When he cleared for calls, Radio sent him as a cover car to the Black & White Liquor Store at 27th and Fruitvale. By the time he got there, more cars had been dispatched, one of them coming Code 3 up MacArthur, red and blue lights flaring through the darkening sky. He pulled partway up onto the curb, got out, locked the car, and then had to shoulder his way through the growing crowd, keeping his momentum, elbow tight against his holstered pistol, through the glass door and inside—the eye of the storm—hot, humid, the floor slippery with blood and alcohol, shards of broken bottles refracting the light. Outside, beyond the tinted windows, red and blue emergency lights strobed the yelling, fist-pumping crowd into fast slow motion.
Sergeant Jackson pulled into the lot and got out of his car, stiff-arming a Rasta man with dreadlocks out of his way, the Rasta man falling into the crowd, where they beat him to the pavement for bumping into them. Sergeant Jackson pushed past a fat teenage boy who was pumping both fists into the air, drove an elbow into his chest, dropping him to his knees, and just kept striding through the howling chaos to the front of the store where he turned and surveyed the crowd, taking charge of the other officers out front. As far as Hanson could tell, Sergeant Jackson only came out on the street to take over some situation that was going to shit or when he was in the mood to fuck with people—suspects, citizens, or other cops.
Inside the liquor store the light was bright and without shadow, chain-hung fluorescent fixtures humming overhead. Convex mirrors mounted at the end of each aisle distorted the scene from every perspective. The oscillating fan at the back of the store sucked up the stink of alcohol, blood, and gun smoke, dispersed it, then sucked it up again.
The failed and deceased holdup man seemed to float in an inch-deep pool of blood and alcohol, fresh blood still seeping from what remained of his face. He’d come through the door, the clerk told them, with a knife in his hand, “acting crazy.” The clerk had pulled a .44 Special Bulldog snub-nose pistol from beneath the cash register—just going to point it at the man, he said, let the man see he was armed, you understand—but it went off accidentally beneath the counter. The 240-grain hollow-nose slug tore through the plywood countertop, mushrooming to twice its original size, before ripping through the suspect’s neck from below, severing his carotid artery, all but severing his tongue on its way up and through the roof of his mouth and out his nose before lodging in the ceiling. He ran up and down the aisles, blood spraying from his neck and face, stumbling into the shelves and pyramid liquor displays until he fell.
“Just like a chicken with its head cut off,” the clerk said.
One of the cops, the second so far, remarked in a John Wayne drawl on the folly of taking a knife to a gunfight.
“He won’t be eating any more corn on the cob,” a cop named Shannon said, looking down at him, one foot on either side of his head. The body suddenly arched, belched gore onto Shannon’s boot and trouser leg and he jumped back into a display of Smirnoff vodka that had, until then, been undisturbed. “Well, shit,” Shannon said, the display collapsing around him, its twenty or thirty bottles of vodka exploding, one after another, onto the floor, just as the windows began to shudder—music—a song from some popular movie or TV series, relentless, louder and faster, from cars jammed and trapped in the parking lot, their radios tuned to the same station.
“I wanna do it, do it, do it, do it, do it with you
You make me crazy…”
An EMS siren, way down East 14th, honked and warbled and brayed, getting louder, coming their way fast, the chained dogs for blocks around picking it up and howling along.
The crowd was growing, getting angry, one kid yelling at a Hispanic cop Hanson had never seen before. “Are you telling me I can’t stand here on the sidewalk? Is that what you’re telling me? I can’t stand on a sidewalk? Is that what you’re telling me?”
The cop had his nightstick out, holding it upside down, its length hidden behind his cocked forearm.
“This is a public fuckin’ sidewalk, an’ you’re tellin’ me—”
“I’m telling you to shut the fuck up, motherfucker, an’ I’m tellin’ you to get the fuck off my fuckin’ sidewalk,” the cop snarled, pivoting, snapping the stick out, slamming the kid expertly in the chest with it and knocking him on his back between two cars.
“I wanna do it, do it, I wanna do it with you
Let’s go crazy…”
More police cars—too many—were pulling up, blocking the civilian cars in, doors slamming as the cops got out with nightsticks, shoving people out of their way, looking for a little stick time tonight. Time to go, Hanson thought, before somebody gets shot. A good two-man car—just a pair of cops who worked this neighborhood every night and knew the people—could have handled this, he thought, walking across the store, a slurry of alcohol and broken glass crunching beneath his boots.
A Kandy apple green Monte Carlo lowrider drove in from the street, over the curb, over the foot-high concrete parking lot borders, to the very front of the store, humping up and down on its hydraulic shocks, and Sergeant Jackson began slamming the car’s hood with his Kel-Lite. The driver got out, ready to fight, and Sergeant Jackson pulled something from the back of his pistol belt that looked like a blue plastic camera. He’d been issued one of the first Tasers a month before. Hanson only realized what it was when Sergeant Jackson shot a pair of Taser darts through the front of the kid’s silk shirt, a tracery of blue electricity throwing him against the open car door, slamming it shut. He slid to the asphalt beside the car, bewildered, then put one hand on the asphalt to push himself back up. Sergeant Jackson shouted down at him, “Have some more juice,” turning the current back on.
Hanson worked his way through the crowd back to his patrol car. The OPD helicopter thundered overhead, and after it passed, one of the big liquor store windows shattered. Every cop in Oakland would be here soon, he thought, maneuvering his way through double-parked cars. Calls for service must already be backing up. It would be a busy night. If he hurried, Radio would keep him 908 at the liquor store long enough to drive over to District Three and get a couple of Junior Whoppers. It would be his only chance for something to eat tonight. He thought he saw that kid Weegee maneuvering his bike through double-parked cars and pedestrians but lost sight of him in the crowd.
Across the street a hunchback black man, a dwarf, his stunted legs bowed, seemed to be studying Hanson as he opened the door to his patrol car, but his smeared Coke-bottle-thick eyeglasses flashed red and blue, mirroring the emergency lights, hiding his eyes. He wore two wristwatches outside the right cuff of his buttoned-up long-sleeve shirt. In his left hand he held a quart bottle of Olde English 800 malt liquor. He watched till Hanson got into his patrol car and pulled away. Then he looked back at the angry crowd and began laughing, raised his deformed arms above his head, hopping from foot to foot, dancing as the piss-dark beer foamed out of the bottle, until the first gunshot snapped in the liquor store parking lot.
Dawn was just barely coloring the clouds in the east by the time Hanson finished his shift. “Rosy fingered dawn,” he recited aloud, “child of morning.” He checked the side mirror, managed to start the Travelall, and pulled away from the Justice Center, driving the deserted downtown streets past barred storefronts, stopping for red lights at empty intersections. He took Grand Avenue, turned onto Lakeshore, parked the Travelall and got out. Lake Merritt was gray and two-dimensional, a layer of fog hanging over the water.
He pulled a pair of handcuffs out of his back pocket and, eyes still on the lake, began ratcheting the cuffs, one, then the other, open and closed. Bits of dried blood, black and dark purple, flaked off and fluttered away like gnats. The clicking steel teeth were loud in the silence, so he closed them and put them in his back pocket. He’d have to use a toothbrush to clean the blood off with Simichrome paste. Putting his hands on people every night, most of them bleeding or drunk or dope sick, it was a miracle he hadn’t gotten VD or hepatitis or who knew what else was out there. Like that new thing going around lately. Nobody knew what it was, but it seemed to be killing junkies and queers mostly. If he died from that, the OPD would claim he was both.
A horse-drawn tourist carriage turned onto the street, the slow clop, clop of hooves on the asphalt. A white horse in brass-studded black harness and blinders, taking her time. The driver, impeccable in a tuxedo and top hat, stopped next to the Travelall. Behind him, the lake began to glow as the sun rose.
“Late night, Officer?”
Hanson nodded. “Just going home to bed.”
“Champagne and me, we’re headed for the barn too,” the driver said. “Comes out of the dark like magic, doesn’t it?” The lake flickered silver now through the fog. He looked at Hanson’s name tag. “Let me introduce myself, Officer Hanson. My name’s Michael Townsend Landon. Everyone calls me Mickey, though.”
They watched the lake color up.
“Best time of the day, eh, Champagne?”
Hearing her name, the white horse shouldered into the harness, the big spoked wheels moving forward, then back. Hanson put his palm on her shoulder, and she turned her head to look at him, her eyes dark behind the blinders.
“My big brother is in law enforcement, up in Lone Pine,” Mickey said.
Hanson said. “A deputy?”
“Oh, no. He’s the high sheriff himself. Inyo County. Has been for a long time now. Just about runs the place. He doesn’t approve of what he calls my ‘lifestyle,’ says it probably costs him votes each time he comes up for reelection, but he always gets reelected. There’s been Landons in Inyo County since the 1880s. My great-great-grandfather came from Indiana. He headed out for the Sierras in 1860, mined for gold in Bodie. Didn’t fight in the Civil War.”
“Mine fought for the Confederacy,” Hanson said, “and all his brothers and cousins. Most of ’em got killed.”
“My brother’s looked after me since we were kids,” Mickey said. “All the family I’ve got left now. I tell him everything,” he went on, for a moment almost as if he was talking to himself, “and he listens now. He’s a Republican too. But he’s still my big brother,” he said, straightening his collar.
“Look at that,” he said. “The lake sneaked up on us, right there, and it’s all agleam now. We’d better be on our way,” he said, reaching down to shake hands, wearing white gloves.
“It’s a real pleasure to meet you,” Hanson said, taking his hand.
“Lovely.”
Hanson said, “Champagne,” touching her flank.
Mickey clucked to the horse, twitched the reins with his fingers, and drove on, Hanson watching them roll to a stop at the corner, the iron rims of the head-high wheels throwing sparks. They turned left, Mickey raising a gloved hand as they rolled out of sight.
Hanson looked back at the lake, gleaming now, a line of white pelicans, gliding only inches above it, their wingtips skimming the water—awkward-looking birds on land but graceful in the air—before they crash-landed, the way they always do, looking for fish. Somebody that summer had been trapping them, cutting their big bills off with a hacksaw, then setting them free to starve to death.