Orientation (12 page)

6700 Block, Coast Highway. Officers go to beach. They park Patrol Unit at overlook, dig into chimichangas, chew thoughtfully, ponder view. The sky above is heavy and gray, a slab of concrete. The ocean chops fretfully beneath it, muddy green, frothy as old soup. Officer [Shield #647] loves how the two of them can be quiet together. There is
some
small talk: the upcoming POA ballots; Tasers, yea or nay; the K-9 Unit’s dogfighting scandal. But mostly there is only the tick of the cooling engine, the distant whump of surf against shore, the radio crackling like a comfy fire. Officers sigh. Officer [Shield #647] gestures with chimichanga at vista before them. “There’s a saying,” he says. “How’s it go—

“Blue skies all day, officers gay.

If skies gray and clouds creep, officers weep.”

Officer [Shield #325] chews, nods, furrows her brow. “It’s an
old
saying,” he adds. “You know.
Happy
gay. Not
gay
gay.” She laughs. He laughs, too. Relief fills Patrol Unit. A weight is lifted, a door eases open and swings wide. His right hand slips from steering wheel and alights, trembling, upon her left knee. Her breath catches, then begins again—steady, resolute. Officers swallow, park chimichangas carefully on dash. Officers turn one to the other. Suspect in backseat asks if they’re done with those chimis, complains he’s hungry, too, you know, complains that
some
body in Patrol Unit didn’t get to eat his combo plate and can they guess who? Officers terminate break, split Mucho Macho Nachos three ways, transport suspect to Division for booking.

400 Block, Glenhaven Road. Criminal trespass and vandalism at construction site. Four pallets of eight-foot framing two-by-fours chain-sawed into a grand assortment of useless two- and four-foot one-by-fours. Officers walk scene, sniff air. Sawdust, gas fumes, chain oil. It is a pungent mix, complex and heady. Officers inhale deeply, go all woozy.

2600 Block, Frontage Boulevard at Highway 99. Injury accident. Soil subduction collapses shoulder of 44th Street on-ramp. Three vehicles roll down embankment. Officers notify EMT and DOT Units, assist injured, secure scene. State Patrol pulls up, kills engine, emerges from Patrol Unit like starlet at movie premiere. State Patrol is starch-crisp and preternaturally perspiration-free. State Patrol thanks officers for their assistance, flashes horsey smile, tips dopey hat. Officers sit slouched on Patrol Unit, watch State Patrol strut about. “Prince of Freeways,” officer [Shield #647] mutters. “Lord of Turnpikes,” he says. Partner suggests that a more collegial relationship with State Patrol is called for. “King of the Road,” he continues. “Ayatollah of the Asphalt.” Officers giggle, get all silly, love that they can be silly. DPW Units swing by, offer wide range of orange gear and signage:
SLOW
,
CAUTION
, choice of
SOIL SUBDUCTION
or
SUBDUCTED SHOULDER
.

2200 Block, Felicity Court. Domestic disturbance. Man with golf club pounds on washing machine in garage. Woman in lawn chair applauds his every blow, whistles, barks like dog. Dogs next door whipped into frenzy by noise, bark like woman in lawn chair. Soapy water jets in jugular arcs from innards of crippled washer, streams down driveway, gurgles into gutter. Officers linger in Patrol Unit, assess scene, swiftly reach unspoken agreement, gun engine, hightail it out of there.

1000 Block, Clearview Terrace. Traffic obstruction. Sinkhole reported in street, measuring twenty-five feet across by four feet deep. Officers peer down hole, whistle. DPW Units flush restraint down crapper, go whole hog in establishing perimeter—orange barricades and flashers, orange arrowboards and signage, orange-garbed personnel braiding Reflect-O-Tape throughout scene like carnival light strings. Sinkhole perimeter is now a secure
and
festive perimeter. Officers clash with tableau, sent off to disperse rubberneckers: “Move along, folks, nothing to see here, move along.”

2200 Block, Oak Street. Public intoxication and urination. Outside Ye Olde Liquor Shoppe. Sixty-four-year-old man taken into custody. During transport to Division, officer [Shield #325] confesses: “I’ve always wanted to say that. You know: ‘Move along, nothing to see here.’”

5500 Block, Pleasant Avenue. Vandalism. Eighteen mailboxes destroyed along roadside, lopped neatly off their posts in a bout of mailbox baseball, but with chain saw instead of baseball bat. “Mailbox lumberjack,” officer [Shield #325] muses aloud. Shot at whimsy misses mark. “Har-dee-har,” complainant says. “Ha-fucking-ha.” Officer [Shield #647] wonders aloud if somebody maybe put their crabby pants on today. Officer [Shield #325] adds if maybe they OD’d on their potty-mouth pills, too. Argument escalates. Scuffle ensues. Fifty-five-year-old male complainant taken into custody.

2200 Block, Felicity Court. Domestic disturbance. Woman wielding shovel hacks at wide-screen television set in driveway. Under canopy of tree in front yard, shirtless man sits on case of beer, pounding brewskies, watching woman, offering profane commentary. Above him, slung into limbs and branches, wet laundry drips heavily—hanged men left in the rain. Dogs next door yowl and bay. Officers cruise by, tap brakes, assess scene, nod assent, hightail it out of there.

2500 Block, Fairmount Street. Criminal trespass and vandalism. Spivak’s House of Wicker. Wicker chewed and chopped chain-saw-style. Officers move silently into gray wicker haze, powdered with wicker dust, in awe of the sheer totality of wicker havoc.

1900 Block, Cypress Avenue. Illegal assembly. Demonstrators blocking access to public health clinic, refuse order to disperse. All available units dispatched for crowd control. Officers gathered at staging area, briefed on use-of-force policy, on arrest and intake procedures, then sicced on crowd. Officers stoked, fired up, ready to rhumba. Hand-to-hand maneuvers seemingly long forgotten—armlocks and choke holds, the supple choreography of baton work—all return facilely to muscle memory. Crowd control progresses smoothly. Officer [Shield #325] musses hair clobbering balky demonstrator. A scrawny little hank slips loose, nestles against her right cheek, framing the side of her face like an open parenthesis. A semaphore of possibility, officer [Shield #647] muses, spotting her while clobbering
his
balky demonstrator. Amid the tussle and heat of arrest and intake, she looks up, seeks him out, finds him. She smiles, waves shyly. From across the tactical field, he smiles, waves back, sticks out tongue. She is suddenly overcome, startled at how the sight of him affects her. It is not just love, or desire, but something profoundly less complex, as unadorned and simple as the Vehicle Code. Officer laughs, cries. Tearful and giddy, she whales on her demonstrator with what she realizes is joy in her heart. Demonstrators cuffed, processed, loaded onto County Transport Units. Assembly dispersed. Scene secured. Officers spent, pink and damp in the afterglow of crowd control. Cop Camaraderie ensues. Shirttails tucked, batons wiped down, cigarettes shared. Backs and butts slapped all around.

6700 Block, Coast Highway. Officers go to beach, park at overlook. Officers pooped, reposed. They do not speak. They sip double lattes, ponder view. A gash in the bruise-colored sky bleeds yellow. Sunshine leaks into the ocean, stains its surface with shimmering light. He looks over at her, notices a discoloration, a swelling on her left cheekbone. His hand reaches out, his fingers touch the wound, touch her. “You’re hurt,” he says. She smiles, whispers: “You should see the other guy.” They park their double lattes on dash, slip off their sunglasses, avert their eyes. They screw their faces against the jagged harshness of an unpolarized world, slip sunglasses back on. His hands reach for hers, their fingers clasp and enmesh, roil and swarm at the fourth finger of her left hand. Officers tug and pull, remove and park ring on dash. He reaches for her. She leans toward him; it is like falling. Officers fall. Afterward, they linger over their coffee. Wedding ring on dash glints in the shifting light, harmless as a bottle cap or a shiny old button, something a bird might snatch up. Officers watch a ball of sunlight flare up at earth’s edge like a direct hit. Officers assess scene, ascertain world to be beautiful.

2200 Block, Felicity Court. Domestic disturbance. Officers pull up, kill engine. They dawdle in Patrol Unit, fiddling with the mirrors and the radio, double-checking the parking brake. Officers sigh heavily, climb out, and assess scene. Garage door closed. Curtains in windows of home drawn. Officers walk up driveway, pick their way through the detritus of television set and washing machine. They knock on door, ring bell. No answer. Neighborhood quiet. Dogs next door quiet. Birds quiet. Everything, in fact, is quiet. The quiet of earplugs, of morgue duty, and of corridors at 3:00 a.m. The quiet before an alarm clock goes off. Officers backtrack down driveway, approach west side of house, move toward a gate in the fence that leads to backyard. They move gingerly across a saturated lawn, squishy beneath their feet. Soapy water oozes into the tracks they leave. Up ahead, against an exterior wall of house, a pile of freshly cut wood comes into view—one-by-four posts and whitewashed flatboards painted with black block letters. “LIFE” one of them reads. “MURDUR” reads another. Chain-sawed picket signs. Officers’ napes prickle, butts clench in autonomic response. They thumb the release tabs on their holsters, move toward gate. They lift latch, ease gate open. Above them, the sky clears and the sun breaks. The shadow of a distant airplane skims over them, glides across the lawn, disappears. Officers enter backyard. The back fence sags forward. Trellises and plant stakes list at crazy angles. A brick barbecue sits crumpled atop its sunken hearth slab. The deck along the west side of the house is a corrugation of collapsed planking. It is as if the earth here simply gave up, shrugged, and dropped six feet. Officers move along periphery of sinkhole toward the sliding patio doors that open onto deck. Their panes are shattered. The ground glitters with pebbles of safety glass. From within, cool air drifts out. And then they are hit, bowled over by a surge of vapors foul and thick—the redolence of mimosa clawing at their eyes and throats like some monstrous blossoming from somewhere inside the house. And then the noises. First, a loud muffled report—the only way to describe it. Then, rising from the basement—or from someplace deeper still—the robust glissandos of a chain saw, its motor throttling up and down, laboring mightily. And within this an indeterminate overtone—the cadence of voices, urgent and shrill. Shouting, or laughing. Or screaming. Officers unholster service revolvers, position themselves at either side of patio entry. They slip off their sunglasses, take this moment to let their eyes adjust to the dark inside. They look at each other. His eyes are dark brown, like coffee or good soil. Hers are gray, flat as lead except for the glint of a pearly chip in one iris. They do not speak. They love that they don’t have to say anything. Instead they reach down, check ammo pouches for extra clips, wipe palms on duty trousers. Eyes adjusted, they draw and shoulder their weapons. They brace their wrists, release their safeties, silently count three, and take a breath. Whereupon officers cross threshold, enter home.

Only Connect

Two men followed a third man up the street one night. His name was Bennett, and he had just left a party where the woman who’d invited him used him to flirt with somebody else. She worked with Bennett in the labs at the medical center. They were both researchers on the same projects, doing cutting-edge work in psychopharmacology, where the big bucks were. They made very good money, but her apartment was much nicer than his, and he wondered if she made more than he did. She lived on the northwest slope of Capitol Hill, in a secure building that was a hundred years old and meticulously restored. It had a lobby with thick, bloodred carpet and stamped copper panels on the ceiling, and a cage elevator that rattled and clanked pleasingly as it took you up. Her apartment had many windows, and they all looked out over Lake Union and the boats huddled in their slips, and at the Olympic range beyond. As the party progressed, dusk settled and you could watch the snow-drape on the mountains sparkle in the last light before sinking into shadows. You could watch the Space Needle brighten, shimmering and upright in the clear night. It was his first time in her apartment, and he liked it, the spectacular view and the tasteful and elegant minimalism of the decor, uncluttered and clean. He had hoped something would come of this invitation, that being invited by her might mean something. But she had a lot of friends, and the place was teeming with strangers. Bennett was born here, and although she had been hired less than a year ago, she knew more people than he ever did.

He had somehow ended up with her in a corner of her crowded kitchen. They were seated across from each other at a tiny breakfast table, and she was telling him about a trip she was planning over Christmas, a trek along the Inca Trail in Peru. He was asking her questions to keep the talk going, and she was answering them, when a man detached himself from a nearby clique, smiled briskly at Bennett, and leaned against the wall behind her, holding a beer bottle in his hands. Bennett recognized him. He was a popular barista at an espresso bar at the medical center. He was young, narrow and pale, with lank black hair that flopped into his eyes. He wore one of those expensive secondhand bowling shirts that you find in expensive secondhand clothing shops.

“I heard it’s not so dangerous down there anymore,” Bennett was saying to her. “Not like it used to be, I mean.”

She shrugged. “It’s dangerous everywhere.”

“I suppose.”

“It could be dangerous right here.” She leaned forward, toward Bennett. “You never know where danger lurks.”

He looked at her and smiled. When Bennett was confused, he smiled. Her eyes glimmered. She smiled back. She was playing with him.

“I could be in danger right now,” she said. The barista behind her was grinning, picking at the label on his beer bottle, and Bennett realized that he was the one she was playing with. Two women appeared and tugged her out of her chair and swept her away. The barista looked at Bennett, toasted him, and tipped his beer back. Bennett watched the cartilage in the barista’s neck bob up and down. Then he got up and left.