, torn-up bottom of the Glock’s grip. It’s all gnarled up, bad, like it’s been danced all over by a really dull drill press or hit by a . . . a what? I tip the barrel up and discover that the base plate of my magazine has been blown clean off. It has disappeared, along with—shit!—all my ammo!

  All my bullets have fallen out. I look up into the empty magazine. Nary a round to be seen. I look on the ground and see a couple bullets among the blades of grass just a few inches into the line of fire. I sure as hell am not gonna try to reach over there and scratch around in the grass for them.

  Oh well, I think. No worries. Things could be worse. I could have been wearing my usual civilian duds and I’d be shit outta luck. But not today. I’m in uniform! Fully equipped! Got two more full mags hangin’ on my blessed belt! Thirty rounds, comin’ at ya, muhfucka! Not countin’ the one already in the pipe with your name on it!

  If I could only get this damn empty mag out of the Glock, to replace it with a full one. I tug and twist, and pinch, and pry, and try to wiggle, then slap the useless, ruined, empty piece a shit out of the bottom of the grip, but hell. It’s hopeless. FUBAR. I’m screwed.

  There is still the one round in the chamber, thank God. Better not waste it in a blind pop around the cinder block. What if he’s been crawling up this way and comes out blazing? At least I’d have one chance to drill him when his head sticks out of his dark lair. Better hold what I got and just get real skinny and push straight back an inch at a time, then make a run for it.

  And that’s exactly what I do. When I get far enough back from the house that I’m past
the back side of the AC unit on the other side of the gap in the skirting, I draw my legs up under my chest and spring sideways over the line of fire and take cover on the ground behind the AC.

  For about thirty seconds, anyway. Just until I realize the AC is really no better cover than the corrugated tin skirting. It’s just a mostly empty, flimsy sheet metal box with a whole bunch of horizontal vent slits on every side; it may actually be worse cover than the tin skirting: it’s already perforated. Whatever (and wherever) all those thicker mechanical things are inside the AC cowling, I don’t know if they can stop a bullet.

  Guys are still yelling at me to “Get better cover! Pull back!” and I decide that’s what I need to do, so I roll over and spring back to the rear of the car parked next to the AC. Of course I’m not really safe lying on the ground, so I sorta crouch behind the trunk, thinking, it’s only my feet and ankles at risk, and he’d need to be a pretty damn good or lucky shot to get me in the ankle.

  But then I think of the base plate of my magazine that he blew all to smithereens, and I hightail it on outta there, back to the next yard over, behind the wheels of that SUV I had cleared before terrorizing the father and son setting out on some errands together, just minutes—but what now seems a lifetime—ago.

  At a far safer distance, behind much better cover, with guys I know and trust who have working firearms and lots and lots of bullets, including armor-piercing combat rifle rounds, and grenades, and God only knows what all else, I take a knee next to none other than Captain Darby. Way back in the day, Darby had been my very first sergeant out of the academy, back when ol’ Portly Porter was my first FTO, up in the Third. Three or four other guys are in the carport there, lined up along the rear wall of the house and crouching with me behind the wheels of the SUV.