He stares sadly out the window, and I decide to leave him alone for a while.
On the far side of Forney, though, he starts to tell me about a girl he once dated named Forney Kate. Thankfully, before I have to listen to the story I get a call from Jackie telling me to be careful, advising me on what I should avoid eating for lunch—she reminds me how bacteria-ridden diner food is—and finally whispering that she loves me. I give an “Uh-huh, me too” response, to which Hoskins says, “Oh, for crying out loud, Detective, just tell the girl you love her.”
A few hours later we drive into Marshall and at the first traffic light I check the messages on my work phone. I’ve gotten texts from Seth and Ryan, both telling me to be vigilant out in the hinterlands.
Hoskins reaches over and pokes me, pointing to a large billboard that reads LET US HELP YOU IN YOUR STRUGGLES. LET US PRAY AWAY THE GAY.
He watches me for a reaction and then asks, “You know about my wife, right? Twelve years of marriage and she leaves me for another woman.”
“You mean a woman,” I say. “Not another woman.”
“Yeah, well, whatever,” he says. “It could have been a dozen women, for all I know. I had her computer checked out after she left. She’d been communicating with all kinds of lesbos on Facebook.” He looks at me quickly. “No offense.”
The light turns green and a nanosecond later the car behind me blares its horn.
“None taken,” I say, driving through the intersection, leaving the billboard behind to reflect in my rearview mirror. “I’m a proud card-carrying member.”
What’s bothering me is not so much that he’s torn up by his wife turning out to be a lesbian but that he’d spied on her.
“You think you know somebody,” he murmurs. “Twelve years and they pull a one-eighty.”
He shakes his head, his lips downturned tragically, sighing the way people do when they’re mystified by their own expectations.
But what I want to tell Hoskins is this: People don’t just do a one-eighty. Not like that. I long to take his face gently in both my hands and then give him a vicious head butt and scream at him three decibels above ear-tolerance level that his wife didn’t have a change of sexual orientation overnight. He’d spent twelve years in complete and utter denial of who she was and what she wanted.
I’m surprised he hasn’t already asked me the Question: Did you always know you were a, you know, a…lesbian?, the word lesbian spoken in a hushed whisper. Or the three syllables accented carefully, as though the speaker were sitting for his or her medical boards and enunciating the word vagina with pained, professional detachment.
From time to time, I’ve been curious about having sex with men, in a squeamish, lab-experiment sort of way. But at the age of five, watching Snow White on television, I discovered that I didn’t identify with the pale and cursed Ms. Helpless so much as with the Wicked Queen and her force-of-nature personality. And when the prince bent down to kiss Snow White, my imagination embodied me squarely as the one in the cape, the woman in my arms.
Benny was the first person I ever talked to about who I was, and that was after I’d already joined the academy. My mother suspected, sensing it through my reticence in welcoming the advances of the red-faced, overly eager boys my age. She’d never once come home to an interrupted wrestling match on the couch, the boy covering his crotch with a pillow, her daughter desperately tugging on her shirt to cover an exposed bra. And I never brought home a girl whom I was interested in, preferring covert kisses in some alleyway or deserted lot. It’s not that my mother was scandalized by what she suspected; it was more that she was disappointed that her daughter would never have a family wedding or give her a grandchild.
If my father knew, he never talked about it. I was a disappointment to him too, not because I was a lesbian but because I took the place on the force that my brother had filled. After my brother killed himself, my father couldn’t pretend anymore that all of the things he had done in the shadows—all the corners he had cut, all the money he had taken to look the other way, the dozens of “accidental” deaths that eradicated the street denizens in his precinct—hadn’t left its crippling mark on his son. My brother died at twenty-five, the year I started the academy. And forever after, every time Phillip Andrew Rhyzyk looked into my face, he saw the fervor of a true believer, someone with the will to first do no harm and the zealotry to turn a dirty cop out of the ranks. But most of all, what he saw in my ramrod posture and challenging gaze was condemnation. Every day of his life, until the moment he shriveled up and died.
Something large and lumbering at the next light makes me slam on the brakes, and I come to a screeching halt in front of a man on horseback riding calmly across the intersection pulling, by a length of rope, an old man in a wheelchair, both legs amputated at the knees. The old man is wearing a jacket with dozens of Veterans of Foreign Wars patches. All three, the legless veteran, the young cowboy, and his horse, are blithely untroubled by the traffic around them.
“Now, see,” Hoskins tells me, “you’d never get that in Brooklyn.”
As the young rider clops past the front bumper of my car, he dips his chin, the brim of his hat shadowing his face more. But I can tell by the turn of his head that he’s peering through the windshield, unsmiling, and the skin at my sternum where the Saint Michael’s medal rests seems to warm, setting the underlying muscles to nervous quivering. The wheelchair is safely delivered to the far side of the street, and they continue on their way without a backward glance.
“Uh-oh, Detective,” Hoskins laughingly warns. “Cowboy doesn’t like the looks of you. Maybe you should let me do the driving now that we’re in Marlboro Country.”
On the far side of Marshall we take 43 North for close to a dozen miles, driving along sandy-soiled lots with small brick homes and trailer parks with junked cars abandoned out front. Near-feral dogs emerge explosively from porch overhangs or brushy cover like bottle rockets, racing out to bark savagely at our car, then wheeling about and retreating again.
Hoskins informs me that, in a few miles, we’ll be turning onto County Road 2198 and into the entrance to Caddo Lake State Park, where we’ll be meeting members of the Harrison County Sheriff’s Office. He texts one of our contacts that we’ll be there within twenty minutes.
It’s midday, and only two vehicles have passed us, both pickup trucks, going in the opposite direction. The air in the car has warmed and I lift the heavy hair off my neck, cupping its mass against the back of my head. I catch Hoskins staring at me.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing,” he says immediately. “No, it’s just that, your hair…” He makes a vague wagging motion toward his own head after I give him a warning look. “It’s just really nice. Pretty. Oh, fuck, I don’t know…” His voice trails off and he’s beet-faced and squirmy.
“Pretty?” I ask, grinning with delight at his discomfort. I reach over and slap him briskly across the shoulder. “Bob, are you…you’re not flirting with me, are you?”
“No. Fuck no,” he says with a little too much emphasis, and then we’re both laughing.
He catches his breath and says, “You tell anyone about this and I’ll call sexual harassment on you.”
“Ooh, that’d be fun,” I say, wiping at my streaming eyes. “It’s been a while since I was on that side of the fence.”
We hit a few potholes and patches of broken asphalt, and where the road comes to a fork, a road-repair sign detours us farther east. We’re closer to the state park now and the trees are denser, with fewer houses set back on dirt paths. We pass a sign for the town of Karnack.
“Home of Lady Bird Johnson,” Hoskins muses. “Hell, there’s another detour sign.”
My personal phone rings and I dig it out of my pocket to answer. It’s James Earle, but the reception is spotty, the bass tone of his voice wavering in my ear.
“Hey,” he says. “Jackie just told me you’re going out to Caddo Lake. What’s shakin’?”
“Yeah, we
’re close, headed toward Karnack. Just a few more miles,” I tell him. I want to fill him in on the discovery of El Gitano’s body and the plank with its message nailed to the cypress tree, but I’m not sure Hoskins would appreciate my talking about the case with a civilian, even though the civilian had been an MP.
“Things are finally coming to a head, James. We’re close to the belly of the beast.”
In the road ahead is another sign, directing us onto an even narrower road. Hoskins studies the GPS on his phone and motions to me with hand signals which way to turn.
“Shit, more detours,” I say into the phone. “Typical hick roads, right? Got to take four rights to make one left turn. Listen, James, I got to go—”
“Betty,” he says, interrupting me. “You keepin’ sharp, right?”
“Absolutely,” I answer.
“’Cause you’re in their jungle now.”
“Not to worry. We should be to the lake soon. Texas DPS is just forcing us to take the scenic route.”
I make a wrong turn and Hoskins looks at me, exasperated.
“James, I got to go. We’re bum-fuck lost. Call you later.”
I put the phone back in my pocket, turn the car around, follow the detour signs.
“Sorry,” I say to Hoskins.
“That’s okay,” he says. “We can get to the lake once we’ve passed Karnack. Stay to the right here,” he directs.
Soon there are a few houses and near-empty fields studded with tall longleaf pines and brushy trash trees.
At a T-crossing Hoskins says, “Here you’re going to make a left.”
Immediately, I see a large commercial truck parked on the gravel shoulder, shaded under a canopy of elm trees. Parked on the opposite side is a white patrol car with a Jefferson Police logo. An officer with his hand over his service revolver is standing toe-to-toe with a larger man who is wearing work overalls, perhaps the driver of the truck. They are not having a polite conversation.
A second officer, young, tall, and densely angular, steps away from his position by the squad car and into the middle of the road holding both hands up, barring us from passing the truck.
“Oops-a-daisy,” Hoskins says. “Morning meth run? Looks like we’re going to see how it’s done by Jefferson’s Finest.”
Hoskins pulls out his badge and rolls down the passenger-side window as the second officer begins walking toward us.
Hoskins makes a curt acknowledgment to the approaching officer. “Dallas Police. Need any help?”
My attention is pulled back to the truck when the truck driver gives the confronting officer a shove, and they grapple, the driver looking to put the officer on the ground.
Alarmed, I turn to yell to Hoskins for an assist. The tall officer has reached the passenger side, his own weapon drawn. It’s a Smith and Wesson pistol and I think, absurdly, that it’s too small a weapon for the size of his hand. The hand comes through the open window, the barrel of the gun moving with too much deliberation and speed toward Hoskins’s head. The officer fires.
27
The force of the bullet slams Hoskins sideways and into my right shoulder, slinging blood across the dashboard and onto me before he slumps forward against his seat belt. The gun is now pointed at my head; my hands reflexively come off the steering wheel, my lips ejecting a wet, gasping sound. I’m mindlessly croaking, “Police…police…I’m police…” I can’t bring myself to look at Hoskins’s face. I know instantly that he’s already dead.
Both my hands are up in the air and I don’t want to take my attention away from the shooter, but my eyes involuntarily jerk to the left, toward the truck. I’m thinking this is a nightmarish mistake, and the other officer has to come running now, his own hands up to signal horrified intervention. But the cop that was standing by the truck, shorter and thicker across the chest than Hoskins’s killer, is now jogging toward my car with his own weapon in hand and pointed in my direction. The driver in overalls slams open the back of his truck, revealing a large, cavernous space within, extracts a wide entry ramp, and angles it to the ground.
The short cop tries to open my door, but it’s locked. He raps loudly on the window and says, “Get out.” The gun comes up to the level of my forehead and, mindful of the gun from the passenger side, I carefully unlock the door and open it. The short cop immediately grabs me by my jacket and jerks me from the driver’s seat.
He disarms me, pulling my gun from its holster and handing it to his partner. All the while I’m reciting, “Wait, wait, I’m Dallas Police…you can’t be doing this…”
He yells at me to shut up and then pushes me, facedown, onto the road. He stands over me, one foot on the back of my neck, and orders, “Put your hands behind you.”
The fucker is short but really strong.
For an instant I freeze. They are not cops, but they know that I am. This has got to be a drug operation, and my only chance for escape from these guys may come in the first few moments of my seeming to be compliant. I’m not certain they’re not going to shoot me in the back of the head anyway.
I slowly begin to put my left hand at the small of my back, leaving my right hand braced against the ground. I turn my head to the side to see that the guy over me has holstered his gun and is reaching for his handcuffs.
They want to take me alive.
The tall cop has quickly gotten into my car and is driving it toward the truck, Hoskins’s body still in the passenger seat. He drives it up the ramp, into the containment area. The truck driver is back behind the steering wheel and starts the engine.
The short cop straddles me, then squats down with his knees on my ass and searches my right pocket. He takes out my work cell and puts it in his jacket. He grabs for my left hand without searching the other pocket, and I realize he doesn’t know I have more than one phone. But as soon as my hands are cuffed, he’ll continue searching my clothes. I make a whimpering sound to distract him, giving him the cue that I’m afraid and cowed, still in shock.
Now.
I roll explosively to my left, using my bracing right hand for extra thrust, throwing him off balance. I roll with his momentum and then strike up and back sharply with my head, butting his nose and forehead. I feel soft cartilage giving under the impact of my skull, and he screams in pain, but the engine of the truck covers the sound.
He’s on his back and I need to get to his gun, but I have to work from a position of strength. I roll away onto my hands and knees, reaching for the weapon the whole while, but his reflexes are too conditioned, and he grabs my wrist and twists. He’s mad and in pain, and if he gets the upper hand again, he may kill me after all.
I manage to grind my left elbow into his neck. Still the bastard hangs on to the gun and he fires off a wild shot. I give him hard, successive elbow strikes, but he jabs out with a fist that glances off my cheekbone. Scrabbling away, I kick out as hard as I can, and my boot connects with his jaw like a hammer. He gives a groan but manages to hold on to the gun, even when he rolls onto his side, momentarily stunned, gasping for breath.
The shot had to have been heard above the engine noise. Starting from a crouching position, I sprint away, adrenaline flooding every cell, toward the fields behind the stand of elm trees. The grass is tall, and there are bushes and pine trees clumped together for cover.
The last house I remember seeing was a quarter of a mile from the T-crossing. My left hand reaches into my pocket to grab at my phone. Glancing back, I see the tall cop has jumped from the truck and is running after me.
The loss of attention causes me to stumble and almost fall. I can’t run and grapple with a phone. I release the phone back into my pocket and bring up both arms, swing them hard, giving momentum to my legs.
Fifty yards and I look back. The tall cop is closing the distance. The bastard is fast. He’s not shooting at me, though, and there’s no weapon drawn. They need me alive.
The ground is uneven, and my boots are not made for sustained running, but I will myself to watch the terrain beneath
my pounding feet, avoiding holes or rocks or roots that will bring me down. If I can gain enough ground, I can throw myself into some green cover or even climb a damn tree, anything that will give me thirty seconds’ grace to put in a call to someone, anyone, before the phone’s taken from me.
My breathing is too shallow from fear, my face slick with sweat that streams into my eyes. I focus on a stand of pine trees with low branches another fifty or so yards away. I know he is coming, but I don’t look back for ten, twenty, thirty yards. I sense the rushing dense heat of him, the exhalation of spent air pressed through pumping, animal flesh.
Then I do hear him, the crunching sound of dry grass behind me being trampled under a relentless piston. I fire off one last obscenity-laden directive to myself to run faster. And I do for another ten yards before he overtakes me, grabs at my hair, and yanks me backward. My neck pops painfully, a flaring spasm in both shoulders, and I’m flung onto my back. I lie stunned, immobilized, the little air I had remaining knocked from my lungs.
He’s on me and I fight, blindly striking out, kicking, gouging, trying to suck in more oxygen, until he punches me once, hard, in the solar plexus. Then he’s behind me, one arm around my throat, squeezing, blocking the air from entering my body. A feeling of slow drowning, a last vengeful thought preceding the dark.
28
The training gym is close and hot, rankly smelly from thousands of hours of cadets learning how to stay alive on the streets, the academy instructors trying to compress and intensify decades of real-life scenarios into a few short weeks of police training.
There are more than a dozen of us in loose sweatpants and T-shirts, twelve males and two females, gathering around the blue mats to begin the morning’s defensive instruction. The instructor, in his dark, formfitting sweats, NYPD insignia prominent on his chest, stands in the center of the mat, arms crossed, waiting for the talking to cease.
Frank Costello is not overly tall, less than six feet, but with biceps the size of most men’s legs and eyes that seem to be everywhere at all times. From Rhode Island, Costello compresses words as though processing them through a wood chipper. Arm becomes “ahm.” Hard becomes “hahd.”