Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You (3 page)

As far as I can tell nothing has changed, except Mary has disappeared—untraceable—and Emma is dead: drugs, prostitution, suicide.

This is how I remember us at play: A rich, late-afternoon light ribbons through my mother's wood-paneled kitchen. We have closed
all the doors and shutters to keep the adults out. The tang of soy sauce and heavy promise of honey are in the air. Mary and Emma sit blindfolded at a table, an old cherry table with deeply etched
e
's and
c
's, a result of my brother's and my early attempts at writing. The table is laden with my mother's tan dishes full of carefully chosen food. This is the tasting game.

Mary has taken her thick, black glasses off and has a grin on her face, braces poking forth, while Emma sits quietly, hair pulled into a ponytail, face smooth and still, waiting. Her cheekbones catch the light, and in this memory, she could be Michelangelo's model for the
Pietà.
I stand across the table, trying to decide what to test them with first.

This image hovers in my mind: them blindfolded, me standing nearby, watching, in control of what happens next. I could never decide which role I liked best: tester or tested. I liked being in charge, that power over outcome, but I also liked the thrill of detection, of getting it right. We would play for hours, rotating turns as game hostess, challenging our powers of smell and taste. We wanted to be able to tell, even with our eyes closed, what was going on.

 

I tell the rookies that their hands are more important than they realize. Their jaw and cheek muscles go slack, and they stare at me: either they are bewildered or they think I'm an idiot.

And so I continue to teach them, patiently, all I have learned.

One evening, not long after I'd graduated from the academy and was still riding with Johnny, he drove our unit into a deserted, little-used park off Harrells Ferry Road.

“Get out,” he said, “and show me how you unload and load your gun.”

I stood there in the warm fall breeze, dumped my rounds and reloaded, two bullets at a time, proud of how quickly and efficiently I moved.

“No,” he said, the wind kicking his dark hair into errant tufts. “First, this isn't the firing range. Always eject rounds into your hand. You get in the habit of dumping them on the ground and what if they hit cement? Roll and hit something metal? Whoever's firing at you hears that and knows your gun is empty.”

I blinked at this obvious lesson and nodded.

“Second, learn to reload by touch alone,” he said. “You'll need your eyes for other things.”

So I practiced, sometimes at night before I placed the gun on my nightstand and went to sleep, sometimes in the early morning on dog shift, between four and five o'clock when the city held its breath and was quiet. Over and over I thumbed the ejection pin and caught the bullets in my hand. My eyes closed, I quickly fed six bullets into the chamber, thumbing the cylinder round, using the groove by each chamber as a guide for the hand feeding the bullets. When we went to speed loaders, wondrous contraptions resembling a black Ferris wheel turned on its side that dropped bullets into the chamber with a twist of a knob, I continued to practice both methods of loading.

Touch, I slowly learned, was an important tool. My hands could feel the car hood and discover how recently it had been used; my hands could test the car trunk to see if it was indeed closed; my hands could gently twist the doorknob, tap the screen, tug at the window; my hands could probe the entry marks from the bullet or knife; my hands could check the tension in a person's body—would he or she come willingly or was I in for a fight?

“And the reason for training your hands,” I tell the rookies, “is because observation, a close, instantaneous cataloguing of details, is essential.”

Often there are so many details to process that survival depends on honing this sense to an exquisite intensity. When I respond to a call—whether an armed robbery, or traffic stop, or suspicious person, or family fight—I focus first on the hands, then on the eyes. “The hands will kill you,” Johnny would say over and over again, “the eyes will tell you.”

Late last year, Sarah Jeffries and I went 10-7 on a family disturbance. Although we are different in personality and background, and she's more rookie than seasoned cop, we both believe in intuition, in paying attention to the feel of a scene or a person. Sarah calls it “reading the vibes.” We'd been working the same shift together for over a year, and we'd learned to read each other—and a situation—in an instant, without words. Sarah's young, but she's got potential. And she learns quickly.

The apartment complex we were dispatched to was a decrepit build
ing on Nicholson Drive just off the LSU campus, mostly occupied by married or international students. A long narrow hallway and even longer, more narrow inside stairway led up to a landing that had just enough room for one of us. Lighting was poor. Raised voices and the thump of furniture—or a body—against walls came from the apartment.

“This feels bad,” Sarah said.

“Yep.”

I stood on the edge of the landing and knocked on the door, hard, said “POLICE” in a loud voice, deep from the belly. Sarah stood a few steps down. Our hands rested on the butt of our guns, the leather guard strap unsnapped. I was acutely aware that I had nowhere to go, had no available cover.

The door opened about seven inches and a white male in his late twenties, over six feet tall and well built, stared at me without expression. I could see only one hand, and it was empty. His dirty-blond hair was shoulder-length, his eyes flat. Behind him, against the far wall, a woman with long, black hair paced back and forth. Her face was puffy and bleeding, her expression crimped with fear.

I don't remember what I said to him. What I always said, I suppose: We got a call, neighbors are concerned, can we come in and talk, we're just here to help.

His face didn't even twitch. He just looked at me with those eyes, his inner eyebrows raised slightly, and my dread deepened.

“Could you step away from the door, sir. Let me see your hands.”

No response.

I was vaguely aware of Sarah speaking into the portable radio, asking for backup in a low but urgent whisper. I wasn't sure how we'd all fit or where, but more officers seemed like a good idea.

I continued to talk, using a soothing but firm tone, words cascading out of my mouth, anything to keep him focused on me, anything to get through and resolve this without force, without injury. I kept one hand, my left hand, out in front of me moving slightly. I wanted him to stay focused on my hand, its reassuring movement. Whatever I said was my usual family fight spiel: people sometimes have problems, we're here to help, let us in the apartment so we can help sort this out, I'm sure this can be settled. Is your wife all right? Are you all right? Are there any weapons in the house?

With my last question, the wife halted behind her husband and nodded vigorously.

Dread turned to icy fear.

And then it turned to near panic as Sarah backed down the stairs.
Where the fuck is she going? Can't she see this is about to go way wrong real quick?

But I kept talking, kept my eyes on his eyes, on the muscles in his face, on the one hand in sight, on the lines of his body, looking for any sign he was about to move, that the hand I couldn't see might be holding a weapon. I didn't draw my own weapon, not yet; I didn't want to give him a reason to escalate.

Briefly, I thought about leaving, about joining Sarah downstairs—
where the FUCK is she?
—regrouping with backup and trying again. But returning here a second time could be uglier, more dangerous. He might hurt his wife, or worse, in the intervening time. He'd be ready for us, and those eyes had already told me he was debating whether he should attack.

Attack with what, was the question. If he had a gun in that other hand hidden by the door, I had little chance. Bullets clear doors with ease. For all I knew, one was already pointed at my chest. Despite my bulletproof vest, I worried about a head shot, a leg shot, a shoulder shot, about clearing my own gun from the holster and not falling back down the stairs in the process.

If he had a knife, I had a chance, although I hate knives. He'd have to open the door farther to come at me. If I didn't fall, if panic and fear didn't override clearheaded reaction, I could draw my gun and shoot him before he reached me.

If. If. If.

I kept talking. He kept staring. His wife continued crying and pacing behind him.

Suddenly Sarah was beside me again, her gun drawn, held down the length of her leg so he couldn't see it. “Portable was breaking up, but backup's on the way,” she whispered. I nodded.

“Sir,” I said, “there are other officers coming and I'd like to settle this quietly, as I'm sure you would. We aren't here to cause any problems. Now, step away from the door and let us in.”

He and I stared at each other until something shifted in his eyes,
a barely perceptible flicker of minute muscle movements rippled over his face, his lips compressed slightly. Sarah's gun came up as my own hand tightened on the butt of my gun, pulling it up out of the holster, my knees bent. He took one step back, flung the door open.

I rushed in, fists clenched and arms perpendicular to my body, as though I were a fullback moving in for a tackle, which was exactly my intent. I hit him full force against the chest, Sarah behind me, one hand hard against my back, and I drove him clear across the room and up against the wall. I never said a word, and neither did he. He was strong, and it took all our combined strength to get him flipped around, spread-eagle against the wall. As our backup arrived, three officers pounding up the metal stairs, I yanked the automatic out of his jeans where he'd placed it against the small of his back. Loaded. Safety off.

To this day I remember the look in his eyes. I've seen that look only a handful of times in my career, and each time I've survived. Somehow. Sometimes I see that look in my dreams and wake, the dread just as fresh as that moment on the landing outside his door. Why he didn't shoot is a mystery. But then so much of what happens to us—or doesn't—on the job is a mystery.

And luck.

Here's another story I tell the rookies: Four o'clock one morning, in the poorer, more industrial north section of town, four of us went 10-7 with a silent burglar alarm on a big warehouse off Acadian Thruway, an alarm that went off frequently and was always false. Joe, Beth, Jerry, and me. No security lighting, interior or exterior. The area was black; the humidity enhanced the velvety feel of the night.

As we were getting out of our units, laughing softly—we'd been handling calls all night together and were feeling good—something made me focus on a dimple in the texture of the darkness of the cavernous entrance.

You don't look directly at objects in the dark. For one thing, staring too hard produces imaginary spots of movement. To locate and evaluate danger you can't look at it. As I shifted my eyes slightly right, the shotgun pointed at my chest came into full focus. Or at least full enough focus for me to rack one into my own shotgun and yell at the others. There was a tangled rush for cover, and the anonymous gunman fled around the corner, disappeared, blending back
into the blanket of night. We were left with thundering heartbeats in our throats and the exquisite, painful rush of adrenaline.

It was the slight clink of metal that registered as wrong, as an alert. Whether it was the burglar's keys or gun whispering against the side of the building, or belt buckle meeting the button on his sleeve, we never knew because we never caught him. But we did find the loaded shotgun in a lot behind the building.

It's one of those calls we still talk about. Small and insignificant in proportion to so many other, more serious calls, yet huge because in that moment, we were acutely aware of luck's hand brushing past our faces, aware of the gift of our lives handed back to us—intact, breathing—simply because I heard a sound and the gunman chose not to shoot.

Like sight and touch, I tell the rookies, hearing is also essential to survival. Sound is often our first clue of something gone wrong. It is an undeveloped attribute, and though I had been a ferocious listener as a child, trying to discern the patterns in my parents' voices, Johnny taught me to listen below and beyond the obvious. I developed headaches from the strain of intently looking and listening, trying to peel back layers of the air. Sound—whether the tone of voice, the whisper of metal against metal, the squeal of tires, or even the absence of sound itself—reveals so many secrets.

My sense of hearing has become so acute that I can differentiate among sirens. Fire department, rescue van, Emergency Medical Service, Acadian Ambulance, Gilberts Ambulance, police unit: each has a slightly different tone. Ambulances have a lower whooping sound; fire trucks a slight bellow; EMS has a sharp
dee-doo-dee-doo
, which stops and starts as they usually punch the siren button only at intersections. Police cars howl.

Those screaming-banshee sirens. Inside my police unit, the siren blaring, filling every pore, I am the siren—
Get out of the way, help is coming, gonna get you, hurry, hurry, hurry.

Even now, I stop momentarily when I hear a siren to catalogue the source. Johnny teases me about it, but, like Pavlov's dog, I just respond at some chemical level. And if it's a police car, I imagine myself there beside the unknown officer:
Careful
, I always think;
please be careful
.

Before I cut each rookie loose to ride on his or her own, I tell the story of my shooting, about Jeffery Lewis Moore. Just the facts, nothing more. It is quiet in our patrol car after I finish talking. For a long time. They don't ask questions.

 

Idle chatter and random, silly questions at some choir practice out on the Mississippi River levee one night with Johnny and Joe and a bunch of other off-duty cops: “What is
the
sound of your childhood?” The proverbial brick wall appears. No answer, no sound.