Resist not evil: whosoever shall smite thy cheek, turn to him the other.
—Matthew 5:39
For it is written, Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.
—Romans 12:19
Later that evening and over the days and weeks that follow, I learn from television and newspaper stories, written police reports, digital surveillance footage, and the firsthand, eyewitness accounts of the officers and detectives involved, that twenty-year-old Lawrence Wallace Jr. walked into a west Mobile Dollar General store on the morning of Friday, February 3, at 1113 hours. He was about as far away as you can get (without leaving the city limits) from the sad and crumbling subsidized rental houses and boarded-up commercial strips of the lower Parkway, where I encountered him a little less than five hours later. It’s not a stretch to say that the North Schillinger Road Dollar store and its prosperous retail neighbors, as well as the comfortable middle-class subdivisions surrounding them, are a world apart from Dauphin Island Parkway south of the I-10 overpass.
Lawrence Wallace drove to the Dollar store that morning in his silver Toyota Camry. He entered the store wearing a black hooded jacket and blue pants. He walked around the store a few minutes, gathering seemingly random items, then approached the checkout counter and placed them (charcoal, lighter fluid, a longneck Bic lighter for barbecue grilling, and several knit caps) on the counter. As cashier Kayla Cunningham began ringing them up, Wallace exited the store, explaining he had to go get his money from the car.
When he returned moments later, he ordered the cashier to open her register and give him all the money. When Kayla Cunningham advised him politely that she couldn’t do that, he began removing the articles Kayla had rung up for him from the plastic bag she’d put them in and demanded to speak to the store manager. Then he began squirting the lighter fluid all over the charcoal, the knit caps, and the counter.
Despite the old complaint about cops never being around when you need one, sometimes we are. Off-duty Mobile police officer Charles Wilson, shopping in the store at the time, had already noted Wallace with suspicion, even before he witnessed the confrontation at the checkout counter.
“He was walking around the store acting strangely, as if he was gonna commit some type of criminal act,” Wilson told me. “You know what I’m talkin’ about. You been on the job awhile. Sometimes we can just sense it with people, their vibe: something ain’t right.”
When the lighter fluid started to flow, Charlie Wilson ran out to his car for his gun.
Cashier Kayla Cunningham turned around and tapped her store manager on the shoulder. Tobias Smith was working the register next to her. “We have a problem here, Toby,” she said.
“I turn around to see a guy squirting lighter fluid all over the place, clicking his Bic with his other hand,” Smith said. “He says to me, ‘Give me everything in the cash drawers and the safe, or I’monna burn this bitch down.’ Then he walks around Kayla’s counter over to mine and stands right next to me. I thought he was gonna squirt me and set me on fire, but instead he squirts the cardboard display of potato chips next to my register and lights it.”
Charlie Wilson returned to the store just in time. He pointed his Glock at Lawrence Wallace Jr. and said, “Mobile PD. Get on the floor,” according to his written account in the Incident/Offense Report.
“You can tell me the truth, Charlie,” I said when he recounted the episode to me later. “I mean, how often do we get a chance like that, to hit a robbery in progress, catch the guy right in the act. You were psyched, I know you. What you really said, in your best Shaft voice, was ‘Git onna ground, now, muhfucka!’”
Charlie laughed. “Well, I mighta used some colorful language. And yeah, I was pumped.”
Charlie’s a fifteen-year veteran, a motorcycle cop now. I used to work with him in First Precinct patrol years ago. He’s a handsome six feet, 200 pounds, solid, dark skinned with blazing white teeth, and a no-nonsense demeanor about him, although he’s quick to smile and joke around. He’s really a gentle soul; I’ve always liked and admired him. But he can summon a fearsome command presence in an instant, and I can picture his eyes flashing fiercely with his weapon drawn on Wallace, the potato chips ablaze behind him, Charlie not knowing if Wallace’s got a gun or not, and a terrified Tobias Smith and Kayla Cunningham within reach as potential hostages. Charlie was counting on his command presence—his stern countenance, the authority of his voice—to do the trick, or this could all go south in a hurry. It was Charlie’s once-in-a-career Dirty Harry moment. Fortunately, his turned out better than mine. But Charlie’s moment wasn’t much like the movies, either.
If he’d been in uniform, it probably would’ve worked. Especially if he’d been wearing those shimmering black leather knee-high motorcycle boots he’d normally have had on. Those damn boots alone mean business.
(And they mean other things, too, if you believe John Balzer, who rides a PD Harley with Traffic now, too. He calls them his “fuck me” boots. “Women can’t resist a man in these boots,” Balzer swears, grinning. “Even when he looks like me.”)
If Charlie’d been in uniform, if he’d had his radio on his belt and the microphone clipped to his shoulder, and Wallace could’ve heard the chatter of backup units being dispatched to the Dollar store on Schillinger, if he’d heard “robbery in progress, officer holding one at gunpoint,” chances are Lawrence Wallace Jr. would have complied.
But Charlie was in his civilian clothes. He was off duty. Despite Charlie’s intimidating size, his confidence, his fierce demeanor, and the authority of his deep voice and his .40-caliber semiautomatic Glock leveled directly at Lawrence Wallace Jr.’s center mass from a can’t-miss distance of three strides, Lawrence decided to make a run for it.
Actually, backup was already on its way. Well, not “backup,” exactly, but police were already en route to the Dollar store to respond to a robbery in progress. They were just expecting the gun toter to be the bad guy, not some weird little guy with lighter fluid and a lit Bic. Unknown to everyone at the time, an employee at a nearby service station had observed Charlie run out of the Dollar store to his car, grab his gun, and run back into the store. The alert citizen at Raceway Discount Gas called 911 and reported, “A black guy with a gun’s robbing the Dollar store! I just saw him run into the store waving a gun! It’s happening right now!” The good Samaritan’s racial profiling aside, his call did the trick: the cavalry was coming, though Charlie—and Wallace and everyone else in the Dollar store—didn’t know it.
“Sometimes, profiling works to our advantage, eh brah?” I said.
He laughed. “Yes it does. No doubt it does. And this ain’t the only time it’s worked for me, either, or probably for you, know what I’m sayin’?”
Wallace bolted to the rear of the store, entered store manager Smith’s office, and attempted to close the office door behind him. But Charlie was right on his heels, his Glock stuffed into his waistband, and snatched Wallace back out of the office.
In the movies, Charlie would have just dispatched the bad guy with a single clean shot between the eyes before he could take a half step toward the back of the store, and it would’ve been ruled a righteous shoot by Internal Affairs because they’d have found a .38 in the bad guy’s pocket. In real life, even though Wallace had already set the store ablaze (arguably placing people in danger), Charlie would’ve been in trouble for using lethal force at this point.
“A brief struggle ensued, which ended when I was able to control the subject with a series of body punches,” according to Charlie’s written account for the Incident/Offense Report. When I read this, I shuddered at the risk Charlie took by attempting to take a robber into custody—especially one who’s actively resisting arrest—with his weapon just stuck in his pants, unsecured. What if the robber had made a quick, lucky grab for it? When Charlie told me how it really was, the hair on the back of my neck stood up.
“It was a real knockdown, drag-out, man. Messy. I mean, like one a those old cowboy movies where there’s a fight in the saloon, dog. I had a holda him by his jacket, y’know? And he kept tryin’ to wriggle out of it like they do. I was slingin’ him by that jacket all over the store, we were knockin’ down display racks, makin’ a helluva mess. And this old white guy, a customer in the store, y’know, he jumps in, tryin’ to help me. We were back in the shoe section, and this old man’s whackin’ the dude in the head with a shoe.”
According to the witness statement written by fifty-one-year-old white guy Cornelius Jenkins (yeah, just fifty-one—really, Charlie?—“old”?), “I had cancer on my nose about six weeks ago, but I noticed a fight broke out and I helped the guard”—meaning Charlie—“subdue the thief and hold him down until Police arrived.” We need more good citizens like Corny Jenkins, willing to risk life and limb and the cancer bandage on his nose to take a stand for justice.
Without the uniform, we’re not Police, even if we have a gun and announce “Mobile PD.” In Cornelius Jenkins’s eyes, Charlie was a “guard.” But at least Mr. Jenkins didn’t mistake Charlie for the bad guy.
Cornelius Jenkins continues, “I removed his wallet from his back pocket, and he kept trying to put his hand in his left pocket and I did not know if he was armed or not.”
I asked Charlie if Lawrence Wallace seemed high, or crazy. “I mean, what was he thinking? Like, ‘I bet he’s just bluffing with that gun, he won’t really shoot me’ or ‘I can outrun this guy,’ or ‘I can take him, he doesn’t look that tough.’ He had to be high, or crazy, or really, really stupid.”
Charlie shook his head. “If it’s any of those, I guess it’d hafta be stupid, ’cause he didn’t really seem crazy or high. But he didn’t seem that stupid, either. I don’t know. Probably just young. He was just inexperienced, naïve, y’know? Playactin’ the badass, like he’s seen ’em do on TV. He obviously had no experience in robbery: no plan, no weapon, no mask or partners. He wud’n no real criminal, he was just playin’ one on TV. Lot of ’em are like that, y’know? Till shit gets real.”
For Lawrence Wallace Jr., however, shit had not yet gotten real, if his televised perp walk is any indication. He was still playacting the badass gangsta two hours later, when he was walked out the backdoor of headquarters by Officer Steven Green before a phalanx of TV news cameras and loaded unceremoniously into the cage for transport to Metro, on the very real charges of Robbery First and Arson First degree. For most people facing charges of that magnitude, on their way to Metro after two hours in police headquarters cuffed to a table in a cramped interrogation room with a robbery lieutenant, four robbery detectives, and an arson investigator, shit’s gotten plenty real.
But not for Lawrence Wallace Jr. He strutted, sneered, and trash-talked all the way to Patrolman Green’s cage, even pulling his cuffed hands around from behind his back to throw gang signs. “Y’all ain’t seen the last a me,” he declared with a snarl, playing to the cameras. “I ain’t near done in da two-five-one,” he said, referring to Mobile’s telephone prefix. “Y’all gon’ remember my name, y’hear me?” He smiled maliciously. “Fuck da Poe-lice! I ain’t done in da two-five-one, y’all!”
According to the reports, Wallace was fully compliant, even polite, if somewhat unfocused at headquarters. “He was cracking jokes with everybody the whole time, even the secretaries we walked past,” one of the Robbery detectives later told me. “Like this was his fifteen minutes of fame.” He signed the Miranda warning and waiver and talked freely, fully confessing to his actions at the Dollar store. The interview and his confession to detectives were videotaped. Store surveillance video was also secured and viewed, which confirmed the accounts by Charlie Wilson and the others.
Wallace claimed to the robbery detectives that he had been forced to do the robbery by three unknown black males who had driven him to the Dollar store in a black Navigator and were waiting for him in the parking lot until, he theorized, they must have left when they saw police arrive. He had no explanation for the presence of his own silver Toyota in the parking lot but would not recant his “forced-to-do-it-by-three-bad-niggas-in-a-Navigator” story.
Officer Green, visible in the periphery of the television camera shots, climbed into the front seat of his cruiser after Wallace had his fifteen seconds of swaggering and transported his prisoner to Metro. Green, thirty-six and the father of two, had been a police officer for seventeen months. He had been one of several officers responding to the Dollar store after the 911 call, but another more seasoned officer, a sergeant with the tactical response team, had actually taken Wallace into custody. Green had transported Wallace from the Dollar store to headquarters. There Green had waited through Wallace’s two-hour interrogation by the robbery lieutenant, four robbery detectives, and the fire department’s arson guy.
At Metro, Green pulled into the sally port, which is essentially a cinder-block garage attached to Metro intake and booking, with large overhead garage-type doors on both sides of it.
You pull up outside and push a button to an intercom. “Control” is what you hear.
“MPD, one male prisoner” is what you say, what Green must’ve said, and Control pushes a button raising the overhead door and says, “Ten-four. Secure your weapon.”
You drive into the sally port and the overhead door closes behind you. It’s big enough to hold four cruisers, two in each lane. When Green pulled in with Wallace in his cage, there was another Crown Vic already there, the unmarked unit of a County Probation and Parole officer who had parked in the inside lane, all the way forward to the second overhead door, the one for exit. The PO had already taken his parole violator into intake for processing. Green pulled his cruiser up next to the PO’s as the overhead entry door came down behind him. The intake area is to the left of the sally-port parking lanes, behind a heavy bulletproof door with thick bulletproof glass that is locked and unlocked remotely with a loud buzz.
Green got out, popped his trunk, and secured his sidearm there, as he’d been reminded to do by Control over the intercom before entering the sally port. No weapons are allowed inside Metro, or any facility for incarceration, to preclude the possibility that a corrections officer or outside law enforcement officer could be overpowered and his gun taken from him by a prisoner, resulting in hostage taking, murder, mayhem, maybe even escape.
There are a few lockboxes for securing weapons by the intake door, but I’ve never seen anybody use them. Most of us prefer to secure our weapons in our cruisers. Those who drive caged units will sometimes just leave their weapons in the forward, uncaged half of their cars, locking the car behind them, unlike Green who put his weapon in his trunk. It doesn’t much matter, security-wise.
My first FTO Porter would always slip his Glock surreptitiously from his holster and slide it under the driver’s seat as he pulled into the sally port, before getting out and opening the backdoor to let the prisoner out, on the theory that the prisoner, whom we always keep away from our gun side, will assume he’s still armed and not try any “funny stuff.” If you get out and open your trunk before you unload the prisoner, Porter reasoned, he’s gonna wonder what you’re doing back there, watch you, see you put your gun in the trunk, and know you’re unarmed, which might embolden him to try some “funny stuff,” he explained. “Better to make him think you’re still armed and you’ll just pop a round in his ass” if he acts up. Maybe that’s why nobody ever uses the little lockboxes by the intake door.
Of course, even though you don’t have your gun, you’re not exactly unarmed, I remember thinking. You still have your Monadnock knee-capper, your pepper spray, your Taser, and probably a knife or two to discourage any “funny stuff.” But I’ve always done it Porter’s way and slip my Glock under the seat.
I guess it can be argued either way. If you’re not sneaky enough when you put your gun under the seat and the bad guy knows there’s a gun in the car, it’s theoretically more accessible to him there than in the trunk, because he could, I don’t know, maybe smash the driver’s window with the steel cuffs on his wrists—which would be a good trick with his hands behind his back, but possible, not to say painful—and then get the gun. Of course, he’d still hafta unlock the car door with his hands behind his back, and the little lock knobs, recessed down into the door when locked, are almost impossible to grasp even if you’re not cuffed in back, and the remote unlock button is way down inside the door on the armrest, a stretch with your hands behind your back. And then there’s the challenge of getting the weapon from under the driver’s seat while handcuffed behind the back, too. Unless the bad guy’s smart enough to snatch the disabled cop’s car keys—and cuff key, which is rarely kept on a cop’s key chain—to use on the cuffs, then on the car door or the trunk. Some thugs are skinny assed, long armed, and limber enough to maneuver their cuffed hands in the back over their boney little butts and around their feet to the front. I’ve seen it happen. It’s plenty good reason to whack a handcuffed prisoner a couple times upside the head for “attempt escape.” But any scenario—cuffed in back or cuffed in front, gun in the trunk or under the seat, and a prisoner who’s really clever, quick, and a contortionist as well—requires the big assumption that the prisoner’s “funny stuff” has somehow disabled the transport officer, thereby enabling him to go for the cuff and/or car keys, to get the gun in the trunk, or under the seat, or whatever, and then what? He’s still locked up there in the sally port. And whatever he could have theoretically done to disable the transport officer would have been in full view of the intake officer just behind the bulletproof glass, to say nothing of the video cameras remotely monitored by corrections staff, who will instantly sound the alarm at the first sign of any funny stuff, sending jail guards swarming into the sally port, eager to put a good beatin’ on the smart-ass before he can snatch any keys or weapons or anything else—it’s all pretty damn academic, if you ask me. I’m sure every possible criminal scenario has been imagined, corrected, planned for, and prevented or defeated through tried-and-true, redundant security measures, architecture, engineering, and procedure relentlessly tested, reviewed, and implemented by experienced professional wardens, sheriffs, and chiefs all over the country.
So Officer Green locked his Glock in the trunk, got Wallace out of his cage, locked his car, stuck the keys in his belt, walked his prisoner over to the door, and signaled the corrections officer to buzz him in. But there was a delay. The intake space is small, and it was already crowded with Mardi Gras revelers who’d gotten a head start on the first parade’s festivities scheduled for later that night, and inside there were also that PO and his proby violator being processed. It happens, especially during Mardi Gras. So Green and Wallace stood there side by side in the sally port, waiting patiently for intake to clear enough space to buzz them in.
Green stood with his right hand gripping Wallace’s left arm, waiting. His empty holster was exposed to Wallace’s view, but, all things considered, that was academic, anyway. Then Wallace scratched his nose with the thumb of his right hand but quickly put the hand back behind him. Green saw the nose scratch. Perplexed, Green leaned in toward Wallace, reaching behind him to grab Wallace’s free hand, presumably to re-cuff him.
Quick as a Cassius Clay uppercut, Wallace punched Green in the throat with that loose right hand, staggering Green. Down he went. Wallace ran back over to the far side of Green’s cruiser, as the stricken officer struggled back to his feet, his hand at his throat. Still in the fight, he stumbled after his prisoner, chasing him around the parked Crown Vics. But he was hurt, and not just from a sucker punch to the throat. Blood spurted through his fingers as he gave chase, and Green collapsed in a fountain of crimson.
Wallace circled the cruisers and returned to his victim. He snatched the keys from Green’s belt, opened the trunk and grabbed Green’s pistol, slammed the trunk, jumped in the cruiser, and crashed it through the sally port’s exit door. A few seconds after the escape, the plainclothes PO and a few corrections officers can be seen rushing in to Green. They attempt to apply pressure to Green’s wound, but it’s already too late. Officer Green is beyond saving, having bled out onto the sally-port floor. His jugular had been severed, and he is gone.
My group at the firing range reacted to the Metro surveillance video as had every group preceding us: stunned, sickened silence. Stifled rage. Disbelief. And grief. The classroom lights came on, and our instructor, the same tactical sergeant who had first taken Wallace into custody at the Dollar store months ago, told us to take a break and be back in the classroom in fifteen for a briefing from the intelligence unit on local gang activity. We filed out of the classroom wordlessly, as if from a wake.
Shit had gotten real.
My weapon still in hand, I hurry up the driveway on the north side of Cedar Park Drive, across the street from Green’s cruiser, abandoned in somebody’s front yard, lights and siren still going strong. I’m hunting a guy who has cut a cop, stolen his car, and escaped from Metro. Though Green is already dead, that word has not gone out on our radios.
I’m figuring Frank and Bailey can’t miss Green’s cruiser and mine right behind it. They’ll be screeching up behind me any second, because Dispatch keeps saying, “AVL still showing Cedar Park at Jacksonville, subject may have bailed, subject may be armed . . .” and I’m counting on the lady with the handful of mail to point them my way.
I get to the end of the driveway and hug the brick house’s rear corner, peering carefully around to scan the backyard—lotsa hidey-holes: a detached shed with an open carport coming off the back of it piled full of stuff, two junk cars in the tall weeds near the back, and a cement mixer, a couple of old gutted motorbikes and a rusty go-cart clustered nearby—all enclosed by a six-foot wooden slat privacy fence on all three sides.
I take a quick glance around the corner at the back side of the house before making a dash to the shed: no open doors or windows on the house, but he wouldn’t have tried to go inside, anyway, not here, not so close. He’s wanting to get the hell away from here to hide, as far away from here as he can get, quick, without being spotted by alert citizens or cops. He knows it’s fixin’ to get real thick here with cops, real soon, thanks to that cop car’s damn tracking unit.
I figure he’s probably still on the move but can’t be certain, and I sure as hell don’t wanna risk having him behind me, so I gotta clear the backyard. In a low fast-moving crouch, I run to the south side of the windowless shed, my eye on the shed door all the way. I see the door, on the shed’s east side, has an exterior padlock on it, so he’s not in there. I flatten against the south side of the shed, between the shed and the rear of the house, and move to the shed’s southwest corner, slicing the pie around the corner. Nothing.
Creeping along the back side of the shed, in a narrow passage between the shed and the wooden fence at the left (west) side of the yard, I reach the next corner and slice my way around it. Nothing.
There’s a loud squawk in my ear and I flinch. Damn Dispatch is repeating, “All units, hold your traff—” and I turn the blasted thing off, for silence at least till I clear this cluttered cluster of a backyard. Why creep around like a ninja if the damn radio’s gonna give me away?
The open-sided carport on the north side of the locked shed is stacked with lumber, wheelless old bicycle frames, an ancient riding mower, plumbing fixtures, and barrels, buckets, and boxes. I creep through it scanning every spot big enough to hide in. Nothing.
A short distance away are the hulks of the two old cars, one on blocks, both nearly overgrown with weeds, and nearby are the scooters, the go-cart, and the cement mixer. They’re all kinda out in the open, exposed, but I’m not gonna turn my back on ’em before going over the rear fence. I sprint across to the rusty hulks and scramble around them looking high and low, checking that their trunks are locked down, checking the engine areas under the hoods, checking inside front and back, checking underneath. Nobody. Behind the one closest to the rear fence, an old box-style Caprice, I crouch down and lean back up against it, my arms on my thighs in a triangle, both hands gripping my Glock. I do some tactical breathing to settle and try to figure out my next move. Where the hell are Frank and Bailey, I’m wondering. They’ll be here any second, I answer myself. The main question is where the hell’s the damn thug?
I’m scanning the rear fence looking for a good spot to clamber over it when I spot a gap near the corner that I hadn’t seen from previous vantages. I push off from the old Caprice and creep up to it to study things more closely. Two slats have been pulled out, making a gap just wide enough for somebody not too plump to squeeze through. The torn-off slats are lying nearby, their nails sticking up, still shiny and slightly bent. They haven’t been lying there long enough to rust or get cruddy. The fence’s three cross supports—the horizontal two-by-fours that the pulled-out slats had been nailed to—are now exposed where the slats had been, and they’re a clean bright blond on their inside surface, almost like fresh lumber, not weathered and darkened to a dull gray like their other surfaces.
Bingo! The bad guy’s just gone through this fence, right here, I deduce.
I peek carefully through the gap in the slats and scan the empty backyard of the house directly north. No escapee from Metro is running around, and compared to the yard I’ve just cleared, this one’s tidy and neat as a pin, although there are a couple places he could be hiding. There’s a small windowless shed, at least from what I can see of it, to the left, some bushes along the west side chain-link fence line, and a car parked snug up to the back of the house by the backdoor, next to a central AC unit on a concrete pad. The house is raised up on cinder blocks, as are most down here on the parkway where flooding is frequent, but there’s corrugated tin skirting around the bottom of the house, blocking off the crawl space beneath it, except for a three- to four-foot-wide gap near the air conditioner.
But even if I can squeeze my fat ass—made even wider by all the damn gear on my duty belt—sideways through this narrow two-slat gap in the wooden fence without getting shot at, there’s a damn chain-link fence just inches beyond the wooden fence on the other side, the top of which doesn’t match the height of the wooden fence’s middle cross board, and is too far away from the wooden fence to straddle both at once. There’s just enough room between the fences to stand with both feet in order to hoist myself over the top bar of the chain link, but it’s gonna take some doing. Some contorting, and some luck.
And where the hell are those guys, Frank and Bailey, anyway? I could sure use a little cover as I try this, and maybe a shove to squeeze me through. I look back for the cavalry. Nothing.
Here we go. Putting my left foot on the lower horizontal member of the wooden fence, I grab the top cross piece with my left hand and attempt to straddle the middle cross piece with my right foot. This ain’t gonna work, not one-handed anyway. I step back down and scan the yard on the other side of the fence one last time, reluctantly holster my Glock, and hoist myself up once more, grabbing the top cross board with both hands. I think for a second maybe I should just forget about squeezing through and climb on up and over the top. But I’d make an easy target at six feet off the ground. Best to keep a low profile.
I step up on the lower cross beam with my left foot, lean away from the fence sideways and feed my right foot and leg through the fence over the middle two-by-four and put my right foot on the bottom horizontal board, then sorta snake my way sideways through the fence, ducking my head sideways to get beneath the top horizontal two-by, my crotch—my ’nads—just barely clearing the middle cross board and my spare mag pouch on the front of my belt damn-near hanging me up.
Managing somehow to clear the wooden fence, I step into the narrow space between it and the chain-link fence on the other side. I hafta place my feet parallel to the fences—there’s not enough room to put them perpendicular—and I grip the top cross bar of the chain link after trying to sorta flatten those damn little triangular links that stick out above the top bar with the jagged-pointed twists sticking up to stab you in the wrist or the heel of your hand, and with a herculean effort I vault myself over the second damned fence into the next backyard.
Before I even get a chance to take a deep breath or to even glance back through the wooden fence gap and wonder, just what the fuck are Frank and Bailey doing all this time, a noise and movement to my right captures my attention.
A couple of guys have just come out of the house next door and are climbing into an SUV in the driveway. I bark, “Freeze! Police!” and draw my weapon, striding quickly toward them. They comply, putting their hands up high, their eyes popping. They’re on the other side of the east leg of the same chain-link fence I just struggled over. No way am I gonna holster up and vault the thing again. I steal a glance to my left, to the north, and see the gate of the fence is open; that’s how the car parked by the AC unit at the back of the house got there.
“Stay right there, keep your hands up and don’t move,” I command, not taking my eyes or my gun off them as I walk through the open front gate, round the fence, and approach them on the other side. Neither of them looks like a desperado just escaped from Metro after stabbing a cop, but I check the SUV they were getting into to make sure he’s not crouched down in there having just ordered them at gunpoint to take him somewhere. The car’s clear.
“What’s wrong, Officer?” the older one, a guy about my age says. The other one is maybe thirty-five or forty, likely the older guy’s son.
“You live here?”
“Yes sir,” they reply in unison.
“Let me see some ID with this address on it. What the hell is this address, anyway?”
“F-ff-ffourteen eleven Daytona D-ddrive, three six six oh fffive,” the old guy stammers, digging for his wallet.
“Never mind the ID,” I bark. “You seen anybody come through here? Through that fence back there, maybe wearing a Metro jail inmate uniform?” (Sometimes they’ll strip down a prisoner at HQ and dress him for Metro before transporting him there.)
They both nod vigorously. “We did just see a guy come from back there, don’t know ’bout no Metro clothes, though,” the older one says, excited. “He run across that yard there toward the front, didn’t he, son?”
The younger one says, “Yeah he did, Pops. Musta went on up between them two houses . . . wudn’t but a minute ago, was it?”
Old guy, still nodding, says, “He be damn sho in a hurry!”
I turn on my heel and begin jogging back toward the front of the house next door, saying over my shoulder, “Y’all need to go on back inside and lock your doors. And keep your heads down—don’t be lookin’ out your windows.”
Circling around the front of the house, I scan the neighborhood in both directions, looking for somebody—anybody—running away, or crouching behind a parked car or at the corner of a house. Nothing.
But I’m incredibly relieved to see MPD officers, guys I know, some with combat rifles or shotguns, sweeping the area on foot and rolling up in cruisers. Some deputies, too, are rolling up in brown Crown Vics. I see one whom I FTO’d when he was a rookie, before he jumped to the County for better pay and less work. Blue and brown uniforms are saturating Daytona Drive.
I call out and gesture to anyone within earshot, “He came this way, from back there. Neighbors over there saw him runnin’ between these two.” I crouch to scan under the house next door, also raised up on blocks but with no skirting. I can see clear through the crawl space to daylight on the far side. Nothing.
Continuing on to circle around into the backyard I’d first landed in from the rear fences, I finally catch a glimpse of portly old Frank Black trying to squeeze his way through the two-slat gap in the six-foot wooden fence. He sees me and calls out, “I can’t get through!”
“Don’t even try, Frank,” I yell. “Just come on around the block—we already got guys over here, an’ he’s prob’ly somewhere on across the street by now.” Frank nods and disappears from the two-slat gap.
I spot the gap in the skirting by the AC unit that I’d first seen through the back fence, and throw myself down to the left side of it, behind a cinder-block footing. Lying flat on my belly, I peek around the cinder block and squint into the darkness, trying to force my eyes to penetrate the gloom, my weapon pointed in front of me.
About a dozen or fifteen feet directly ahead, about halfway into the shadowy crawlspace, I perceive what might be a wide pile of rags, maybe old sheets or a bedspread, spread out perpendicular to me in the darkness. It looks to be a tangle of something, maybe even crumpled-up old newspapers, I can’t be sure. It’s about six feet wide, maybe eight inches or a foot high, about a third the height of the crawl space, and I can’t see its depth or anything that might give it definition. I crane my neck and stare hard, trying to discern what it is I’m looking at. There’s just not enough light coming in from behind me through this three-foot-high, four-foot-wide opening in the tin skirting.
The winter sun is waning and the air has turned brisk. Downtown they’re shutting the traffic down on Government Street, starting to form up the parade by the Civic Center: towing cars whose drivers have failed to heed the No Parking–Parade Route signs, lining up the marching bands and the floats, unloading the PD and SO Mounted Units; the vendors of funnel cakes and chicken on a stick are heating up their deep friers, the masker-flaskers are mounting their floats.
As I lay on my belly in the weeds, my eyes adjust slightly, and I can make out other cinder-block pillars spaced in rows at uniform intervals receding under the house into the dark, and I see narrow slits of light at the far-forward right corner, where the skirting is apparently composed of loosely laid bricks or blocks instead of long tin sheets, but the light there does little more than silhouette the unevenly stacked bricks. It does nothing to diminish the blackness that shrouds the center of the crawl space.
I wiggle back to my left, fully behind the cinder-block footing, and pull out my Streamlight, gripping it up near the neck where the on-button is with my left hand, my right hand still filled with Glock.
Behind the cinder block I roll onto my right hip and crook my left knee forward as a counterbalance to prevent rolling over to the right, out from behind the cover of the cinder block. I press my left forearm firmly against the cinder block about forehead high, further stabilizing me.
This is awkward, to say the least. And painful, for a guy with a right shoulder that’s been frozen since high school, severely limiting that arm’s upward and lateral range of motion. I work the Streamlight’s lens around the corner of the cinder block with my left hand, lining it up parallel with the business end of the Glock, and then sorta scooch to the right and rock up onto my right elbow in order to see around the cinder block.
My right hand is now gripping the Glock at a sideways cant—but not as the gangsta boys do in the movies, thumb down and knuckles up, but the opposite, since I’m leaning hard onto my right elbow. Then I press the barrel-mounted on-button of the light.
Three or four ear-splitting cracks fill the air, and I roll back to my left for cover, thinking, what the fuck? Did that just come from under the house? I never even saw the muzzle flashes, much less whatever my Streamlight’s beam may have revealed.
But there’s not any doubt in my mind. That wasn’t some old pile of dirty sheets. That was It. This is the Shit. And it just got real. The bastard saw my light and tried to take me out.
Guys are yelling at me, “Mark, pull back! Get outta there, Mark!” Nice of ’em, I think. Glad they’re looking out for me, but I’m not real eager to move in any direction at the moment. The tin skirting to the left of the cinder-block stack isn’t gonna stop a round. I’m best off laying right here behind this stack. I make myself real skinny and consider sticking the Glock around the corner to return fire blind. Suppression fire, I think they call it in the war movies. I could lay down a little suppression fire, just to rattle the sonofabitch a little, make him slither around on his belly in the dark like the damn serpent he is. I might even get lucky and sting the little snake, or at least brush him back long enough to push away from this narrow cinder block and get the hell outta here.
I raise my weapon to poke it around the corner and notice the raggedy, torn-up bottom of the Glock’s grip. It’s all gnarled up, bad, like it’s been danced all over by a really dull drill press or hit by a . . . a what? I tip the barrel up and discover that the base plate of my magazine has been blown clean off. It has disappeared, along with—shit!—all my ammo!
All my bullets have fallen out. I look up into the empty magazine. Nary a round to be seen. I look on the ground and see a couple bullets among the blades of grass just a few inches into the line of fire. I sure as hell am not gonna try to reach over there and scratch around in the grass for them.
Oh well, I think. No worries. Things could be worse. I could have been wearing my usual civilian duds and I’d be shit outta luck. But not today. I’m in uniform! Fully equipped! Got two more full mags hangin’ on my blessed belt! Thirty rounds, comin’ at ya, muhfucka! Not countin’ the one already in the pipe with your name on it!
If I could only get this damn empty mag out of the Glock, to replace it with a full one. I tug and twist, and pinch, and pry, and try to wiggle, then slap the useless, ruined, empty piece a shit out of the bottom of the grip, but hell. It’s hopeless. FUBAR. I’m screwed.
There is still the one round in the chamber, thank God. Better not waste it in a blind pop around the cinder block. What if he’s been crawling up this way and comes out blazing? At least I’d have one chance to drill him when his head sticks out of his dark lair. Better hold what I got and just get real skinny and push straight back an inch at a time, then make a run for it.
And that’s exactly what I do. When I get far enough back from the house that I’m past the back side of the AC unit on the other side of the gap in the skirting, I draw my legs up under my chest and spring sideways over the line of fire and take cover on the ground behind the AC.
For about thirty seconds, anyway. Just until I realize the AC is really no better cover than the corrugated tin skirting. It’s just a mostly empty, flimsy sheet metal box with a whole bunch of horizontal vent slits on every side; it may actually be worse cover than the tin skirting: it’s already perforated. Whatever (and wherever) all those thicker mechanical things are inside the AC cowling, I don’t know if they can stop a bullet.
Guys are still yelling at me to “Get better cover! Pull back!” and I decide that’s what I need to do, so I roll over and spring back to the rear of the car parked next to the AC. Of course I’m not really safe lying on the ground, so I sorta crouch behind the trunk, thinking, it’s only my feet and ankles at risk, and he’d need to be a pretty damn good or lucky shot to get me in the ankle.
But then I think of the base plate of my magazine that he blew all to smithereens, and I hightail it on outta there, back to the next yard over, behind the wheels of that SUV I had cleared before terrorizing the father and son setting out on some errands together, just minutes—but what now seems a lifetime—ago.
At a far safer distance, behind much better cover, with guys I know and trust who have working firearms and lots and lots of bullets, including armor-piercing combat rifle rounds, and grenades, and God only knows what all else, I take a knee next to none other than Captain Darby. Way back in the day, Darby had been my very first sergeant out of the academy, back when ol’ Portly Porter was my first FTO, up in the Third. Three or four other guys are in the carport there, lined up along the rear wall of the house and crouching with me behind the wheels of the SUV.
Darby looks behind him, and I follow his eyes to see who he’s looking at. To my surprise, it’s the chief. But it shouldn’t be a surprise, since this is a pretty major incident, and he’s known to be out of the office a lot, riding around. I’ve seen him down this way several times. He lives down here off the parkway, in fact, right smack in the middle of my beats, not a mile from here. And besides, this is a cop convention. There’s gotta be a hundred cops in a double perimeter around us, and I think I hear a helicopter circling above.
I nod at the chief, who doesn’t acknowledge. He’s looking very intently at Darby, kneeling next to me. I look back at Darby in time to see his eyes locked with the chief’s. Darby nods slightly, signaling some unspoken but understood accord between them.
Then Darby speaks to me. “Good job finding him, Mark, but what the fuck took ya so long to get outta the line a fire? Could’ncha hear me and everybody yellin’ atcha to pull back? We got plenty a firepower here, we can fuckin’ strafe the blocks right out from under that house and bury him with it, but we couldn’t do a fuckin’ thing with you in the way.”
“Sorry, Cap, but I got a little confused. My damn gun’s all blown up.” I show him. “All my rounds fell out, but I can’t switch out for a fresh mag.” I look around at the others nearby. “Anybody here got an extra gun for me? How ’bout one a you guys with rifles—gimme a Glock.”
Captain Darby’s looking in disbelief at the gnarled-up grip and the bottomless mag, then looks at me. “Are you all right? Are you hit? You been hit, Mark, lookit all that blood on your hand. No, the other one,” he says. I had inspected my gun hand, figuring I must have caught a little shrapnel when my gun got hit. But that hand’s clean. Then I see the thick red smear down my left palm. I wipe the blood off, looking for the wound, thinking I probably just stabbed myself in the hand on one of those jagged, spikey twisty things at the top of the chain-link fence.
But there’s no puncture or tear on my left hand. I pull back my sleeve and realize the blood on my hand has run down from somewhere higher up my arm. I unbutton the cuff and start rolling it up my arm, and there’s more blood, all over my arm, but still no wound I can see, although I now feel a kind of burn, or pinch, up past my elbow, but it’s on the back side, the underside of my arm.
This makes zero sense to me, and I keep peeling back the sleeve higher until Captain Darby says, “Stop. Don’t go any farther. There’s a big bloody flap of skin you might pull off. Just leave it alone, Mark.” Then, turning to the guys at the rear of the carport, he yells, “I need somebody to get Mark to an ambulance. He’s been hit.”
A couple guys I’ve worked with come toward me, but I wave them off. “Nah, it’s nothing. Just a little scratch, prob’ly just snagged myself on one a those fences over there. Somebody just give me a damn gun.”
Darby shakes his head at me and tells the guys to walk me out to the Rescue wagon on D.I.P. because Daytona Drive’s so clogged with cruisers they’ll never get any closer.
“Ahh, come on, Captain. Seriously. I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine, you’re hit, and we don’t know for sure how bad. Now, go with Fuller and Simmons. That’s an order. I’m done fuckin’ around with you.”
At University of South Alabama Hospital’s ER trauma center (after a long, maddening ride through streets clogged with Mardi Gras crowds), they’ve got my shirt off and a couple of doctors and a nurse are inspecting my upper left arm. The senior doc remembers me from a visit to the ER several years ago that I don’t immediately recall. He tells the younger doc about it, trying to prod my memory.
“He and another officer came in with a prisoner to get checked before taking him on to Metro,” he says. “I think it was a domestic you had arrested him for, and he had fought you,” he adds helpfully.
“Well that really narrows it down, Doc.”
“The prisoner only had a few scrapes and bruises, but I remember thinking you two looked like you’d gotten the worst of it because you were both covered in mud from head to toe,” he says, and then I remember, but too late to cut him off, “and you had accidentally tased your partner in the fight.”
“Yeah, that was me and LD Jones,” I say. “Thanks for the memory, Doc.”
They both have a chuckle, then he assures me that there’s no real damage, it’s just a flesh wound, I’m very lucky, and he’ll be back to sew me up after Nurse Betty cleans out the wound and preps it for stitching.
Nurse Betty steps up, starts laying out bandages and sponges and little tools on a tray next to the bed, and says, “Have you called your wife yet? Believe me, you don’t want her to hear about this first on TV or anywhere else.”
“You get really crappy cell signals in here, as I recall. Usually I can’t get out at all from back in here.”
“Yeah, it’s something to do with all the equipment, they say. But you really need to let her know. Would you like me to call her for you?”
“Nah, they said this wouldn’t take long, I’ll just wait till you’re done, and call her when I can get back outside for a good signal.”
“You’re making a big mistake, Detective. What time is it now? A little after five? Now, you know, she’s probably on her way home from. . . . Does she work?”
“She works for the County Commission, at Government Plaza.”
“Oh Lordy, the poor thing’s probably stuck downtown in all that Mardi Gras mess, and you know she’s gonna be listening to the news on her car radio. Trust me on this, Detective, you definitely don’t want her to hear about all this, even if they don’t say your name over the air, am I right? Just sayin’.”
She’s right. Nancy will shit a brick if she even suspects I’m anywhere near this cluster. “Yeah, I better not wait. How ’bout you just wheel me out closer to the door, or to a landline?”
She laughs and maneuvers my left arm up and back to get a better angle for scrubbing it or picking dirt out of it or whatever she’s doing.
“Now, this might sting a little, or kinda burn,” she says, not even acknowledging my request. “We’ll be giving you a local in just a minute, honey, so it won’t hurt for long.”
“Oh, all right, I’ll give it a try.” I dig my phone out of my pocket and hit Aaanancell, the first one in my contact list. To my surprise, I get through, though it’s breaking up.
“Mark?”
“Hey, first of all, I’m really okay, but—”
“Mark? You’re breakin’ up. You’re really what? Can you hear me?
I raise my voice, as if yelling will strengthen my faulty signal. “Hey, I’m in a dead spot, but I’m okay . . . Nancy? You hear me?”
“Whaddayou me . . . ur . . . kay . . . at ’eans you’re not . . . r . . . y . . . udn’t . . . e ’alling . . . ’ere. R . . . ou?”
“Nancy, listen, listen to me, don’t talk. I’m at USA ER, but it’s no big . . . Nancy, can you hear me?”
Nurse Betty can take it no longer. She snatches my cell from me and walks out saying, “Oh for heaven’s sake, I told you to let me do it for you. Lord only knows what she heard or what she thinks.” Her voice fades as she hurries down the hall to get out to a clear signal before the call’s dropped. “I just hope you didn’t go and make the poor thing have a wreck.”
By the time Nancy arrives, she is a wreck. She walks into my bay while I’m yukking it up with my sarge, my captain, the chief, and hizzonner the mayor. I’m feeling sorta buzzed and manic anyway, from the excitement of it all, I guess. It’s definitely a giddy kind of high when it starts to sink in that you’ve cheated Death (yet again, in my case) and dodged a really close one; add to this the visiting Rank and Royalty, and it’s all gone like a pop bottle rocket straight to my already volatile ego, and Whammo! It’s like I’ve bumped a couple lines of quality flake and chased it with a slash of Jim Beam, or something.
But then shit gets real. The wisecracks and joking stop when my poor, worried, scared sweetheart enters the room panicked and fearing the worst. She walks right on in oblivious to all the brass and hizzonner, tears already streaking her pretty face, and when our eyes meet there’s this moment of stunned silence and then the tears really start flowing and she comes to me, and as abruptly as my jovial banter stopped, my own eyes overflow. I’m a weepy damn pushover anyway, but I’m absolutely without defense when I see her cry. We both just choke out unintelligible sounds to each other, helpless to do otherwise, and for a few moments the rest of the world melts away.