She’s strutting now, the dispatcher, down in the windowless radio room in the basement of the Justice Center, tethered to the electricity by a coiled black cord. Assigning one-man cars to complaints and calls for service, responding to traffic stops, record checks, requests for backup—sending the cars out and bringing them back on line, good to go again. The 911 operators handle the phones, process the backed up calls, all the requests, complaints, and accusations, write them in shorthand on punch cards and hand them to her when she passes. Robbery, rape, burglary, battery, domestic violence. Shots fired, missing persons, suspicious persons, DUIs, trespassers, wife beaters, lewd and lascivious acts. Drunks, barking dogs, the insane, screaming, hissing, talking in tongues, passed out, down on the street, dead. It’s always night in the radio room, always late, down there in the basement where the twenty-four-hour clock glows like the moon.
Hanson cleared from the call and angled down toward the freeway. His ankle ached from falling off a chain-link fence, his left hand was bleeding on the steering wheel, and he was two hours into overtime. He pulled over on a quiet street just north of the freeway and shined the flashlight on his hand. Two puncture marks like a snakebite at the base of his thumb. He must have done it when he lost his hold and fell off the fence. He was wiping the blood off onto his sock when he heard a car wreck—an explosion of metal and glass—looked up and out the windshield at a rising cloud of steam glowing silver white in his headlights half a block away.
“5Tac51. I’ve got a collision in the seven hundred block of Hamilton Street. Are there any graveyard shift cars available to take it while I check for an ambulance and stand by?”
Negative, 5Tac51.
“I’ll be at this location, then,” Hanson said.
Maybe it’s not as bad as it sounded, he thought. Then he smiled at himself. Nothing he was going to be able to kiss off on an assignment card and go home.
He turned on his brights and overheads. A cherried-out ’63 Chevy, a Kandy apple red Super Sport with wire wheels, the front end destroyed, floated in the steam. As he watched, the Chevy backed away from the parked Buick it had hit, pulling the Buick’s door off, dropping it in the street, then, trailing debris, thumped past Hanson’s patrol car on flat tires, the radiator fan clattering, fan belt squealing.
“Well, shit,” Hanson said aloud, turning around to follow it, lights and siren on now, adding to the noise. He stayed behind the Chevy at twenty-five miles an hour and gave Radio a description and license number. A DUI arrest might get somebody on graveyard shift to swing by to get his name on the report, and maybe he could kiss the paperwork off on him. A moment later the smashed-in left front fender of the red Chevy peeled the tire off the wheel, and the rim, throwing sparks, pivoted it into two more parked cars. The horn started blaring, lights began coming on all over the neighborhood. A lot of paperwork.
He pulled in behind the Chevy, blocking it from backing up again, his overhead lights flashing, and ran up to the driver’s door, standing just behind it so the driver couldn’t slam it open into him. She looked like she was fifteen. “Get out of the car,” he yelled over the horn. She ignored him, grinding the starter. Steam from the crushed radiator blew on him, a hot fog, stinking of burned rubber, soaking his wool shirt. “Get outta the car.”
“Fuck you,” she said, blood bubbling from her nose, turning the key on/off/on/off.
She was under the influence of more than just the liquor Hanson could smell. She looked back at him, spit blood, her teeth pink, and he saw it in her eyes. Shit, she was dusted.
The grinding starter lurched the Chevy backward. Hanson reared back out of the way as the driver kicked the door open and the ankle he’d twisted gave way. He fell to the street and she ran off into the dark. Hanson limped after her, pain shooting up from his ankle like electricity, his holstered pistol slapping his thigh. He reached to his belt for the PAC-set to call for assistance, then remembered it had stopped working. He’d lose her if he went back to the patrol car to use the car radio.
She wasn’t running very well, and she wasn’t very big, but if he was right about the angel dust he’d have a hard time handcuffing her by himself. In addition to killing pain, it made a person superhumanly strong. It also made them crazy.
Hanson cut her off at the front yard of the corner lot, grabbed her arm, and she pulled it free. He grabbed her other arm and hung on. She clawed his face. She tore his name tag off. When she tried to bite him, Hanson stepped back and jerked her off her feet, which put them both on the ground because Hanson’s ankle gave way again.
“Eeeeee,” she screamed. “Eeeeeee. Help! Eeeeeeee.”
As he got to his feet, she lunged for him, but he threw her back on the ground.
From the screened porch of the corner house, a woman yelled, “Leave her alone. I got a gun and I will shoot you.”
“Ma’am,” Hanson began, as the girl got to her feet. He kicked her legs out from under her.
“Help!” she screamed. “Chinga tu madre! Help meeee!”
The voice from the porch yelled, “I got a shotgun. Go on now. Let that child alone or I’ll shoot.”
“I’m a police officer.”
“Then why you beatin’ up on a little girl like that? You ain’t no policeman. You just a street thug and a rapist.”
The girl spit at him, “Puto,” and got to her knees, then up like a runner in the starting blocks, just as a flashlight beam from the porch hit him in the face. “I will shoot you!” The girl sprinted away.
“Shoot me, then, lady. Go ahead the fuck and shoot everybody,” he yelled back. “And shoot the people whose cars she ran into, why don’t you,” he went on, hobbling after her.
He heard sirens. Red and blue lights began flickering through the tops of the trees. The flashlight beam went out.
Two patrol cars, coming from different directions, had her caught in their headlights. He limped toward them as two cops got out of the cars and grabbed the girl, slammed her to the street, and fought to twist her arms behind her. Hanson stood on the curb and watched as she pulled loose.
They knocked her down again, on her stomach, one of them put one knee on her neck, the other on her upper arm, grabbed a handful of hair and twisted her head, while the other cop dropped a knee in the small of her back, got one wrist handcuffed, then, with the help of the first cop, brought the other arm around and cuffed it too. When she tried to get to her feet, the second cop stuck his nightstick between her cuffed wrists—handle above one wrist, the tip below the other—and twisted her arms till she stayed down. A good job.
“Thanks for the help,” one of them told Hanson.
Hanson laughed. “No,” he said, “I thank you.”
“You’re on overtime, aren’t you?”
“Absolutely.”
“You might as well transport her. Since you’re going in anyway.”
“Of course. You guys probably need to go back to sleep. But who’s gonna do the paperwork on this shit?”
The two other cops looked at each other. They’d been on the street for maybe fifteen years.
“You’re the primary officer.”
“You guys made the arrest.”
“What’s your problem, man?” the other cop asked him. “We’re just here to help you out.”
“It’s been a long night, Officer. Yeah, I’ll transport her. You two gonna help me load her ass into my car?”
“Yeah. Yeah. We can do that.”
They cuffed her legs while she spit and tried to bite them. Hanson brought his car down, and they lifted her by the handcuff chains, ankles and wrists, flopping like a fish, and tossed her in the back of Hanson’s car and slammed the door.
“Don’t forget to put our names into the report. We’d appreciate it, okay? We need the court time. You know, we all gotta cover each other’s asses out here.”
“You bet,” Hanson said.
“Singer and Neal,” the cop said. He was giving Hanson their badge numbers when the girl kicked the side window out of the patrol car with her bare feet. The three of them pulled her out of the car again and used Hanson’s belt to strap both handcuff chains together, hog-tying her and throwing her back in.
“I’m taking her on to jail,” Hanson said. “I don’t want her dying in my patrol car while I’m making sketches of the damage. I’ll put you guys in the report if you’ll write up the damaged vehicles.”
“We’ll do it on a continuation form,” Singer said, “and turn it in at the end of our shift. Both of us used to work traffic. Just put our names in the report.”
“Thank you,” Hanson said. He gave Singer the report number and drove on to the freeway.
Even with the cuffs locked down tight, the angel dust made her strong and pain-resistant enough to pull her left hand out, slamming the Plexiglas shield with the freed handcuff, banging her head against it, screeching at Hanson how her boyfriend’s crew was gonna fuck him up for touching her. “He don’ let nobody touch me but him, motherfucker. They gonna cap you’ skinny white ass, pendejo.”
Once he had pulled into the jail parking area and they’d lowered the clattering steel doors, he sat on a concrete ramp and watched as four jailers fought her out of the car.
He washed his hands and forearms twice, his face and neck, though it was probably too late by then to keep her blood from getting into his own. He limped upstairs to the front office, found a desk with an IBM Selectric typewriter, and began typing like a demon, trying to finish the reports before a civilian clerk showed up for work and wanted his desk back. His blue wool shirt was bloody, and it was torn where the name tag had been ripped off. His pants were muddy and grass stained, and one knee was torn. He’d probably have to replace both of them, shirt and pants, at eighty dollars each. The swollen heel of his thumb was hot and throbbing, and he thought for a moment about getting a tetanus shot, but all he wanted was to get home, drink some tequila, and go to bed. He ignored his aching ankle, the scratches on his cheek and neck that stung with sweat, and kept typing. He always typed better when he was exhausted. He’d had a typewriter just like this one that he’d bought with money he’d won in an essay contest back in graduate school. After a few minutes he was almost enjoying himself, the words taking him away.
An hour later he’d finished—it would have taken him twice as long, three times as long, to write the narratives if he’d done them by hand. He pulled the last form out of the humming IBM, stacked it on top of the pile of finished forms, and sat back in the office chair. All he had left to do was the overtime-worked requisition form.
He pulled one out of his briefcase and looked at it. One-third the size of a piece of typing paper, the top two inches was taken up with boxes printed FOR AUDITORS USE ONLY. The bottom half a row of signature/approval boxes to be signed by the shift sergeant, watch commander, division commander, and bureau commander. That left him a two-by-six-inch box to summarize the calls he’d just finished typing up. There was no way he could have squeezed it in with a pen—black ink only, blue ink voided any OPD form—so it would be legible enough to be approved, and if any of what he wrote was outside the lines of the box, it would be disapproved. If the form was approved it was kept for six years, probably to build a case against someone for excessive claims for overtime—who knew? If it wasn’t approved, again, per the phone-book-thick Manual of Rules, it would be “destroyed.”
The three hours of overtime he’d just put in on top of his ten and a half hour shift was almost enough to pay for a new uniform, which would take him all morning to have tailored, on his own time. Destroyed, he thought. Fuck you. Destroy this!
He rifled through the desk drawers and found a smaller typeface ball for the IBM, locked the machine so that it squeezed the letters closer together, and, single-spacing the sentences in, managed, on his second try, to fit in a very abridged but acceptable version of the calls he was claiming overtime for. They’d probably find a way to disapprove it or lose it, and he needed a supervisor’s key to turn on the Xerox machine.
He heard them before they came through the door, and pulled on a sap glove, but he didn’t look up as Barnes and Durham came laughing into the office.
“Well, look here,” Durham said, standing with his hands on his pistol butt and nightstick. “Must be a new secretary.”
“Did you get promoted?” Barnes said. “This is the job you should have had in the first place. You don’t belong out on the street.”
“You guys are so manly in your leathers, it’s enough to bring out the queer in me,” Hanson said, swishing his right hand. “Where you been, trolling down South of Market?”
Durham slammed his helmet down on a desk and said, “Come on, you little dick, let’s see who’s the faggot. Come on, come on.”
Hanson smiled, tired but happy now, leaning back in his chair.
“Come on, man,” Barnes said, taking Durham by his jacket. “He’s not worth all the paperwork.”
“Bye-bye,” Hanson said.
“The DA’s gonna be calling you about that Anchor Tavern deal with the bikers. It goes to court next week,” Barnes said. “You be there.”
“If I’m there, I won’t be a friendly witness.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” Barnes said, still hanging on to Durham.
“It means that if I testify I’m gonna say it was bullshit, everything but the DUI. I had that Indian arrested when you showed up and started the fight. Maybe they’ll sue you for aggravated assault. I hear that the Angels have a big legal fund.”
Barnes grabbed Durham with both hands. “Come on,” he said, pulling Durham toward the elevators, then, over his shoulder to Hanson, “You’re in deeper shit than you know.”
On the way home Hanson thought about the time he watched Yellow Submarine in Vietnam.