It was a nice Saturday evening out in District Five, the sun low in the sky. Hanson drove over to the newly opened Burger King in District Four without clearing from his last call, hoping a sergeant wouldn’t drive by and spot his car while he waited in line for two Junior Whoppers and two milks, his PAC-set hissing and barking, everyone else in line pretending not to see him. It was a gamble to open a Burger King in District Four, too many holdups and they’d pull it out. Hanson wanted to use it as often as possible before it was shut down.
He’d finished one Junior Whopper with cheese and a milk by the time he crossed High Street back into District Five, where he cleared from the disturbance call. Radio came back right away, sending him Code 2 on an “unwanted son with a gun,” in the area of 82nd and East 14th Street. He tossed the other burger and milk out the window, turned on the overhead lights, and angled down toward East 14th. He was only a few blocks from the location when the dispatcher was interrupted midsentence by the high-low electronic yodel announcing another armed robbery. The channel went silent for a moment, then the dispatcher read out the mostly useless details.
Pioneer Chicken 211, downtown, involving a 187. Two N/Ms, both mid-twenties, approximately five ten, medium build, short afros, and dark clothing. Suspect one with a handgun. Suspect two, sawed-off shotgun. Suspects herded the employees and three customers into the cooler, locked them all in. Both suspects raped a cashier, then shot her. She died en route to ACH. Possible suspect vehicle a light blue over dark blue Lincoln with tinted windows and possible wire wheels. No license plate or further details.
For a moment he saw the ring-bound Thomas Guide open on the seat next to him as a collection of fourteenth-century maps. END OF THE KNOWN WORLD. Every page was blank except for a tiny sea serpent coiling across the parchment.
He pulled the mike off the dashboard, his thumb on the push-to-talk button, waiting for an opening to tell Radio he’d arrived at his location.
AC Transit driver has parked the bus at this time and is watching from the sidewalk. He says the subject is under the influence or possibly 5150…walking up and down the bus, screaming at passenger.
Car calling, say again…Unit calling, your PAC-set is garbled. You’ll have to use the radio in your vehicle…
Fifth and Foothill…
Little gold letters spelled out MOTOROLA across the top of the mike, its perforated once-beige face was rubbed to bare metal by years of use.
Negative, the driver does not know if the subject is a male or female. The subject is brandishing a knife at this time, we understand…I have 3L13 covering…Unit with the car stop, go ahead…
At Fifth and Foothill on a black LTD, John Frank Mary one zero two.
Unit with the car, stop. Repeat your call number only.
People up and down the block were patrolling their yards with baseball bats, frying pans, golf clubs. Inside the house, the complainant was draped in a red muumuu and must have weighed four hundred pounds—a whale with tiny human hands and feet. She reclined enormously on a beige vinyl sofa bed on wheels, propped up on pillows, smoking hungrily. She must have lived on that couch and slept there at night. Hanson saw no way she could be moved.
The house had its own microclimate, humid and rank—a bucket of dirty diapers, food left burning then forgotten on the stove, unwashed dishes used as ashtrays, shoulder-high piles of garbage bags. Children wandered through the kitchen, regarding Hanson with a kind of dull anticipation on their way out the door. The complainant used the children as messengers, to fetch her things and to deliver notes she wrote on a lined notepad with a picture of Michael Jackson on the cover.
She was drunk and had changed her mind about involving the police. “You like Michael?” she asked, holding up the notebook.
Hanson gave her a noncommittal smile and held out his hands, palms up.
“That’s all right. Lotta people don’t like him. He’s not like anybody else.” She dropped the notebook on the floor. “You ever arrest my son? He’s the one got everybody scared out there.”
Hanson asked what her son’s name was.
“You’d know it if you knew him,” she said, dismissing him.
Hanson thanked her and found his way out of the house. It was a big, high-ceilinged place, with people in every room, children and adults who seemed to be just passing through, startled when they saw him, then acting like he wasn’t there.
Outside, across the street, a woman in a tiger-stripe slip was screaming down at a man from her front steps, a pair of silver scissors in her hand, holding them like a dagger. When the man saw Hanson he tried to smile, backed away from the porch, said something—Hanson could read his lips: “No problem here, Officer.”
Walking to his patrol car, Hanson noticed Death, up on the corner. He was wearing a reflective vest and a hard hat, holding a traffic sign that said SLOW on one side and STOP on the other, directing traffic around some repair work. Hanson wished they could take a walk together, talk some, go back to the war where Hanson always knew who he was and was always sure of what he was doing, but Radio sent him in the other direction.
He was stopped at a red light at 82nd and Bancroft singing, “I got sunshine, on a cloudy day…” when a light blue over dark blue Lincoln Continental—the description of the Pioneer Chicken suspect vehicle—crossed the intersection in front of him. Through the tinted windows he saw the shadows of a driver and a passenger, saw them look his way, the Lincoln continuing on down Bancroft, its wire wheels flickering, the yellow-orange streetlights sliding one by one up the long hood, over the windshield, across the roof, down the back window and off the trunk, vanishing into the past at the speed of light.
Relaxed and wide awake, his pupils dilating, he turned through the intersection behind the Lincoln so smoothly, following it so perfectly, that it felt like he’d been preparing for this all his life. The streetlights glowed brighter and warmer, painting the failed and wretched ghetto street with subtle color and crisp detail. Time, he noticed, was unfurling a little more slowly and reliably than it had been.
He lifted the mike off the dashboard to give Radio his location, the license number of the car, and go through the motions of requesting a cover car, which he knew wouldn’t be available, but Radio traffic was so heavy that he wedged the mike back into its holder.
When he closed up on the Lincoln and turned on the overhead lights, it swerved across the centerline, almost hit a parked car, sped up. They hadn’t noticed he was behind them till he turned on the lights. Now, he imagined, they were arguing over what they should do—ignore him and hope he’d disappear, speed off, run him off the road, bail out of the car and run, pull over and kill him, pull over and surrender, pull over and pretend to surrender, then kill him. He bleeped the siren and felt his waist to be sure he didn’t have the seat belt on.
He hit the siren again. The Lincoln cut its lights, continued on for another block, then turned down a driveway and around behind a five-story U-shaped apartment building, where it was hidden from the street. Hanson followed, his blue and red strobes spinning out and back through the courtyard lot like a Tilt-A-Whirl at a ghetto carnival—snatching windows, walls, stairwells, doorways, Dumpsters, out of the dark, flinging them away, bringing them back again. Hanson threw the patrol car into PARK, pulled the shotgun from the dashboard lock, and stepped out into the V of the open patrol car door. If they bailed out and ran in different directions he’d be able to shoot them both. He tipped up the worn old Remington 870 with one hand and rattled it like a blued-steel snake, comfortable when he was holding a shotgun, jacking a buckshot round into the chamber.
The steel clack-clack of the shotgun echoed off the buildings. Hanson’s voice: “In the car. Police officer. Do not move unless I tell you to.”
He watched himself from the other side of the patrol car—that Hanson watching him, the one with the shotgun—switching places, back and forth, out of body in the overhead lights.
“Driver. Turn off the car and drop the keys out the window.” He waited, wondering if they were too stupid or scared to follow instructions. He wished he could just kill them both and be done with it. “Lower your window.”
The electric window, reflecting the lights from the patrol car, slid smoothly into the door. Hanson saw that the driver had both hands on the steering wheel. He was a kid, nineteen or twenty, wearing a top hat.
“Turn off the car. Turn it off.”
The exhaust from the car stopped rippling the spotlighted air.
“Drop the keys out the window.”
He shouldered the shotgun and stepped away from the protection of the patrol car and put the front sight on the driver’s window.
“Do not look at me. Drop the keys out the window.”
Hanson held the steel bead of the front sight steady, just below the driver’s jaw, as if the gun weighed nothing, looking down the length of the blued-steel barrel as the keys glittered down to the pavement.
“If I see a weapon, I’ll kill you both.” His voice shook the dark buildings. “Driver. Open your door from the outside. Keep both hands where I can see ’em. If I can’t see both empty hands, I will shoot you. Passenger. Stay in the car.”
The driver pulled the outside door handle with his left hand, keeping his right hand extended through the window.
“Push the door open with your knees and—don’t look at me—get out of the car.” The driver swung the door open, his top hat falling off, both hands extended as if he was blind. “Behind your head. Lace your fingers. Step sideways away from the car until I tell you to stop.”
He took two sideways steps, and Hanson said, “Stop. Get down on your knees.”
The driver squatted, put one knee down, then the other.
“Passenger. Stay in the car.
“Driver. Take your hands off your head and hold them way out away from you and lay down on your stomach. Your head turned toward the car. Don’t fuck this up.”
Hanson’s finger tightened on the trigger as the driver put one forearm down, but then he lay all the way down on his stomach.
“Spread your arms way out to the side, like Jesus on the cross. Good. Spread your legs. Way apart. Farther.
“Passenger. Open your door and put your hands up where I can see them, above the roof of the car. Don’t look at me. Now step out.”
“Don’t shoot,” the passenger shouted. He was older than the driver, in his thirties, wearing expensive clothes. These weren’t the holdup guys.
“Now. Walk backward.”
“Don’t shoot.”
“Keep walking till I tell you to stop.”
“Don’t shoot.”
“Do what I tell you to do.” Hanson walked him backward, then sidestepped him to the left, had him kneel, then lay down behind the driver. They weren’t the holdup guys, but why didn’t they stop right away? Why did they pull in here?
Sirens wailed in the distance, closing in as Hanson stepped around into the flashing high-low beams of the patrol car, stepping carefully, aiming the shotgun at the two suspects, one eye still on the car. More headlights and overheads flashed and spun in the lot, the yelping of sirens going suddenly silent. The sound of boots on the asphalt. He raised the shotgun as two cops he’d never seen before stepped in with handcuffs, then he pushed on the safety, walked backward to the patrol car, and locked the shotgun inside.
Two special unit narcotics guys walked past him. The one in the leather vest, with his badass Fu Manchu mustache and long hair, said, giving him orders, “We’ll take it from here.”
“You’ll what?”
They ignored him. Uniformed cops were lifting the prisoners up by the cuffs. He didn’t care if they wanted to take charge of the prisoners and do the paperwork—that was fine with him. He’d still get credit for the arrests on his stat sheet. But the guy in the vest had pissed him off.
“What?” Hanson said, crossing in front of the narcs and standing between them and the prisoners. “What are you talking about?”
“We’ll take it from here.”
Suddenly Hanson was unanchored in the urgent rush of all the mindless emergency lights. The arrest had gone so smoothly that maybe he was still waiting to explode. Maybe, after planning but failing to kill the two suspects, because what the detective had said made no sense, he was afraid that he was losing his mind. Whatever the reason, he was in the narc’s face, chest-to-chest, saying, “Why don’t you ‘take it’ and fuck yourself?” This was the fucker he should have a license to kill. Who the fuck did he think he was talking to, and what was he talking about?
Then Sergeant Jackson was there. “Let them take the prisoner,” he said, his voice low, calming, trustworthy, the tone of voice Hanson used to settle disputes without making an arrest. “I’ll explain.”
There had been seven police cars and a fire department ambulance crowded into the lot behind the apartment building with a police helicopter circling overhead. An emergency vehicle traffic jam, pulsing with light, radio loudspeakers barking and squealing, clicking on and off. Yellow plastic tape, printed endlessly with POLICE POLICE POLICE, kept reporters and other citizens away, but people who lived in the apartments watched from above, leaning over wrought-iron railings, drinking and smoking dope, trading rumors. Two lieutenants had come and gone.
Sergeant Jackson was still there with Hanson. Their cars were the last two in the lot, with only their parking lights on. The passenger in the suspect car, Sergeant Jackson told him, was a confidential informant working for narcotics, a paid undercover OPD snitch.
“Foolishness,” Sergeant Jackson said, “but it’s officially above my pay grade. Nonetheless, Officer Hanson, you should have put out your location on the stop. There are people who already think you must have some kind of death wish, the way you take calls by yourself.”
“I…” Hanson began. “Radio was…” He didn’t finish the sentence.
“The good news is that there won’t be much paperwork on this,” Sergeant Jackson told Hanson.
Hanson nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said.
“All right, then. Excellent.” Sergeant Jackson opened the door of his patrol car, about to leave, then turned back to Hanson. “No,” he said, “the good news is that you didn’t kill both of them.”
He smiled at Hanson then and drove off.