Chapter Eleven

Stats

Hanson’s hangover was all but gone and the breeze off the bay smelled like the open sea. The first day of May, another month gone, no reason he couldn’t make it through his eighteen-month probation. He remembered that his mom was the Queen of the May in her high school. He’d just keep marching.

He’d cleared from his first call of the day—attempted sodomy, 245 Knife, that’s how Radio put it out—in a halfway house, resulting from an argument over whether Jesus was actually the Son of God or only a prophet. Both victims were also suspects, the alleged knife threat having been made against the alleged attempted sodomist. After Hanson managed to separate and calm them down, both seemed okay, except for being drunk and moderately psychotic.

It was almost the end of his monthly report period and he needed three more felony arrests and at least two misdemeanors to keep up with the rest of the squad on his arrest quota, to meet his stats. He could have arrested both of them for felonies, and he considered it. Even though the DA would never charge them, the two arrests would count toward his stats—two down and one to go. But processing them, the transportation and paperwork, would have taken two hours, so he wrote it up on an assignment card. Problem solved upon departure. Hanson / 7374P. Hanson tried to reduce most calls to assignment cards.

They’d promised to stay away from each other for the night, each of them alone in his own bleak room, and they both waved goodbye when he drove off. He raised his hand in response and caught himself hoping they’d be okay. What was he doing? They were drunk and psychotic black men in Oakland. They’d never be okay. They were fucked and doomed and beyond help.

He’d better come up with a few more arrests in the next couple of nights or Lieutenant Garber would have a reminder and an excuse to fuck with him. One of Fernandez’s girlfriends, who worked up in Records, had told him that the lieutenant had them route all of Hanson’s paperwork through his office. Working all this time out in Districts Four and Five, just a blip on the radar, he’d hoped the lieutenant had begun to forget he was there. He’d never seen anyone above the rank of sergeant out there, and not many of those. Except for shootings, ADWs, and quite a few armed robberies, it was mostly just domestic disputes, neighborhood disputes, property disputes, trespassing, threats and simple assaults, plus various 647s. So mostly he was a social worker. People in East Oakland only called the police after they’d threatened each other to a stalemate and it was either call the police or settle it with guns or knives or tire irons. Hanson could talk to people, calm them down, asking, suggesting, persuading, telling them what they should do, and not arresting them unless he had to. Which cut down on his paperwork but hurt his stats. Some nights, though, near the end of the report period, like now, he did his best to go by the book, do things the OPD way and solve problems by putting people in jail. He might feel bad about it when he got home at dawn, but he told himself that if it wasn’t him out there doing it, he’d be replaced by someone who treated people a lot worse. And it was only for another—less than eight months. Then he’d be gone to a better department, where he could do some good once in a while. It was all a means to an end, and he shouldn’t beat himself up.

Just up the street, in front of a falling-down Victorian house, a shirtless black male, early thirties, buffed-out prison build, was swinging a severed head by the hair. He’d begun slamming it against a tree by the time Hanson took his foot off the gas, the head breaking apart—nose, ears, then the jaw sloughing off. Hanson pumped the brake, turned in toward the curb, and, seeing that it wasn’t a head but a dead potted plant, dried stalks and a root ball, put his foot back on the gas and straightened the steering wheel, wondering where he could pop a few felonies between Radio calls. He glanced in the rearview mirror at the guy, standing out in the street now, still gripping what was left of the dead plant and glaring at the patrol car, his eyes saying, What the fuck you looking at, motherfucker?

He needed some movers too, moving violations he could write some traffic tickets on. He’d find some movers, but if he didn’t fill his arrest quota every month, he’d look like a mediocre cop, what they called a slug, and if you looked like a slug, you were a slug.

So what? That shouldn’t bother him, his reputation with these fuckers, but it did. Day in and day out on a PD, reputation was everything. Who the other cops thought you were, before long, was who you began to worry you were. Once you began to think you were a slug cop and started losing your confidence, you couldn’t handle the job and then you became what they thought you were. He missed having a partner just to talk to sometimes, but he was getting used to it.

There had been a lot of cops who didn’t like him back in Portland, but his reputation there had been solid. He’d been a real hot dog cop out at North, the toughest precinct—ballsy and outrageous. He might have been weird, but he kicked in doors and was the first one through. He might have been a smart ass, a tree hugger, talked like a commie, but he didn’t take any shit. They all thought he was a little crazier than they were, but that didn’t take away from him being crazy brave.

But he wasn’t brave, or even crazy, he just wasn’t afraid, only angry sometimes. He was supposed to have died over there in the war. He worried sometimes that he might fuck up, get somebody else killed, do something careless and look stupid when he died. He didn’t want that, and, of course, he hoped it wouldn’t hurt too much or take too long when it happened. It was that simple, and he kept it a secret. Not a secret really—only something he knew he could never explain.

If he had a secret, it was his mean streak. He’d assumed it was something he was born with, but in the army and over there in that war he realized it wasn’t just a character trait but more like a talent. If you practiced, you got better and better at it. He’d learned that if you’re mean and don’t care if you live or die, nobody messes with you. But he kept it under control now and had for a long time. He thought sometimes that, even under control, it looked out of his eyes at people, and when they saw that look, that’s why they did what he asked them to do. Like a bad dog, it was still loyal, still protective, even though he kept it chained up. He’d had a partner in Portland for four years, until the partner got killed and Hanson chased down and executed the killer. Dana, his partner, had been a respected fourteen-year veteran of the ghetto known as “The Bear of the Avenue,” fearless, almost a force of nature, who was a witness to Hanson on the job. The two of them had patrolled the same beat every night and worked with cops in two-man cars in adjacent beats who also saw Hanson at work. Witnesses and word-of-mouth was how you got your reputation in Portland.

In Oakland a reputation was established with paperwork. Crime reports, arrest reports, property reports, witness statements, additional information reports, supplemental reports. A good cop had good stats, he made a lot of arrests that were recorded and filed. A good cop in Oakland usually had more than his share of citizen complaints, sometimes a lot more. Because he made more arrests, he was going to get more complaints, of course, but if you were a cop who used arrests as the first and primary way to deal with people out there, if you didn’t try to talk first, and listen, you probably were going to get a lot of citizen complaints. The cops pronounced the word “citizen” exactly the way they spoke the word “asshole.”

So many arrests were made, driven by the arrest quota, that only about one in ten complaints was ever charged by the DA, which was all the system could handle. Then it could be months, maybe a year before the case was looked at by a detective, and by then the suspect, witnesses, or victims might be in jail themselves—“Today’s victim is tomorrow’s suspect”—or dead, and the DA would be happy to toss the case out to get it off his workload.

The murder clearance rate was based on arrests—more stats—not on suspects found guilty. Guilty findings were mostly the result of confessions made after twenty-four or thirty-six hours of nonstop questioning. The confessions were recorded by detectives who didn’t record the interrogations that led up to them. So sometimes, after two or three or four years in prison, the person who confessed was released when it came to light that he had been at work, or at someone’s house or even in jail at the time of the crime, that there were videos or recordings or witnesses to prove that—and that the suspect had told this to the cops interrogating him until he finally confessed in order to get some sleep and avoid a death sentence they’d said he’d receive if he didn’t confess.

The Department maintained the arrest quota like the army had kept a body count in Vietnam. It was the only way the Department could prove they were on the job when the crime rate kept going up every year. But the courts were so backed up with all the arrests that only cases virtually impossible to lose went to trial. Most of those arrested knew this, so they didn’t plea bargain and were released to become stats another day.

Working a one-man car in East Oakland, Hanson rarely saw another police car all night. No one saw him at work except citizens, always strangers because Hanson worked a different beat every night like all the OPD cops. Every citizen contact with the police—if only a gesture, a glance or a half-heard comment—involved strangers who expected the worst of each other. Every single contact was potentially lethal.

It was early evening when Hanson backed into a row of parked cars where he could watch the Pioneer Chicken. The aluminum and glass building was spotlighted like a Salvation Army cathedral, outlined in flickering neon, steam rising like a cheap miracle from the kitchen in back. The massive Pioneer Chicken sign, ablaze with light, rotated and tilted through the dark sky like a ghetto space station—a cartoon covered-wagon, its neon wheels twitching red, red, red, while a pudgy white chef held aloft a cooked chicken the size of a motorcycle.

They’d had five or six takeover robberies in the past couple of months—the whole chain, Pioneer Chicken franchises all over town—and they had beefed up the lighting and hired minimum wage security guards who refused to work after dark.

On the other side of the street from where Hanson was parked, down at the intersection, a black man in his fifties, his left hand clenched in a fist, stood waiting for the light to change from WAIT to WALK. A heroin addict Hanson had first spotted back in January when he was working this beat. A few weeks before, he’d stopped him and written his name, address, and DOB in his notebook, like a mojo curse, keeping him in reserve for times he was low on arrests. He was usually on the street this time of evening, always alone and always wearing the same brown sport coat and slacks. Heroin was how he got through the days and nights, a way to get to sleep and a reason to wake up, only a misdemeanor but an easy one to write up.

As a trained police officer, Hanson could recognize the six signs of opiate addiction, so he had probable cause to stop him, search him for weapons, and inspect him for needle tracks, which were sufficient evidence that he was in violation of statute 11550 of the California Health and Safety Code: use of a controlled substance. The Narcotics Influence Report form was easy to fill out—not too many boxes to check off and, at the bottom, simple line drawings of a right and a left arm where the arresting officer could just sketch in the needle marks observed on a suspect.

Hanson got out of the patrol car and called, “Hey, Jonah.”

Jonah looked up with a forced smile, his eyes deciding whether or not to run. He knew he was guilty of something but wasn’t sure what it was. He held the smile, reviewing the past few days for a clue. The red WAIT sign was replaced by a green WALK sign.

“Come ’ere,” Hanson said, and Jonah’s smile began to fade. Too late to run, and where would he run to? He’d been to San Francisco a few times and down to LA once when he was in high school, but other than that, he’d spent his entire life in East Oakland.

Hanson gestured for him to walk over to the patrol car, and Jonah did, trying to put a little spring in his step and perk up his smile.

“What is it, Officer?” he said, still hoping against a lifetime of being stopped by police that he wouldn’t be arrested.

“Come on.”

“I was just going to get me some of that chicken,” he said, gesturing with his almost-bald head toward Pioneer Chicken, then opening his fist to show Hanson the two dollar bills and change he had.

“I’m sure hungry,” he went on, managing a smile.

“Roll up your sleeve.”

“What now?”

“Roll it up.”

“Sir. Officer, I was just gonna get my supper and go home.”

“Roll it up.”

He rolled the sleeve up and, his eyes on the revolving Pioneer Chicken sign, straightened his arm out to Hanson, his scarred, pocked, festering ruined arm.

“You carrying any weapons, Jonah?”

“No, sir.”

“Anything in your pockets that—”

“No, sir.”

“That are gonna cut me or poke me.”

“No, sir. Sorry…”

“That’s okay,” Hanson said politely, before he could stop himself. “Step on over to the car.” No fucking around here, no careless empathy, strictly business. Handcuffing somebody was where people got hurt. The suspect’s last chance to run, to fight, to try and take your gun. Once those cuffs were on, though, it was a done deal.

“Lean over the hood and put your hands behind your back.” A few people were watching from the Pioneer Chicken parking lot and Hanson glared at them, angry that Jonah was being humiliated. “Spread those legs out a little more,” he told Jonah, kicking the run-down heels of Jonah’s shoes with the toe of his steel-toed boot.

Once he had the handcuffs on, Jonah didn’t say another word. He did what Hanson told him, without complaint, as if Hanson was nothing more than a gear or a lever in a familiar, relentless piece of machinery. Neither one spoke on the way to jail, but Hanson listened to Jonah’s breathing behind the wire cage and considered what Jonah’s evening would have been if he hadn’t been arrested for 11550 H&S. Not much. A couple pieces of fried chicken, a glass of fortified wine maybe, and some heroin to soften the hard edges of his failed life. Then sleep.

Now, though, he’d spend the night, probably standing up, with a dozen drunks and sociopaths and bullies in a filthy holding cell where, before morning, he’d begin to go through withdrawal from the heroin. Then they’d chain him up to a ring bolt in the jail bus and take him out to Santa Rita, where he’d probably spend ninety days.

When he got out he’d have to scrounge up some money, find a place he could stay while he looked for a place to live, hope his drug connection wasn’t in jail, and find a new one if he was. Get back to normal, essentially. He’d done it plenty of times before. No big deal. He probably wasn’t even that pissed off about it. Just part of life.

  

Hanson got so drunk after work, passed out by 9 a.m., that he had to call in sick the next day, the phone shaking in his hand, the hangover was so bad. He used a couple of the bindles of cocaine he’d collected from the back of the patrol car when he didn’t see any reason to write up and charge whoever had dumped them there, snorted them a little at a time while taking a long hot bath, listening to the water pipes gurgle in the walls of the old house.

He did his best not to think about Jonah, going through withdrawal out in Santa Rita so Hanson could add one more misdemeanor arrest to his stats. To satisfy a sergeant whose name he couldn’t remember, an arrogant little-man lieutenant dedicated to finding typos in report forms, and to gain the respect of other patrolmen he mostly despised.

He wondered if he was getting used to that kind of thing and if he’d start doing worse and not be ashamed of himself. He ran through the usual arguments: If he didn’t do it, someone—more of an asshole than he was becoming—would. It was just a means to an end, so he could do some good on another department. He only had to do it for seven months now. Plus a couple of days. He was not a quitter. Fuckin’ A. Nobody could call him a quitter. It’s not like he believed in the stupid laws he was supposed to enforce…And who gives a shit anyway? It’s only a job, a good-paying job in a bad economy, and what else would he do? He was too old to start wearing a tie and taking orders from some moron citizen he could kill with his bare hands without breaking a sweat. Fuck yeah. He needed to start cutting himself a little slack once in a while.

  

Hanson was locked in the OPD jail sally port. The deputy had been about to buzz him out when he had to run back and help another deputy with the prisoner Hanson had brought in. The prisoner had threatened Hanson all the way to jail, slamming his forehead against the Plexiglas cage, yelling and spitting that he was going to find out where Hanson lived and the next time Hanson saw him, motherfucker, would be the last time because he’d have his shotgun with him.

Whenever he paused to catch his breath, Hanson would tell him, never taking his eyes off the road, in a calm, reasonable voice, that he was sorry the prisoner felt that way and that he really shouldn’t slam his head into the Plexiglas because he might injure himself.

As soon as Hanson transferred him into jail custody and was buzzed back through the inner door of the steel mesh sally port, a deputy had called the prisoner a “shit bird,” and the prisoner went berserk. Hanson couldn’t see what was happening, but from the grunts and thuds, he imagined the deputies were struggling to get an arm around his throat to choke him out. The prisoners back there screamed at the deputies and urged the prisoner to keep fighting, though some of them were laughing.

Hanson smiled. He’d thought that the prisoner was just about primed and that the deputies might set him off.

The choke hold was illegal in most cities now. Once in a while, very rarely, a prisoner would die after it was used on him. His esophagus would swell up, he wouldn’t be able to breathe, and unless someone did a tracheotomy on him, he’d die. Since the hold was used most often on black males—blacks making up a disproportionate number of arrestees—civil rights groups had managed to officially ban the hold. Mace didn’t work on somebody pissed off or fucked up enough to fight the police, and usually you were too close to use a nightstick—the guy already had his hands on you. So if the prisoner was big and had decided to fight, often the only realistic alternative to the choke hold these days was to shoot him before he took your gun away and shot you with it. The civil rights ban on the choke hold had gotten a lot of suspects shot. A billboard just across the Berkeley border had recently been put up. A VOTE FOR THE CHOKE HOLD IS A VOTE FOR THE KU KLUX KLAN.

The sally port was a long hallway of steel mesh with an electrically locking door at each end. To enter the jail, Hanson had to put his revolver in a little locker and put the key in his pocket, and the deputy would buzz him into the outer door. He’d push that door closed, locking it again, walk the length of the sally port, and the deputy would then buzz him through the inner door. Only one door could be open at a time. It kept prisoners from slipping past an arresting officer or deputy and running out of the jail.

To his left was a holding tank for prisoners who hadn’t yet been formally booked. As the struggle with Hanson’s prisoner continued, he watched the people in the holding tank.

Two Mexicans in their late teens or early twenties. One was shirtless, and his chest, arms, and back were ridged with scores of red inch-long scars. They were from years of knife fights where the opponents held the blade so that only a couple of inches were exposed, and they’d slash with it, leaving shallow cuts that, Hanson decided, the Mexican had kept from healing by pulling the sides apart for a day or two so they’d be more dramatic. Not unlike Prussian dueling scars from a hundred years ago. This kid had been in a lot of knife fights.

The other Mexican kid, who seemed to be in charge, wore a gray striped train engineer’s shirt with a very well-drafted pen-and-ink drawing on the back of a Chicano wearing a headband, a drooping bandito mustache, and mirror sunglasses, holding a sawed-off shotgun, the muzzles pointing directly at you, outsized and huge in perspective. Also in the tank were a drunk Indian who sat brooding in the corner where no one bothered him, a very drunk black guy in his late thirties who kept falling down, and a second black guy who was less drunk and arguing with the shirtless Mexican, who kept calling him his punk.

“You gonna be my punk. Soon as they turn off the lights you gonna suck my dick.”

“I ain’t your punk.”

“You gonna be tonight, ese.”

The Mexican in the shirt told the scarred one to shut the fuck up.

Someone else deep in the jail began yelling, “Help me. Help me.”

“Shut up!” the Mexican in the shirt yelled back. “All of you shut up!”

The deputy came back, blood on his uniform. “Fucker pissed his pants and we made him wipe it up with that fuckin’ Hawaiian shirt.” He looked up at a TV security monitor. “Hang on a second. I’ve gotta let her in,” and he buzzed in a matron with a woman prisoner. An attractive black woman in her mid-twenties dressed like Little Bo Peep. As if she had come from a costume party. She wore silver eye shadow and red rouge on her cheeks. Her sky-blue dress flared out and up because of layers of petticoats she wore beneath it. She was wearing a corsage of red carnations and carrying a papier-mâché shepherd’s staff wrapped with silver ribbon.

“You gonna suck my dick tonight.”

“Shut up.”

The matron asked Hanson to take the staff so she could escort Bo Peep upstairs to the women’s jail. Hanson made eye contact through the silver eye shadow, and Bo Peep handed him the staff, curtsied in her petticoats, then, rising, said, “Girded with righteousness, I stand before the throne.” Then she turned to the matron and followed her through a side door as the deputy buzzed it open, leaving Hanson with the silver-ribboned papier-mâché staff.

The Mexican in the shotgun shirt was smiling at him.

“Do you believe in the Devil?” he asked Hanson. “Do you? When the Devil comes I will laugh. I will laugh when he comes.”

The others in the holding cell were watching Hanson. “What if we,” he said, indicating the departed Bo Peep with a tilt of his staff, “were the last people on earth?”

“Then we would kill you,” the Mexican said, stepping closer to the bars. “You think your badge makes you bad,” he said to Hanson. “And your gun.”

“And my staff,” Hanson said, holding it before him.

“You ready to go?” the deputy said.

“Yeah. I’m ready.”

The deputy buzzed the lock open, and Hanson pushed through the door with the staff in his hand.

“When the Devil comes, I will laugh. I will laugh.”

Hanson propped the staff against the gun lockers, got his pistol out, checked to see if it was loaded like he did every time he re-holstered it, and walked toward the next door.

“When the Devil comes…”

Hanson pushed through the next door into the jail garage, considering the Devil.

  

Hanson was out in District Four, the patrol car backed up to the wall of a warehouse, glad it was almost time to head in so he could get drunk. The next two days were his weekend. He’d been seeing spider webs floating past streetlights since it had gotten dark—at least that’s what they looked like, some seasonal phenomenon, he thought. As he was finishing a crime report, an old beater pickup rattled out of an alley, stopped at the street, drove across it, then continued on down the alley on the other side. The headlights were on, but it had no taillights. It was 3 a.m.

Hanson put down the report form, turned off the writing light and followed the truck down the alley another block with his lights off, giving Radio his location and the license number of the truck. At the next street he flipped on the overhead lights and the high-low headlights, the darkness opening and closing on the stopped truck, the driver placing both hands on the steering wheel.

He walked to the truck holding his flashlight at arm’s length away from himself so that anyone who might shoot at him would shoot at the flashlight. He doubted that it made any difference. The only place people learned to shoot was by watching movies—it was all mostly luck, good or bad—and anyway, most shootings took place close enough to have been stabbings. There wasn’t a lot of marksmanship involved.

He checked the bed of the truck as he walked past it. A flat spare tire, tow chain, a six-can case of empty oil cans, scraps of lumber, and a couple dozen empty beer cans.

Tall, pollution-mutant shrubbery brushed his shoulder and cheek with gray leaves that stunk of carbon monoxide, urine, and rancid exhaust from the Granny Goose potato chip plant twenty blocks away. The driver still had both hands on the wheel, and Hanson tapped on the roof with the flashlight.

“Sir…” he said, leaning back away from the door, alert and weary at the same time.

The driver of the truck was a white guy with dirty shoulder-length blond hair and bad teeth, wearing ragged jeans and a filthy I WANT MY MTV T-shirt. When he smiled Hanson knew he was an ex-con. It was in his eyes, that abused dog look, shiny with fear even as he pretended he was glad to see you. “Good evening, Officer,” he said. “How are you this evening?”

“Hi, sir,” Hanson said without enthusiasm. He hoped the dumb motherfucker didn’t have any outstanding warrants. It was almost time to go home, and he didn’t want to go into overtime taking him to jail. “Where you headed?”

“I’ll tell you the truth, Officer, I’m on my way home,” he said, “from my girlfriend’s house.” Hanson nodded at the lie. “June. She lives back there on Harvey Court.” Sociopath jailhouse bullshit, and it just depressed Hanson. “I’ll tell you, Officer…June’s a great gal, you know? Officer?”

“Uh-huh,” Hanson grunted. He lit up the inside of the cab with his flashlight, checking the floor, under the seat and dashboard, watching the driver’s hands. The truck cab smelled like stale cigarette smoke and vomit, like the backseat of a police car.

“Could I see your driver’s license, please.” Radio came back and said that the subject did not have any wants or warrants but that he was currently on parole for 459C. The truck wasn’t stolen.

It took him a while to find his driver’s license, checking the glove box, his pockets, above the sun visor, a wallet stuffed with scraps of paper and old business cards, he finally managed to find it stuck behind the door armrest. “Here it is,” he said, handing the limp, torn license to Hanson. “Have no idea why I put it there.” He looked a lot younger in the photo on the license—more than younger, he looked okay, like he must have looked before he’d gone to prison.

“Mr. O’Donald,” Hanson said, reading his name from the license. “This license expired three years ago.” Everybody in Oakland was an ex-con, it seemed like some nights, or they soon would be.

“Is it that old one? The other one must be at home. That’s why I couldn’t find it.”

Hanson pulled out his citation book and began writing.

“Officer, I’m almost home. I live over off High Street. I know I’m out pretty late, but my girl and I had a long talk. About the future, you know? I’d sure appreciate it if you could give me a break on this.” His voice now had an edge of fear in it, and Hanson stepped back just a bit. “My parole officer…He’s gonna be pissed.”

“I have to write you up on this, sir. I’ve got no choice,” Hanson said. But he did have a choice. He could just let the guy go. But why should he? The guy was scum.

“Officer, please. Couldn’t you overlook it, give me a break this one time?”

“Can’t do it, sir,” Hanson said, writing the citation by the light of his flashlight, the red and blue patrol car lights sweeping relentlessly overhead, raw, raw, raw, alternating fans of color like carnival lights over the bleak little drama. “And both your taillights are out. I’m not even going to ask for the registration.”

Hanson was way behind on traffic citations. He handed the citation through the window and asked him to sign it.

“Sixty-three dollars?” the driver said, reading the fine schedule, his eyes flashing blue, red, blue, red. “I don’t have sixty-three dollars, Officer. I’m fucked if you write me up.”

“You want to sign it or step out of the vehicle,” Hanson said.

He signed it and handed it back to Hanson. “Can I go now?”

“Here’s your copy,” Hanson said, tearing it off and handing it to him, ready to kick his ass if he came out of the truck at him. But he only looked at Hanson, beaten but not surprised, a whipped dog. He stuffed the ticket in the neck of his T-shirt, started the truck, turned down the street.

Hanson watched the truck drive away, then got back into the patrol car, turned off the lights, and sat in the dark, his ears chirping like a plague of crickets. He felt like an asshole, even though, he thought, he hadn’t done anything wrong. Hell, he’d let him skate on the registration. The white puke would have killed him if he’d had the balls and thought he could get away with it. And brag about it to his jailhouse buddies.

But he was an asshole, he thought. Didn’t matter, just another asshole cop. Pretty soon he’d fit right in, one of the guys finally. If he’d start arresting everybody he could, pile up citations and kiss enough ass, he might make sergeant someday, or get on a special drug squad with the special assholes.

The little prick had been driving the alleys because he didn’t want to get pulled over with no operator’s license and God knows what else. He was probably out past his curfew, somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be. Maybe he’d been “associating with known criminals.” Who else would he associate with? Churchgoers and family men? Other losers maybe, guys with no heart left, who took their minimum wage checks, worked for their sullen weekend drunks.

His parole officer would be pissed. Probably violate him back to the joint. But, hell, he was doomed to go back to the joint anyway. Eventually. If Hanson didn’t do it somebody else would. Anyway, fuck it. Time to go in for the night. He had two days off. He cleared from the traffic stop and told Radio he was on his way in.

He didn’t know if he could make his eighteen months.

Once he got up to freeway speed, he fed the torn pieces of the citation out the window to the wind, watching them in the rearview mirror as they flickered pink in his taillights and vanished.