Hanson was working downtown again when he got a call to cover 2L23 on a neighborhood problem up in North Oakland. He pulled over and checked his Thomas Guide by the light of a lopsided full moon to locate the address, near Your Black Muslim Bakery, where calls for service were rare. The OPD allowed the neighborhood to police itself with Black Muslim enforcers. The police brass didn’t like it but followed orders and did their best to pretend they weren’t the city council’s stooges.
When Hanson finally found McClure Street, 2L23’s car was pulled to the curb in front of the address Radio had given, and a new blue-over-blue Cadillac was parked crossways in the middle of the street two houses up the block. Three of its four doors were wide open, the headlights and interior lights were on.
Whoever was working 2L23 that night—the primary officer on the call—didn’t notice Hanson’s arrival. He was just inside the doorway of the complainant’s house, his head down, taking notes, talking to a woman wrapped in an elaborate blue Muslim gown and head scarf.
Hanson rolled closer to the car in the middle of the street.
When he flicked his bright lights on/off and blipped the loudspeaker, a Muslim in a black suit and bow tie, wearing a narrow-brimmed black hat, bolted from behind the open driver’s door, running away down the street. Hanson punched the gas, keeping him in his headlights, closing on him before he sprinted down a tree-lined sidewalk and Hanson hit the curb. He threw the patrol car in PARK—the transmission jolting it to a stop—pulled the keys, kicked the door open, and ran after him in his steel-toed boots.
He had no idea why the Muslim in the hat had bolted from the car, but it didn’t matter. He was a suspect, for something, because he was running. It didn’t matter what it was or if he’d done it or not, because he was guilty of running. Fucker, he thought, his lungs already aching, working inside the hot cinched-down Kevlar vest. The suspect was running from him, not from the OPD, or from some drug law or subsection of the California Penal Code.
In spite of his equipment slapping and pulling his pants down, his drinking, poor diet, and chronic lack of sleep, not many suspects ever outran him. The few that had were teenagers in basketball shoes, sprinting into one of the projects where they knew every hole in the chain-link fences, all the shortcuts, crawl spaces, bad dogs, clotheslines, ditches, and the houses where someone would pull them inside and turn off the lights. If someone ran from a cop, when you caught him, especially if he tried to resist the handcuffs, especially if it meant you had to get your uniform dry-cleaned from rolling in the dirt with him, most cops, Hanson included, would probably slam his face into the dirt or asphalt, repeatedly, while telling him, out of breath, “Don’t. Ever run. From the police.”
The suspect was more than half a block ahead of Hanson, but Hanson was gaining on him, and every time the suspect glanced back it cost him an instant in momentum and morale. Hanson kept his breathing even.
The streetlights overhead threw their shadows, Hanson’s and the suspect’s, onto the sidewalk, where the shadows lengthened, shortened, faded into the next patch of light, from streetlight to streetlight. The suspect’s narrow-brimmed black hat lifted off his head, hit the ground, and rolled on its brim until it toppled over the curb onto the street. He glanced back, hesitated, made a decision, slid and skidded to a stop, spun around, and began running at Hanson, who dropped his shoulder as they collided, the suspect going over him, his knee slamming Hanson’s head back, both of them going down.
The suspect started to get up, and Hanson, still on his back, willing himself to stay conscious, threw his arm back, grabbed the suspect’s pant leg, and pulled him back, facedown. Hanson crawled up his back, pulling himself hand over hand, while the suspect struggled and got on all fours beneath him. Hanson took a handful of hair and pulled his head back, gripped his throat and focused what was left of his strength into digging his thumb and fingers around the ball of cartilage, his esophagus, till he saw two more cops running toward them, their gold hat badges glinting in the streetlights. Then unconsciousness took him like a leopard dropping from a tree.
He woke up three hours later, strapped to a gurney, hot and sick.
“Take it easy,” a voice said.
“You take it easy.”
“What’s your name?”
Hanson opened his eyes and pulled himself up against the straps to demand, “What’s your name,” but the pain took his breath away. He’d have vomited, but he hadn’t eaten anything for a day and a half. He gently put his head back down and closed his eyes again.
“Can you tell me your name?”
Hanson slowed his breathing, apologized to the pain for disrespecting it, and waited politely for the next question.
“Do you know who you are?”
“Yes.” His head boomed, and he added, “Hanson. 7374P.”
The doctor told him he’d tried to fight his way out of the ambulance.
“I’m sorry.”
If they unstrapped him would he act right now?
“Yes, sir.”
Someone unbuckled the restraints.
Did he have someone at home who could wake him up, check on him every couple of hours?
“No.”
Did he have an alarm clock he could set to wake himself up every two hours?
“What for?” he asked, annoyed, and the pain narrowed its eyes at him. “Why?” he asked, softly.
He had a concussion and if he didn’t wake up every couple of hours, just to be sure he was okay, he might sleep himself into a coma and never wake up.
“Fine,” he said. “Sure.” He wasn’t going to set a fucking alarm clock.
Hanson is sleeping.
He’s been asleep for fifteen hours. The sodium vapor streetlight, up at the corner of Jean Street and Santa Clara, has constructed a circuit board on the window shade. It glows and fades, cycles on and off, flickers, the polarity reversing itself sixty times a second. He sees the electricity through red webs of capillaries in his eyelids, hears it crackling off the window shade, filling the room till it’s a roar, and now he’s strapped into one of those tiny old space capsules, like the one he saw at the Smithsonian before the war. It hadn’t been designed to hold a human, but they’d wedged him into a slanted seat to test him, to see if his heart and lungs, his brain, the pockets and coils of internal organs, could survive whatever is out there.
He is not afraid of dying, but he is alone and far away, lost now for a long time in a wrong life. Belted and buckled into the rivet-studded capsule, he feels the heat building. Sweat stings his eyes, his ears ache and pop. The capsule shudders, picks up speed, pushes him deeper into endless sleep as the walls begin to glow cherry red. He feels his face distorting. He can barely breathe. He can’t breathe. The heat shield is boiling away in clots of fiery ceramic slag and magma and black honeycomb.
Suddenly the capsule lurches and rocks beneath him, slowing as the drogue parachute deploys, rocking the capsule, and he’s weightless, the pressure on his chest lifting. The capsule hisses into the ocean, bounces, bobs side to side in the waves, and wakes Hanson up in his bed in Oakland, the window shade snapping open to blue sky and sunlight. He lies there sweating, alive. The mattress bounces beneath him again, and the black rabbit hits the floor and hops away.