Love is a perky elf dancing a merry little jig and then suddenly he turns on you with a miniature machine-gun.
—Matt Groening
It’s a predawn domestic and I’m backing LD. The caller’s location is in one of the Woodlawn Apartments off Dauphin Island Parkway. Woodlawn is a cluster of half-vacant, ruined, and uninhabitable hulks that have been stripped of all plumbing fixtures, piping, and electrical wiring for their scrap value, currently around three bucks a pound at any of a dozen local scrap yards who never question the origin of perfectly good plumbing and copper cable delivered to their scales daily by hundreds of crack addicts and other petty thieves. The few remaining occupied apartments in Woodlawn, rundown roach-crawling Section 8 federally subsidized hovels, are inhabited almost exclusively by baby-mamas and their babies, which means they are frequented by their alternately robbing, ripping, and raping baby-daddies. Hence, Woodlawn Apartments is visited several times a day by police responding to domestic violence calls, with your occasional running gun battle between feuding baby-daddies over cuckold/cocksman conflicts. Often you get a combination of both types: the genesis of a baby-daddy versus baby-mama drama will have been some kind of gunplay with a would-be suitor who got away, leaving the aggrieved baby-daddy no satisfaction until he takes it out of his cheating baby-mama’s hide.
It was just such a call that LD and I were dispatched to on a cold gray February morning, and we were both worn out from the extra parade duty we’d been pulling due to Mardi Gras. Dispatch tells us while we’re en route that earlier that night police had been called to the same address by the same caller who reported two black males fighting, both of them brandishing firearms, but both males were gone by the time officers arrived. Now seven hours later, at about 5 a.m., the complainant is awakened by breaking glass, to be confronted by her baby-daddy, gun in hand, reaching through the broken window of the kitchen door demanding to be let inside or he’d shoot her and their child. “Both parties still on the scene, shots fired, very disorderly background,” Dispatch cautions. Subject black male Finest Odom, twenty-three years of age, dark “skinded,” approximately 5 foot 7, 150 pounds, wearing a black hoodie, drives an older blue Cutlass Supreme with fancy rims. Caller’s in a bedroom, and subject has not yet made entry.
LD is closer than me and puts himself at the scene when I’m still a few seconds out. It’s cold enough to see your breath in the first light as I roll up to see LD’s idling cruiser parked at the curb, exhaust fumes curling up from his tailpipe. LD advises over the radio that he’s attempting to contact the subject, whom he spotted in the blue Cutlass parked just in front of his own Crown Vic. I put myself 10-23 (at the scene) with Dispatch and stop next to LD’s cruiser just as LD begins yelling and beating on the driver’s side window of the Cutlass. Evidently, Mr. Odom had heard his baby-mama talking on the phone to Dispatch and was trying to dip on us. Unfortunately for Mr. Odom, when he had arrived to terrorize his baby-mama, he had parked his big ole ghetto sled a little too tightly behind a big ole Expedition, and now LD had hemmed him in by pulling up real tight behind him. Parallel parking makes quick getaways a bitch.
Mr. Finest Odom is not about to be defeated by a tight parking spot, however. He reverses his Cutlass hard into the grill of LD’s Crown Vic, shoving it back a foot or so, then shoots forward, crumpling his own grill into the rear bumper of the Expedition in front of him, skidding the heavy SUV forward a few inches. Finest’s escape plan clearly is to simply bumper-car his way to freedom. He pops it into reverse again and jolts LD’s cruiser back another few inches, prompting LD to draw and point his Glock and yell, “Stop fuckin’ up my car man!” which falls on deaf ears with Mr. Odom. Finest cranks his wheels hard to the left but still lacks the space needed to exit the slot he’s in, and gets the right headlight of his beloved Cutlass all up into the Exped’s left taillight. Tires screech again into reverse, a cloud of pungent rubber smoke rises as Finest disengages from the Expedition and rams LD’s Crown Vic back a few more inches, despite LD’s pointed Glock and commands to “Stop! Halt! Freeze, Muhfucka!” Finest was having none of it.
I had started to get out of my car to assist LD but thought better of it; LD wasn’t meeting with much success persuading Finest to un-ass his Cutlass, even with the point-blank threat of lethal force in the face. In fact, it appears now to me that Mr. Odom might have just demo-derbied enough space to squeal away on us this time. LD realizes simultaneously that the gate to the corral has now swung open. In a last-ditch effort to keep the pony in the pen, LD jumps from the side of Finest’s Cutlass to the space directly in front of it, in the hard-won spot just created by Mr. Odom’s beyond-Bondo, body-shop wet dream. I’m thinking, jeez, LD, you gonna stop all that Detroit horsepower with just your “Command Presence”? LD assumes his most fearsome stance, about a pace from the hood ornament of the battered Cutlass, the stance we practice at the firing range: feet planted squarely on the pavement, bent slightly at the knees, leaning a little forward at the waist, weapon gripped with both hands, pushed out at full arm extension directly from the chest, pointed at the center mass of Finest Odom, seated behind the steering wheel. For a long moment they simply glare at each other.
“Stop or I’ll shoot!” LD barks.
Then a bunch of things happen at once: Finest Odom shifts his Cutlass from reverse to drive and stomps it, LD jumps two giant steps backward while maintaining his fierce firing stance, I pop my Crown Vic from park to drive and stomp it, my push bar and grill caving in Odom’s driver door and driving the front right quarter panel of his Cutlass into the hapless Expedition, immobilizing everybody. Despite (or because of?) nearly being mowed down by the Cutlass, LD remains frozen in “ready-fire” position; Finest Odom’s desperate, still-spinning wheels let out a deafening, piercing shriek but get him nowhere, and my own wheels join in the howling chorus, my foot to the floor pushing my cruiser ever tighter into the Cutlass, the Cutlass ever harder into the Expedition, all in a tenuous effort to keep Odom pinned and LD whole.
For another long moment it’s just a ridiculous standoff, with LD pointing and bellowing, acrid rubber smoke billowing from four tires screeching. I’m not sure how long I can keep the Cutlass stopped. With no plan other than to somehow extract Finest from the squealing, shimmying Cutlass before it flattens LD, I jam my shifter into park, stomp on the parking brake, jump out with my gun drawn. There’s no way to pull him out through the driver’s door, which is full of my Crown Vic’s push bar. The only access to him is through his passenger door on the other side. I pick the quickest, most direct route and clamber up onto the hood of my cruiser, then to the roof of the straining Cutlass, and jump down on the passenger side between the Cutlass and the wrecked Expedition. Miraculously, Odom’s passenger door is unlocked; I won’t have to shoot out its window. I jerk it open and lean inside, Glock extended, the barrel little more than a foot from Finest Odom’s right ear.
“Shut it down, shitbag!” I scream over the keening of the tires.
Odom’s eyes dart from me to LD and back to me, but still he stands on the pedal, his hands gripping the wheel, the banshee howl of his tires driving us all insane. Odom is as frozen at the wheel as LD is out in front. With my free hand I reach in to pull the key from his ignition, and a visible electric tremor hits me when I spot a silver .38 lying in Odom’s lap. I snatch the gun and jerk the key all in one strike, then stuff them both into the front of my pants.
An abrupt silence washes over us, over the wreckage, over all of Woodlawn Apartments, in a soothing wave of quietude, giving all three of us permission to exhale.
“Hands up. Both hands off the wheel. Let me see ’em,” I instruct. “Now reach your right hand this way toward me.” Odom, just moments ago a crazed, cornered animal, is calmly compliant now. I snap a cuff onto Odom’s right wrist and, backing up out of the Cutlass, drag him across the front seat with the other cuff as LD climbs over the hood of the Cutlass to join me. I pass the prisoner off to LD to finish the cuffing and pat-down, and slump against the trunk of the Cutlass, holster my Glock, and light a Camel.
The radio crackles, “Three-thirteen?”
“Three-twelve for 313,” I answer.
“Checking on your situation.”
“Subject in custody, so far?”
“So far.”
“Start 1 Sam 3 to our location, along with Traffic Investigators. We have a four-car signal 7 involving two police vehicles. Also, start the Impound wrecker for a Blue Cutlass.”
“Ten-four. Copy, Sam 3?”
I hear the groan in Sarge’s reply, “Ten-four, en route from Precinct,” and look at my watch. The sun has just climbed over the eastern horizon: 0630, end of shift. I survey the wreckage and am filled with dread: hours of paperwork await us.
“I’ll go see if I can find the victim, get her statement,” I tell LD as he inserts Finest Odom into the cage of his ruined Crown Vic.
It may be end of shift, but we’re still a long way from quitting time.
Finest Odom’s mama arrived on the scene even before the Impound wrecker; she had been called by Finest Odom’s baby-mama, who was having second thoughts about having called the police in the first place. The neighbor whose Expedition’s rear end had been smashed, her whole family, and most of her neighbors (now claiming to have witnessed the entire incident) were outraged, demanding the city pay for the Expedition’s damages; Finest’s mama furiously demanded an explanation for her son’s captivity and to know when the city would pay to fix her battered Cutlass. When Sarge informed her that not only would the city not repair her Cutlass, but that the city was seizing it as evidence in an attempted assault on an officer, to say nothing of the original domestic complaint involving menacing with a firearm, the gloves came off. Or rather, the cell cameras came out. “We recordin’ dis. Gettin’us a record a e’rthang y’all do!” “Yeah! We callin’ ’Ternal Affairs raght nah. We gon have all y’all officers brought up on charges!” Additional units had to be called to disperse the crowd. Finest’s mama bonded him out after his mandatory twelve-hour lockup for the domestic complaint—at about the same time LD and I were reporting to roll call for another twelve-hour night shift.
Three months later, there was a bench warrant for Finest Odom for failing to appear on a previous domestic charge involving the same baby-mama. LD received a tip from Odom’s probation officer that despite dipping out on his court date, Odom had been religiously attending the weekly Wednesday night anger management classes that were among the conditions of his probation. “He probably takes those classes a lot more seriously than he does me, or the judge, because they’re the key to baby-mama’s good graces,” the PO observed, speaking as one who had seen it all too often before. When LD had suggested to her that the anger class might provide us an opportunity to pick Odom up on the bench warrant, the PO had enthusiastically supplied him with dates, times, location, and contact information for the instructor.
LD set it up with the instructor. One of us would arrive at the class early, in scruffy plain clothes, and sit in the back of the classroom posing as a newly sentenced domestic violator attending his first anger class. The other would be in uniform, waiting in a blacked-out marked unit behind a building two doors down. When Finest arrived, the inside guy would punch his cell speed-dial to the outside guy, who would pull around and enter the building and the classroom from the front, as the inside guy closed off any attempt by Odom to flee out the backdoor. We’d simply scoop him up and whisk him off to Metro.
We debated who should be the inside guy and who should be the outside guy. We both wanted to have the pleasure of cuffing Finest once again, which would most likely be done by the outside guy. But we worried Finest might recognize the inside guy, turn and run out the front before the outside guy could respond to the speed-dial signal, so LD decided that since “all you white guys look alike,” I would be best suited as the undercover inside guy.
It worked like a charm, except not exactly as planned. I’m a real Luddite when it comes to anything techie, including even the humble cell phone (which we purchase and pay monthly charges on out of our own meager earnings). I carry only the simplest, cheapest twelve-buck Walmart version, having ruined one in a foot chase that ended in a creek, cracked the screen on another when it slipped its holster and I stepped on it while aiding a fellow officer with one resisting arrest, and drowned a third when I accidentally dropped it in a precinct urinal. (I’m not exactly a whiz at multitasking.) I don’t text, I don’t e-mail, I don’t take pictures with my phone. It’s all I can do to place and receive calls, and that’s fine with me.
So when Finest entered the classroom and took a seat two rows in front of me, I reached into the back pocket of my jeans to speed-dial LD but discovered I had somehow already butt-dialed my wife, who was loudly saying, “Hello? Hello?” Finest and several others seated around me turned to see what the disturbance was, and I decided I’d better just improvise. I jumped up with my Glock in one hand and cuffs in the other. Guys dived under their desks. Odom froze, just as he had the last time I’d had a Glock to his ear.
“Finest Odom, I have a warrant for your arrest. Remember me?” He was speechless, paralyzed. “Put these on,” I said, handing him the cuffs. He snapped one on and I snapped the other one to the arm of his classroom desk. The instructor approached to help.
“Just make sure he doesn’t try to run out the door with your desk while I’m trying to call my backup.” As several of my anger classmates recovered their composure they encircled Finest, who remained seated and mute.
It was sweet.
I’ve learned to savor the sweetness when I can, because it’s often short lived. At Finest’s trial several months later, his baby-mama testified that they had since reconciled and she wished to drop the case. It was a joyful thing to see: they positively beamed at one another in court.
And several months after that, I was delighted to learn from other guys on my squad that my patrol buddy LD had received an “Excellent Police Conduct” medal, ribbon, and citation from the chief for his courage, initiative, and professionalism in the two arrests of convicted felon Finest Odom. I guess modesty had kept LD from telling me.