by Graeme Hurry
Crappy neighbourhood.
The officer is lying in the middle of the street. On his back. Andy slams on the breaks. Tires screaming. ABS making the car shudder. I have time to see the blood pool under his body. Uniform gleaming with it in the wash of the headlights. It looks bad.
We slide to a halt about ten feet away. One look. No words. We draw and get out of the car as one. Covering the houses that line the street. We walk sideways, backs to each other. Moving towards the cop. Looking for signs of movement.
“Anything?” Glad to hear my voice sounding calm. My heart beating about one twenty.
“Nope. Wait…”
I start to turn my head in his direction. That’s when it happens. Explosion of sound from my side of the street. The flat crack of rifle fire. Semi-automatic.
My mind freezes. The training takes over. I hit the deck. My peripheral vision picks out Andy doing the same. I bring my gun up. My head turns back to my side of the street.
Time is running slooooow. I can hear each repeat of the rifle. Feel the breeze as a slug passes by my left cheek.
Some nights I wake up feeling that. Sweaty and scared.
I need to get to cover. We are sitting ducks. Then I see the muzzle flash from the ground floor window opposite. Instinct takes over.
I fired all fourteen rounds into the side of the house. Ballistics confirmed after I’d hit the perp in six places, including the fatal headshot. At the time, all I knew was that the asshole had stopped shooting. I turned back to the other officer. Saw with no real surprise that he wasn’t moving or breathing.
Andy was. He was also drooling blood and looked in a bad way. I dragged him into cover behind our car. Better safe than sorry. Waited for the cavalry.
The CSI boys were pretty surprised afterwards that the shooter had managed to miss me and hit Andy. Actually, they were kind of amazed he could hit anything, the amount of meth in his bloodstream. Still, they took a good look at the angle of the shooter. His field of vision relative to the two of us. Pretty easy to recreate, with the blood pools in the street, my spent casings, what have you. There was a fair bit of head-scratching all round.
“You musta hit the deck quicker, that’s all.” It was bullshit. I went along with it. No sense doing otherwise. I thought I just got lucky.
Andy, not so much. He arrested twice, once in the ambulance, once at the hospital. He went under for ten minutes the second time. He didn’t come all the way back. Oxygen deprivation. Permanent brain damage. He ended up somewhere near functional, but lost all his speech memory. Had to learn to talk again from scratch. Lost some higher function too. Shitty business.
I’d always been a drinker. Most cops are. I started drinking for real not long after that. To start with, it was just to help me sleep. I kept waking up screaming. Feeling the breeze of a bullet passing my cheek. Janie soon had me sleeping on the sofa most of the time - I was waking her up and freaking her out. Of course, that just made me drink more.
I managed to hide it from work. The drinking, the dreams, all of it. PTSD does not look good on a cop’s resume, however PC the department was pretending to be. I went to the mandatory counselling, all that crap. I kept my shit together and to myself. Scored a clean bill of health.
TV makes you think that a cop’s life is nothing but crazed villains and shoot outs. That’s bullshit. It’s mainly boring. Hard mindless work, with occasional flashes of excitement. It was another five years before someone took a shot at me.
My next partner was Fred. Fred was a real piece of shit. Lazy. Dumb. Fucking gross personal habits. He’d belch loudly every time he ate, laugh like it was funny. He could pick his nose for hours, seemed like. Rooting around in there like he was digging for gold. He wasn’t a trophy hunter. He ate what he caught. He also had an appetite like a fucking hog, and the smallest bladder of any man I’ve ever known. Which meant that we’d end up stopping once an hour at the nearest food joint, so he could go for a piss and buy more junk on the way out to fill his face with. Goddamn car stank of stale food all the time. Made me want to puke.
That’s how come we were outside the double D downtown that afternoon. Him and his small bladder and his fat gut.
It happens fast. One second, we’re standing next to the car in the lot, arguing about the relative merits of custard versus jelly. The next his face just fucking explodes. Rips apart, shredded. Splashing my own face with blood. A swarm of angry bees buzzes past my face. The boom of the shotgun blast echoes off the building behind me.
We stand there for a second, frozen. I see Fred try and swallow. The pellets have shredded his face so badly that I can see his tongue working against his teeth through the ragged hole in his cheek.
Then we both drop. Me into cover behind a car. Him into a bleeding heap. I hit the panic button. Officer down. Draw my gun, but the black SUV has already pulled away. In the movies the cop would shoot through the traffic. Somehow manage to only hit the bad guy’s car. I just get the plates and call it in.
Turned out to be stolen. Local bangers had just brought in a new initiation test for the young bloods. Tag a cop, earn your colours. That gang didn’t last the year, but the attack on me and my partner turned out to be the first shot of a bloody and nervy summer.
Not for Fred though. For him, the war was definitely over. No brain damage, but he lost an eye. All the plastic in the world, not to mention four months in hospital, couldn’t put his face back together. He lost some speech too. Nerve damage to his jaw. Talked like he had a mouth full of cotton balls. He took a medical discharge and pension, and on the first anniversary of the shooting, he finished the job with his own .45.
What happened to Andy had messed me up. It was a walk in the park next to Fred. Not because of him – piece of shit. No. Just because…
I’d seen the gun fire out of the corner of my eye. Seen the flame spitting out of the barrel. The eyes of a dragon coming to life. I’d known for sure that I was dead. My partner’s face disintegrated and what seemed like a thousand pellets buzzed past my face, close enough to feel. To hear. Parting in front of my nose like Moses and the red sea.
The drinking got heavier. My marriage collapsed. She walked one evening while I was on shift. Left a Dear John. Sweet, really. Still caring. We had barely spoken in months. I could hardly remember her face, seemed like. Except, no. That’s not right. I can picture her now, if I close my eyes. It’s more like the face of a stranger though. Not connected to anything.
By then there was only the bottle and the job. And the job was starting to turn to shit.
Cop humour is legendarily black. What you may not realise is that it can also be very cruel. With two partners down in six years there were bound to be jokes. It started with a printed note taped to my locker: “To lose one partner is tragic. To lose two starts to look like carelessness.”
I left it on there, to show I could take the joke. It ate at me. The other cops started to pull away too. Distance themselves. Offers to go out after a shift for beers or a meal stopped long before the excuses turned stale. That was okay. By then I preferred drinking alone. Sometimes, when I was lying on my couch, trying to get drunk enough to sleep, I’d take the bullet out of my pocket and hold it up to the light. Look at it. Usually I’d pass out, eventually. Every time I woke up my fist would be closed around it. Holding it close.
Got through a lot of partners. The usual way. No one wanted to work with me for long. A combination of my rep and my increasing distance. It was fine by me. I had no ambition beyond serving my twenty and getting my pension. I had a vague idea that if I could somehow do that, I could maybe get clean. Try and get a little bit of my life back. Drunk logic.
A DV call in ’09 puts paid to that. Jackson and me are the first responders. Neighbours report yelling. Breaking glass. Kids crying. In the two minutes it takes us to make the address dispatch give us an ex-husband and restraining order linked to the residence. A sheet long enough for us to realise whatever is going on tonight has probably been coming for a
while.
None of this is new to me by this time, but my gut is tighter than normal. Because, kids.
“Okay, I say we’ve got P.C. so we go in heavy. You take the back, try and get the woman, kids out, if you can. I’ll take the front, try and nail the suspect. Questions?”
“None.” Jackson already has his piece drawn. Ready for a quick exit.
“Good. Kids’re more likely to be at the rear, but stay sharp. If the perp is armed, he gets one warning – after that, he fails to comply in any fucking way, put him down. Do not try to be a hero. Got it?”
I flick my eyes from the road to Jackson’s face for a second. He meets my gaze level. Nods quickly. He’s got kids. I know he won’t fuck about.
“Okay, let’s do it.”
I pull the car up outside the house, across the street. Kill the engine. The lights are on. There’s yelling. Screaming. Crying.
“I’m giving you sixty, then I’m taking the door.”
Jackson doesn’t reply. Dives out the door and runs across the street. Low. Heading for the side alley.
I wait in the car for a slow thirty. Get out and walk across the street, up to the front door. Gun drawn and pointing at the ground. Heart beating slow but heavy.
I can hear kids crying. A woman screaming. My gut turns cold as I reach the door. The screen door is unlocked. Opens quietly. The door itself looks cheap. Like the house, the neighbourhood. Good. I draw a last breath, deep. Brace. Gun up.
Now.
My kick splinters the thin wood around the lock. The door flies inward, banging off the interior wall, swinging back.
“Police!”
I take in the scene down the sight of my pistol. An open living room/dining room. A woman standing by the dining table. Sobbing. Hysterical. In a T-shirt and panties. Clinging to each leg, terrified, snot faced rugrats stare bug-eyed at me.
No, past me.
My blood runs cold. Things go very slow. I hear the click as my head turns. The sliding sound of a semi-automatic pistol being cocked. My own gun pointing the wrong fucking way. Didn’t clear the corners. Too old, too sloppy, too much booze.
My head snapping round. Upper body turning as well. Too slow. Too little. Too late. The gun floats into focus. A big one, Glock or a Desert Eagle. The barrel like a huge black sightless eye.
I look up the sights. Right into the eye of a terrified, angry, desperate man. His finger already adding that last crucial pound per square inch. I want to say no. Please don’t. In that moment I want to live so bad.
I am too slow and it is too late.
He pulls the trigger.
He is less than ten feet away when the gun pointed right at my head goes off. The noise of the explosion is deafening. I watch the top of the barrel slide back as the bullet fires. I see the flash as the powder ignites. I have time to wonder if I will see the slug leave the barrel before it hits me. The barrel is still sliding, moving backwards. Disengaging from the rest of the gun. Disintegrating. The eye of my killer doesn’t have time to change to surprise before it is obliterated by the lump of hot metal. His head snaps back against the wall. His legs give. He slides down, dead before his ass hits the floor. All I can do is stand there, gun pointed at him, staring, beyond disbelief, beyond shock, in some numb other world, a ghost, as Jackson bursts in yelling questions, checking out the woman and the kids, calling for backup, CSI, ambulance.
They called it shock. Put me in overnight for observation. That was all it took. The pill they gave me got me through the night, but no power on earth could stop the DTs from hitting in the morning. Just like that, I was done.
There was plenty of sympathy. Shrinks. But word was out, and by then I’d just had enough. I didn’t want to get better. I just wanted to drink enough so that I wouldn’t see Fred’s tongue working his teeth through that hole in his face. The gun exploding in the apartment. Andy lying in a pool of his own blood.
It should have been me. That’s the beginning and the end of it. It should have been me. Would have been me. Andy was great and Fred was a jerk and the restraining order violator was a piece of shit, but none of that matters.
It should have been me.
I know that now. As sure as I know that the end isn’t going to be found in the bottom of this bottle.
I’m going to use the .38 special I bought for Janie. She left it behind when she walked. It feels right, somehow. I took the bullet out the case to check, and sure enough, it fit just fine. Seems like it’s just been waiting for this moment. The years between, just one bad dream.
I’m done dreaming now.
PENNIES ON THE DOLLAR
by Rhoads Brazos
When I was four I lost myself in Montgomery Ward’s. The free popcorn lady found me sobbing between a half-acre of sofas and a dinette set forest. The store paged my mother for fifteen minutes but I knew she wouldn’t come. She was shopping, you see. Even at that age I understood.
Security and the floor manager arrived. I gave them the best description I could. Mother was tall and thin with lots of bags and a long-handled purse that swung like a tetherball. It knocked into me whenever I walked too close. Clerks were sent to every floor. After a few minutes, they returned with my mother in tow.
“You need to keep up,” she said.
I started crying again.
She pulled me away to the register. I gave a fleeting look over my shoulder to the staff, all scowling and mumbling and shaking their heads. I saw the look the popcorn lady gave me. I didn’t know the name for it, but I understood what it meant. I wished I could go home with her instead.
Thirty years later and nothing has changed.
My mother shops.
Every day, every waking hour, every effort is put into bargains and deals. When Mother’s not physically in a store, she organizes rooms to make more space. She plots and plans to clear square footage and then sets out to fill it. She converted a spare bedroom into a walk-in closet. She sold her house and bought a bigger one. The market was good so she left that one within two seasons. She moved across the street from me.
“Someone needs to keep an eye on you,” she said.
In my mind, I wrapped my arms around a little girl crying at the foot of an overstuffed Lay-Z-Boy recliner. That day at Ward’s hadn’t been the last like it. There had been recitals and spelling bees and my first art exhibit and countless other events short one spectator. The tip of my tongue tasted the first words of a long overdue argument, one that I’d honed to a razor’s edge. I’d wielded it a thousand times in mock duels, but never in real battle.
A rumbling hiss came from downstreet.
“That’s mine,” Mother said.
“Yours?”
“Make sure they put it in the kitchen and connect the water.”
A Sears truck approached.
“Wait. I don’t—”
“Tell them I am old and infirmed. They’ll bring it all the way in. Oh—you’re single now. Do mention that.”
Mother disappeared into my house.
I did as she asked. The Sears fellows didn’t want to slide the stainless steel Frigidaire over the kitchen island—company regulations, they said—but I pled my case.
The larger of the two deliverymen picked up a photo from the counter, a young Saint Theresa with smudged Bengali children upon her lap. With its foxed edges and benoted back, it didn’t seem to be a copy.
“That her?” he asked.
It was a her, if not the her.
“Yes?” I answered.
Twenty minutes later the fridge was installed.
I walked back to my place, meant for two but now occupied by one. I was dwelling on the purpose of that photo when Mother came trotting down my front walk.
“I fixed your layout,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Your living room. But you must have matching throws to pull it together.”
Mother dug in her purse and retrieved her keys. From across the street, her car chip-chirped.
&nb
sp; “I’ll be back.” Mother marched away.
After the split-up, I’d worked hard organizing what was left of the furnishings. It left me cold thinking of Mother scooting my belongings about as if my home were hers. Perhaps my irritation got the better of me, or maybe at that moment my mind opened to a truth I’d always known.
“I need something,” I said.
Mother stopped as if struck.
I continued. “Maybe you can—”
“What is it?” she asked.
“I had a sewing basket.”
“Yes, yes. I remember.”
“Jeffery—”
“He took it? Why would he need such a thing?”
“So that I wouldn’t have it.”
Mother pressed her lips tight.
“It was Moroccan,” I said.
“Oh, I remember,” Mother said. “Red leather. Silver scissors.”
“Yes, that’s the one.”
“Hmm …”
I didn’t say any more. Mother stared off at the horizon. Her eyes wiggled about as if she were scanning fine print. She spun on her heel, hopped in her station wagon, and left.
The next morning I opened the front door to check the milk box. I knew that I’d have to cancel delivery soon. Glass bottle delivery was a luxury for two but an indulgence for one. I couldn’t afford it but didn’t want yet another part of my past canceled.
A cardboard box sat on the threshold. I took it inside and opened it. I was dwelling on the many calls I needed to make for the milk, the cable package, and the yard service. At first, I didn’t even realize what I was holding. I came within a breath of dropping it.
I told myself she’d stolen it. She’d snuck over to Jeffery’s lovenest and climbed in through a balcony window. I imagined her wiggling snakelike across the floor, snaring the prize, and then fluttering back to the ground like a ninja in one of those Hong Kong films.
I studied the basket closely; it wasn’t the same one. Mine had been worn with the left hinge pin missing from the knuckle. The date on the bottom read 1821. A little older than mine.