Once or twice a week Hanson ran the blocks through Piedmont, an island of affluence with its own city government, built on a hilly plateau surrounded by the poverty and despair of Oakland. The streets were deserted, their huge houses, built after the San Francisco earthquake, looked empty, and Hanson imagined that if he walked into one of the houses he’d find partially eaten breakfasts still warm on tables and counters, the inhabitants vanished, never to be seen. The only people he saw were Mexican gardeners, the mailman sometimes, and an occasional patrol car from the Piedmont PD. The gardeners mostly pretended not to see him.
Jogging the blocks at random, he admired the houses, wide porches with Doric columns, bigger-than-life stone lions, solid oak front doors, faceted stained-glass windows, bay windows where the cats who sat behind the beveled plate glass followed him with their eyes. Hanson got to know the cats, pointing at them and shouting “Hey, buddy” as he ran past.
The Piedmont police were well-paid security guards, hired to keep outsiders out, but they were real cops, guys who’d done their time on the streets of Oakland and San Francisco, others from LA, Seattle, and back East, who wanted to live far from where they’d worked before, so they’d never run into people they’d arrested. They’d put in their years of street combat, and now they just had to be polite and friendly, charming colorful characters in their interactions with the citizens of Piedmont but also discreet when they kicked some outsider’s ass if he was too stupid to leave when he was asked to.
The citizens of Piedmont wanted their town safe, but most were also good liberals, supporters of the ACLU, believers in human and civil rights, and they didn’t want to see the cops thumping burglars, carjackers, and potential home invaders who’d been casing the streets, or have their children witness that kind of unpleasantness.
He turned the corner onto Nova Drive and saw a burglar up ahead who hadn’t noticed him yet. Hanson slowed to a walk well behind him. A skinny junkie in his mid-twenties. Black jeans, the cuffs frayed where they dragged the street, black tennis shoes, and a faded olive-drab army fatigue shirt with dark stripes on the arms where a buck sergeant’s stripes had been torn off. Dirty shoulder-length red hair and a half-ass reddish beard.
He was looking. Staying on the sidewalk but studying the houses he passed, the few parked cars, porches, mailboxes, checking out garage doors. Maybe something left out in the yard he could steal. Was anybody home, how young or old were they, what about alarms, did they have a dog? Hanson jogged up on him, quietly, close enough to put hands on him before he spun around.
“What’s up, homeboy. You live around here?” Hanson said.
“Who the fuck are you,” he croaked.
Hanson was wearing a sweatshirt with the arms torn off and a pair of cut-off Levi’s. He laughed, delighted. “Look at me, homeboy,” he whispered, his mean streak wide awake now. “Look at me, Sarge,” he said, looking into his watery blue eyes. The junkie was going to need some more heroin by late afternoon, before it got dark. “You don’t belong here. You’re not allowed here. Head downhill, back to Oakland, where you belong,” nodding his head at the way he’d come.
“I’m just taking a walk, man,” he said, trying to keep his voice from squeaking. “It’s a free country.”
“No, it isn’t. They just say it is.”
The kid tried to say something, but he stuttered.
“We’ve met before, haven’t we? Somewhere off Fruitvale one night. Hey. Didn’t we?”
“Aw, shit, man. I dunno.”
“Go home, Sarge. The war’s over.”
He stood there a moment, as if he’d forgotten who he was, then turned and walked away.
“Hey, dildo,” Hanson said, stopping him with his voice. “If I see you here again, I’m gonna kick your ass, then have the cops arrest you for assaulting me. And the screwdriver in your pocket, that’s a deadly weapon. Assault with a deadly weapon, Sarge. Plus whatever outstanding warrants I know you’ve got. That’s how I see your future up here. Okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. Bye-bye.”
He walked away without looking back, doing that punk prison strut, tossing his long hair every few steps.
A free country, Hanson thought. Nothing free about it. It wasn’t even a country anymore. If it ever had been. It was a corporation, and at his age he’d been lucky to get hired as a professional asshole by the OPD.
Clouds and a chilly breeze were pushing in from the ocean. It was going to be a cold, wet night. That kid still had a few hours to steal something, sell it, and score some heroin before dark. Or spend the night curled up behind a Dumpster, dope sick in the rain. He was doomed anyway, he told himself, running again, taking a left uphill, pushing it a little more. He’d been born doomed.
Half an hour later, sweating, half lost in Piedmont somewhere, he was walking with his hands on his hips, blowing, when he noticed the patrol car coming up behind him. He smiled. It was Knox, the Piedmont cop he’d gotten to know. He pulled to the curb alongside Hanson. “That runnin’s gonna kill you, Hanson. Drop dead with a heart attack.”
“Keeps me mean. Burns away my empathy. Makes me more cop-like.”
“You need to put on some weight, Hanson, working in District Five. After dark.”
Knox had gone to Vietnam early, been there and back before Hanson had even finished Special Forces training.
“Hey,” Hanson said, “I been doing your job for you this morning,” telling him about the burglar with red hair.
Knox rummaged through a shoe-box file of mug shots, pulled one out, and showed it to Hanson.
“That’s him,” Hanson said.
Knox nodded, thanked him, and tapped the mug shot back into its place in the shoe box.
“Hanson, you do not look like you belong here in the pleasant world of Piedmont. One of these days you’ll fuck with some new guy on our Department who doesn’t know you, and I’ll have to bail you out of jail.”
“Can I put my hands down now?”
“Just don’t make any furtive movements.”
Hanson laughed.
“Knock ’em down, kick ’em around. Tell me, Hanson,” Knox said, “is it still scary out there after dark, down in the flatlands with Tyrone. I remember it used to be pretty scary after the sun went down.”
“I fear nothing,” Hanson said.
Knox had grown up in Boston, gotten drafted, and when he got back from Vietnam, took a job with the San Francisco PD and worked there for twelve years before taking a job with the Piedmont PD. He didn’t talk about the war much, but he’d been in some shit, Hanson could tell.
“Hanson, you got some kind of death wish. You’re too old to be doin’ that shit.”
“Not me,” Hanson said. “I can’t be killed.”
Knox smiled at him, shook his head.
“Hanson,” he began, put the patrol car in DRIVE, then looked back at him, “you be careful.”
Hanson brought his heels together and gave him a crisp salute. It made him feel good to salute Knox. That’s what a salute was for, to acknowledge your bond with people you respected—at least that’s what it was supposed to be.