Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You (6 page)

Boudreaux stood on the steps, a shotgun in one hand, his other hand, palm flat, out behind him. Denux was up on the porch beside Sanderson, who was bleeding heavily from a gash in her cheek, her hand firmly gripping the forearm of an emaciated-looking young man the color of café au lait, who looked both frightened and defiant. Hawkins was nowhere to be seen.

Katherine squealed to a halt just on the edge of the crowd, along with the other units. She slid a shotgun out of the dip between door frame and seat, handed it over to Richard.

“Use it if you need to. You'll know. Stick close and do not—DO NOT—get hurt.” And she pulled another shotgun, the department-issued shotgun, off the rack on the wire mesh screen behind her.

What we would learn that night, and in the years to come, is that you get thrown into a situation without understanding all the pieces—like entering a movie already in progress—and all you can
rely on is your gut, instinct, experience, and, if you're lucky, the officers around you. And only after it was over could you piece together what exactly had happened and why.

At the time, the next eight minutes were mostly a blur, a series of quick snapshots, impressions, and sensations barely coherent for us cadets.

We pushed out into the crowd, Katherine holding her shotgun perpendicular to her body, saying, “Clear the way, move back, back up” as she walked, her voice devoid of emotion but clear and authoritative even over the angry hive of noise. Richard walked sideways behind her, the top of his head just even with the back of her neck, shotgun pointed somewhere between the night sky and the crowd of people folding back around him. Two officers on each side moved forward parallel to them, cutting a small path that additional officers tried to hold open along with a few of us cadets who also held guns, although not shotguns, that our partners had suddenly slapped into our hands as we arrived on the scene, cautioning us to use them only if our lives were in danger.

Up on the porch, Sanderson was swearing profusely. Denux held a small .38 at his side, his mouth a tense line as he sheltered part of her body with his. He looked out at us with a mixture of glee and alarm.

Boudreaux shouted, “One round fired, not sure from where. Chipped out a piece of the railing and hit Beth.”

The eight of us moved into a semicircle on the steps, Richard just one step below Katherine as she leaned into Boudreaux. “The neighbors don't look happy, Joe.”

“Perp shot up the house,” he said. “Didn't hit anyone. Took a swing at Hawkins.”

“We got to get off this porch,” Akers growled.

The crowd pressed in, shouting, “Let Clay go, man,” and “Damn police fuckin' with people.”

“Where's Hawkins?” Katherine said.

“Inside,” Sanderson yelled. “Gonna whip his pansy ass.”

“You, with me,” Akers said, pointing a finger at Richard as he moved past him up the steps.

“I'm with her, sir,” Richard said.

“Boy, move your goddamn ass.”

“Sir, I'm not leaving my partner.” Richard never took his eyes off the crowd as he answered Akers.

“It's okay, Marcus,” Katherine said.

“I'm not leaving you.”

“Denux,” Boudreaux shouted. “In the house with Akers.”

Within seconds Akers and Denux returned to the porch, each with a hand on Hawkins, pushing him forward. Hawkins squinted, lifted his elbow away from Denux.

“I'm gonna kill you,” Sanderson snapped. “If we get out of here.”

“We're moving, now,” Boudreaux yelled. “Everyone.”

Wood spit up from the side of the house as the sound of a shot cut through the crowd. Everyone ducked. Except Katherine. She racked a round into her shotgun, pointed it in the direction from which the shot seemed to come, and yelled, “GO!” For several seconds she stood alone, upright, like a single reed in a field of flattened grass.

Then Richard stood up, pulled Katherine in front of him and pushed her shoulders down as she stepped off the porch. He fired off a round into the air, cracked that night sky wide open with a KA-BOOM, racked another one into his shotgun, and waved it across the crowd. “MOVE BACK NOW.”

“Here we go,” Boudreaux shouted, grabbing Richard by the arm, nodding down at him for one brief instant.

We pushed forward slowly, steadily, a tight phalanx with guns drawn, pointing outward, as we crab-stepped toward units, shoving back against sweaty bodies, ignoring spit and worse hitting our faces and uniforms.

And then it was over. More officers arrived as we tumbled into our units, but we shook them off with the universal sign for okay and twirling index fingers, Code 4'd the call, pulled away, and headed to the holding cell at the precinct. Two units remained on side streets to make sure that the crowd dispersed, that they didn't take their anger and frustration out on property or people, hoping to find a possible hint of the sniper's identity.

On the sweaty, jittery ride to the precinct, we were counseled not to mention one goddamn thing about having guns or Richard firing off a round, at least not around supervisors, and
never ever
to the academy training staff.

“Didn't happen, understand,” we cadets were told. We understood. Cops would lose their jobs, and we'd be out of a career.

Most of the shift arrived back at the precinct, pumped from the aftereffects of adrenaline, high on the sweet rush of being alive.

“This damn sure calls for a choir practice,” Boudreaux said to vigorous nods all around as Sanderson left for downtown booking. Her cheek would require stitches, but only after she'd processed and booked the perp. She left Hawkins behind, and the Lieutenant suggested, none to kindly, that Hawkins go ahead and check out for the night.

And so we attended our first real cop choir practice in a sparsely furnished one-bedroom apartment off Woodward. It's an old practice, still common today. An apartment complex manager makes a deal for extra security and a police presence in exchange for an empty apartment. Usually a cop, and sometimes his family, will live in it, but back then, more often than not, a group of officers, generally on the same squad or shift, used it as a second home—whether during shift as a place to kick back, eat, or use the bathroom, or off shift as a place to sleep during turnarounds or for what's vaguely referred to as “fooling around” and specifically means cheating on one's spouse.

The apartment housed the basic necessities: liquor, sodas, and coffee; a couple of broken-down couches; floor pillows, a boom box, and giant bags of pretzels, chips, and cookies. Toilet paper seemed to be in short supply. Gun belts, shoes and boots, uniform shirts and bulletproof vests were discarded; we walked around in T-shirts, socks, and uniform pants. Beer flowed. The storytelling—and retelling—began. We talked in loud edgy voices, eager to hear what happened to Hawkins (he panicked with the first shot that ricocheted into Sanderson and retreated into the house), to learn more about the perp (he struggled, and his girlfriend ran out into the street screaming that the police were beating him up), to speculate about the sniper (calls would be made to Narcotics to shake down a few confidential informants), to relive Katherine standing on that porch wide open to whoever was taking potshots at the police (“hell of a thing to see”) and Richard pulling her down in front of him (“gonna make a hell of a cop”).

By the time we popped the tabs on our third or fourth beers, a
bunch of us were leaning up against the counters in the alleyway of a kitchen, and the rest crowded around the door.

“You did good, boy,” Boudreaux said, slapping Richard on the back hard enough to make beer flip up out of the can he held. Richard grinned, his whole body relaxed in a way we'd never seen.

“That was something, you up there waving that damn shotgun around like John fuckin' Wayne.”

“Goddamn Rambo, he was,” someone said.

“Motherfuckin' Godzilla.”

“You're lucky I don't write up your ass for not obeying an order,” Akers said in a mock growl. Richard winked, raised his can toward Akers.

“Ah hell, you'd of done the same,” Boudreaux said.

“Hell, yes,” Akers said.

“You sweet goddamn cowboy,” Katherine said, and leaned over and kissed Richard on the cheek.

Richard's face flushed; he tipped an imaginary hat at her without directly meeting her eyes. “Anytime, ma'am.”

“Oh freaking Jesus.” Katherine laughed, looked at Boudreaux. “They're all out to make me an old woman, Joe.”

“Never, Katie,” Boudreaux said.

“No ma'am,” came from several officers.

We don't know when Richard and Katherine slipped out. One moment they were there with us, sprawled out on the floor, and the next they were gone. No one mentioned it, really, although we cadets talked about it plenty among ourselves in the days to come.

But after they'd gone, on about the eighth rehashing of our adventure earlier that morning, we lingered again over Katherine's moment on the porch.

“That woman,” Akers said, a beer balanced on his considerable chest. His tone conveyed both admiration and reservation.

“Wasn't one of her wiser moves,” said another officer. “Still, hell of a thing to do.”

“That's Katherine,” said an older, gray-haired officer.

“No one else like her,” Boudreaux said. He sat against a wall, his legs stretched out in front of him.

“Seems she'd know better,” Denux muttered, his words slurring slightly.

Boudreaux lifted his index finger and shook it at Denux. “Don't go where you don't understand, boy. She's a damn fine cop.”

 

Separating the truth from myth, the reality from wishful thinking, the facts from the fabricated is a delicate undertaking, sometimes impossible. Over time stories take on their own life as details are discovered and carefully added to the whole or discarded when the evidence doesn't match up; any first-year cop can tell you that after working a few crime scenes. But who's to say which details are the truth? Everyone has his own perspective. What's been blurred and forgotten? What is highlighted and exaggerated?

Perhaps it doesn't matter what the exact truth is, if the skeleton is fact, the emotional core is real.

It took us years to piece together what happened between Richard and Katherine before we came up with what we considered the whole story, or as close to the whole story as we were going to get: snippets of information from Richard, seemingly indifferent questioning of cadets who came after us, observation among those of us who worked the same shifts as Katherine and Richard, casual asides from veteran officers, sifting through the rumors about personal lives that inhabit every precinct.

But the story we pieced together, the one we consider true, is one we keep mostly to ourselves. Even now we protect the story of Katherine, as so many officers have before and after us, smiling when we hear the tale of her and Johnny, knowing there is more but reluctant to share it. Protecting Katherine. Protecting Richard. Mostly, though, protecting ourselves, the selves we were so long ago: eager, optimistic, naïve.

 

There was another empty apartment in the complex to which Katherine, along with some of the other officers, had keys. She took Richard there, his brain softened by more beer than he was accustomed to. A place, she would have told Richard, where just the two
of them could talk in peace and quiet. He carried a six-pack of beer in one hand and his cadet uniform shirt crumpled up in the other. Katherine rested her hand on Richard's shoulder as they walked, hips bumping up against each other on the narrow walkway, her gun belt, bulletproof vest, and uniform shirt slung over the other arm.

And they did talk for a while in low, thoughtful voices, mostly about their childhoods, about other cops, about the call at Starling and 12th. And there was silence as well, a comfortable silence, although Richard felt his heart beat more rapidly each time she leaned in close to him, each time she laughed. And he would have still tasted the aftereffects of the adrenaline rush from earlier, that need to feel again how alive he could be.

At some point she would have reached out a hand, slid it along his cheek and up into the hair above his ear, her fingers gently raking his scalp; then she'd have smiled that liquid smile and pulled his face toward hers, told him, “Don't think, cowboy, just kiss me.”

And who among us could have said no, her body pressed up against ours, hands traveling down our back pulling us closer, the sweet intoxication of her tongue deep inside our mouth, the feel of her breasts, her hands fumbling with the buckle, then the snap, then the zipper on our pants, that quick shucking of clothing, the headiness of flesh wedded to flesh, slow and fast and again and again.

Who knows how long they stayed there, talking and kissing and touching, Katherine playing with the hair on his chest, her head resting on his shoulder, his hands stroking the skin on her waist and hip, how very white her skin was under that uniform. And no one knows what he said to Ellen, his fiancée, when he returned to their apartment later that day—or even if he did return.

We do know Richard arrived at the precinct that night looking tired, subdued, his eyes tracking every move Katherine made. She sparkled, laughed loudly and frequently, said, “Come on, cowboy” to him when roll call ended.

“Jesus H. Christ, Katherine,” Sanderson said as we walked to the back lot, a large bandage covering the hollow of her cheek. “Keep a lid on it.”

“Oh, Beth,” Katherine said, her voice light and playful, “go home and kiss your kids.” And she handed Richard the keys, brushing up
against his shoulder as she told him to do the unit check before they left the lot. He smiled at her, a slow smile both tender and defeated.

Later that night, after another impromptu shift gathering in an abandoned gas station parking lot that Katherine and Richard attended only briefly, Katherine seemed so soft and giddy that Boudreaux told Denux after they left, “She's something when she's happy, isn't she?”