“That little thing in there’s got you scared, Hoffman?” he said. “I must goddamn terrify you. Tell you what, I’ll handle the contact and you can take the credit for it. Keep you nice and safe.”
“Just be ready in case I need you,” I said.
Then, raising my own flashlight, I approached the pickup, snapping the beam on and shining it into the cab. I used the butt to tap the window, and Sophie showed me her hands in her lap without moving her head, so I could see the camera was on and recording. I tapped a second time, and Sophie moved her head slightly, as if waking up.
“Police officer,” I said loudly. “Can I see some identification please?”
Then I stepped back and turned to face Morrison, putting the beam from my flashlight directly into his eyes, effectively blinding him. The door, now on my left, opened, and Sophie slid quickly out, holding the camera with both hands, lining up Morrison in the shot.
Morrison had his free hand up, trying to shield his eyes. “The hell — ”
“This is Officer Mark Morrison,” I said for the benefit of the camera.
“Wait a — is that Gault?” Morrison demanded, still trying to free the light from his eyes. “Get your flash out of my eyes, damn it! Is it that little cocktease, is that Gault?”
“He’s about to get the shit kicked out of him,” I added, watching Jen as she came up behind him.
To his credit, Morrison shut up when he heard me say that. Then he started to turn away, and he dropped his hand from where it had been shielding his eyes. He was already half-blind from my flash, and there was no way he saw Jen until it was far too late for him to do anything about it.
“Try holding your breath,” Jen said.
Then she hit him in the face with a shot of pepper spray.
Morrison gagged on a curse, staggered back, flailing in pain. I used my stick and took his right knee, and he dropped forward, managed to land on his hands, and I gave him another one in back to put him down, then dropped my own knees on him and put him in a choke hold. Jen had reached into my car by then, throwing the spot on again, suddenly making every detail in the scene brighter than day. She came back to us, began stripping the gear off Morrison’s belt, going for his cuffs first. She did his wrists, then took his gun and his Taser and his stick, all of it, before running over to his car and dumping it inside.
Morrison shuddered and gagged, and when I released the hold, he collapsed heavily. A fountain of snot was running from his nose, his mouth open wide, dripping its own rush of fluid.
I got my feet under me and watched as Jen put a kick into his ribs, then I backed off to where Sophie was still standing. We traded: I got the camera, and she got my stick.
Sophie just looked at him for a couple of seconds at first. I could see the conflict in her face, see the shifting of her emotions from hesitation and even fear into anger. She was remembering what had happened to her, what could have happened to her. I could see it in her eyes.
“You bastard,” Sophie said.
Then she brought the stick into his side. Not too hard, just enough to make sure he knew what was coming. Morrison choked, squirming, and she hit him on the opposite side, harder. He was still gagging, and he tried to lurch forward, but he couldn’t get far without the help of his hands, and he gave it up when Sophie hit him a third time, harder, high in the back. Then she did it again, and again, and again, working along his side, until she’d reached the small of his back. Morrison was crying out, his inarticulate pleas filled with phlegm.
“You let him hurt me,” Sophie said, and she rammed my stick viciously into his side, and Morrison stopped crying out, for a moment entirely unable to breathe. “You let him hurt me and you laughed while he did it, you son of a bitch.”
Jen had the six-pack for me, and I gave her the camera and took it, then took my stick back from Sophie and replaced it on my belt. Morrison was struggling to regain his breath, trying to get his knees beneath him. I pulled the first bottle, felt it cool and heavy and smooth in my hand, a beer-filled rock that could crack a skull and end a life. Morrison managed to flip himself onto his side, and the spot from my car made the mess on his face shine like a glass mask, and through his tears he saw me, saw what I held, and he sputtered.
“Jesus Christ,” he wheezed. “You can’t do this, you can’t — ”
I threw the bottle, missing his head by six inches or so, and it burst on impact, glass shattering and beer spraying, and Morrison flinched. I took a second bottle, stepping closer.
“You can’t — ”
I threw again, this time harder, again missing him, this time just barely. More glass, more beer, and the scent of it mingled with the pines and the road and the autumn and the bile. Morrison choked back a strangled scream, and it wasn’t enough, and I grabbed two more bottles and threw them at his head back-to-back, still missing, and this time he did scream, closing his eyes and trying to roll away from me. Sophie moved to cut him off, pushing him back with her boot.
“Now who’s on the ground?” I told Morrison, and I threw my second-to-last bottle, letting it shatter beside him with all the others.
He screamed for me to stop, for Jen or Sophie to help him.
I picked up the last bottle, used the church key Jen had stuck in the pack to open it. Then I tilted it over his head and let gravity take half the contents, watching it run out and fall onto his face, washing away his tears and his snot as he spluttered and gagged some more.
Then I let gravity take the bottle itself, and it hit him just above the bridge of his nose, and what was left inside foamed out as it clattered onto the road.
“Bet you wish you had backup,” I told him.
He blinked beer and tears out of his eyes, looking up at me, miserable, full of rage. Then Jen stepped closer, the camera still running, and he seemed to finally see it, and the rage abated in confusion.
“Yeah,” I told him. “All of it recorded for posterity.”
“You’re all crazy,” he croaked. “Fucking crazy.”
“No, you’ve got it all wrong, Morrison,” I said. “It’s not for our posterity, it’s for yours.”
Jen handed the keys she’d taken off him to Sophie, who went around behind and began unfastening his cuffs. Morrison tried tracking her, craning his head, then looked back to Jen, then finally to me. If he hadn’t looked so pathetic then, I probably would have laughed.
“It’s not for us,” I told him. “It’s for you.”
He licked a thin line of mucus from his lips, blinking rapidly. Sophie rose, dropping the keys and the cuffs on the ground in front of him with a splash. He flinched again.
Jen lowered the camera, turning it off. She looked at me and I nodded, so she set it on the ground beside his cuffs and his keys.
“We’re on it,” I told Morrison. “Our names, our badges, all of it. Everything we just did, it’s all there. Everything that just happened to you.”
He forced himself upright, doubled over with a new fit of coughs, then swiped at his eyes and his mouth with a beer-soaked sleeve. The pepper spray still had to be working him something awful, but the beer had probably gone a long way to relieving the pain.
“Hand it over to Internal Affairs,” I told him. “Give it to the commander. Take it downtown and hand-deliver it to the chief, send it through channels. Whatever you want, it’s yours.”
“You think I won’t?” he asked softly, furious.
I looked to Sophie and Jen, then showed him my palms. “I don’t know what you’re going to do, Morrison. You could get yourself cleaned up and go back to District and spin some story about a drunk-and-disorderly call or some other bullshit to explain your sorry state. You might even get away with pretending this never happened. After all, we did a pretty good job of staying away from your face.”
Morrison started hacking again, trying to clear his sinuses. I waited until he was finished to continue.
“Then again, you could drag your sorry ass back to District right now,” I told him. “Y
ou could raise holy hell, try to get the commander out of bed, hand him this camera here in person and tell him he’s just got to watch what’s on it. You could run it to your buddies downtown, you could give it to Internal, you could flip them to us and try to land our badges.”
I paused, wanting him to hear the next part, to make sure he got it and got it clear. Sophie and Jen were each standing with me now, the three of us together, and I realized that my fear had gone. I realized that everything I was saying to him wasn’t just the truth, it was what I believed. If I had to, I’d take the fall, and I knew Sophie and Jen felt the same way.
“I don’t know what you’re going to do, Morrison,” I said finally. “But I do know this: you deliver this camera to anyone in the department come morning, and there will be no one who hasn’t heard about it by lunchtime. And come roll call at third shift, they’ll be making up details of their own, there’ll be patrolmen in the Southwest talking about how you wet yourself, there’ll be bicycle cops riding Central, swapping details about how you begged — begged — for someone to help you.”
The radio on my belt crackled, dispatch asking my disposition. Looking Morrison dead in the eye, I radioed back that the situation had been resolved and that Officer Morrison and I were going 10-6. Dispatch came back with confirmation.
“Bring charges against us,” I said. “Charge us all, you’ve got the evidence. We’re agreed, we’ll all plead guilty, if that’s what it comes to. Each one of us is more than willing to stand up in open court and tell the world what we just did to you.”
Morrison didn’t move, and I thought that maybe he was staring at the camera, but maybe he wasn’t looking at it at all. Maybe he wasn’t hearing me anymore.
Sophie and Jen went back to the pickup, and I returned to my car, climbing in and killing the spot before restarting the engine. The light around Morrison vanished back into the night. He was finally beginning to stir, but he was doing it slowly, and I watched him, because I sure as hell wasn’t going to help. He made it into his vehicle and got it started, and I heard his 10-7 come over the radio, and I called mine in on top of it.
We headed in different directions, he toward the river, me up toward the top of the hills, the direction my fellow officers had gone, tiny Jen and gorgeous Sophie. We’d meet up after I got off shift, feel guilty and giddy as we waited to see if the phone would ring, if some officer we knew would be paying us a visit, asking us to clear up some confusion, to answer some questions.
Or maybe we’d find ourselves waiting for nothing, that Morrison hadn’t dared to breathe a word. Maybe we’d find that we had gotten away with something we never should have done, something we never should have had to do.
Driving up that hill, I didn’t fear the worst.
I knew I was covered.
Rule Number One
By Bev Vincent
She stands out like a cactus blossom in the desert, seated in the roll-call room beyond the eight men in sky-blue shirts and navy-blue pants huddled in the back row like juvenile delinquents in remedial math class. The minute Brett lays eyes on her, he knows she will be his for the evening.
Her attire is simple, understated: a white blouse and blue slacks with white pinstripes. Sensible, flat-soled shoes. Long black hair caresses the shoulders of her blouse, which is open demurely at the neck. In her right hand she grips a pen, which hovers over an open steno pad resting on the desk affixed to her chair. A burlap satchel sits at her feet. She doesn’t look up when he enters.
The room is wide but shallow, containing three meandering rows of simple student desks, the sergeant’s podium, and a TV suspended from the ceiling. Printouts listing suspect information decorate the podium. Behind it, next to the door, American and Texas flags flank an empty table. A poster features the sergeant from Hill Street Blues saying, let’s be careful out there.
It’s nearly three o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, so the television is broadcasting a Texas A&M football game. The Astros play later on, which means Brett’s radio will be filled with chatter every time someone scores.
Two bulletin boards sealed in glass cases cover the wall at the far end of the room. One features mug shots, wanted notices, and BOLO fliers. The other contains approved job postings for officers looking to supplement their income. Most are for night watchmen or nightclub-security positions. Brett has no interest in these — he already works the department maximum forty additional hours.
The comfortable weight of the gear on his utility belt — service revolver, radio, handcuffs, nightstick, and Taser — adds to his swagger. Two colleagues look up from their conversation when he takes the last empty seat in the back row. Phelps raises his eyebrows and tilts his head an inch toward the woman. Brett scrunches his mouth into an appraising pucker and nods. Not bad is the silent message they exchange. He doesn’t waste any time checking her out, though. He’ll have the next eight hours to do that. Guaranteed.
When the sergeant emerges from his office, he mutes the volume on the television but leaves the picture up. He reads a policy-change sheet and advises officers whose body armor is more than five years old that they have three more weeks to turn it in to be replaced. He has an orientation video available for anyone taking the sergeant’s test. After reading the names of officers who need to sign subpoenas before they go on duty, he assigns cars by unit number.
“Hoskins,” he says, “you have a ride-along.”
Which comes as no surprise to Brett. Nine times out of ten, he gets the riders. The only question is why she’s here. Most civilian passengers are either media or members of a mayoral task force. Her attire doesn’t provide any clues, but he appreciates the way her blouse clings to her body. If he had to bet, he’d say media. It doesn’t make much difference. Either way, he has to mind his p’s and q’s, keep the bawdy banter to a minimum, and not bust anyone’s chops unless they deserve it. It also means, however, that he has an excuse to handpick the cushier calls.
The sergeant makes no introductions, merely points Brett in the woman’s direction. She’s already gathering her possessions and heading toward the podium. Her eyes are the color of roasted chestnuts. The long black hair framing her narrow face has been teased into gentle waves. He glances at her left hand — no ring. Her complexion is dark, making Brett wonder if she has Hispanic blood and whether that will be an issue during the shift. Many of the perpetrators he encounters over the next eight hours will be Hispanic.
“Follow me,” he says. “It’s a bit of a hike.”
He leads her along the corridor, down a narrow staircase, outside the central station, across a gravel parking lot, into the garage, and up to the third level, where his ride, 1 Adam 25 E, is parked. The car is where he left it the day before, which probably means no one used it since then. The department is short staffed, so he’s not surprised.
“Hoskins,” he says by way of introduction when they reach the car.
Panting slightly from the stairs and the fast pace he set, she sticks out a hand. “Meredith Knight.”
Her skin is smooth and soft, and he maintains his grip on her hand about two seconds too long. After he releases her, he pulls out a well-worn ignition key, opens the door, and clears the lock on her side. The car is seven years old and has more than a hundred thousand miles on it. He listens for the roof speaker to crackle when he starts the engine. “Some officers like to check all the lights, the siren and stuff. I know everything pretty much works. At least it doesn’t change day to day, especially since the car’s not driven around the clock. Means I don’t have to change the seat, the mirrors, the radio station.”
She starts taking notes immediately, which is a little strange. Reminds him of a high school keener, writing down everything the teacher says.
“How come I never get a ride-along?” Phelps says in a singsong voice on his way to his car. Brett shrugs and grins.
The radio is set loud enough to hear the music without having it drown out the dispatcher or other radio chatter. He boots up the comp
uter, which runs an obsolete operating system; loads the com software; and logs on with dispatch. The crowded quarters, the front seat jammed with computer equipment and other paraphernalia, makes it feel as if they’re unusually close. Her perfume, mild and floral, reaches his nostrils. “Reporter?”
“Writer,” she answers. “I’m doing research for a novel.”
That’s a new one. “Interesting.” With two jobs and an ex-wife, Brett has no time for novels. Of the three, the ex-wife is the most demanding. Still, he relaxes a little knowing that his activities over the next eight hours likely won’t end up in tomorrow’s newspaper or in a report on the mayor’s desk.
“They pretty much just give you paperwork to read over and then say come ride, right?” He knows the routine, but he’s looking for a way to break the ice.
“If I get shot, beaten, or otherwise maimed, it’s my own damned fault,” she says. “At least that’s what the forms I signed say.”
“I’ll do my best to keep that from happening. I’ve never lost a ride-along yet.” He likes her spunkiness, so he answers in detail her questions about the minutia of his routine. He shows her how to use the outdated computer with attached microphone that is his lifeline to central dispatch. “If I’m getting my ass whooped, don’t worry about calling 1 Adam 25 E. Just pick this mike up and say, ‘Hoskins needs help.’” He points at a second microphone. “That one is for yelling at people on the PA. This is the one for saving my ass.”
“Got it.”
The computer pings every time a dispatch message comes through. If he ignores them long enough, a robotic female voice chides him. “Three new messages waiting.” He picks some of the easier call slips to handle first to clear the backlog. Reports of suspicious people that rarely pan out or complaints about illegally parked vehicles that he will ticket and ultimately have towed if they stay there long enough.