Paul Bacon (23 page)

A minute later, I was standing on the stoop of Mr. Thompson’s brownstone looking up and down the street for Clarabel. I didn’t
see her or our patrol car, so I picked up my radio and said, “Two-eight Eddie on the air?”

I repeated my transmission twice, and my cell phone started to ring. I picked it up and saw that Clarabel was calling.

“Where are you?” I said.

“I’m in Sector Charlie now, with Samuels,” she said. “The lieu pulled me off. Didn’t you hear him raising us?”

“I was kind of busy,” I told her. “When are you coming back?”

“I’m not,” she said. “We’re the only sector in the rundown.”

I was out of paperwork, so I asked Clarabel, “You have any blank sixty-ones?”

“We have some in the car,” she said.

“Can you swing by?” I said.

“We’re out on a job now. We’ll come as soon as we can,” she said, and hung up.

Ninety minutes later, Clarabel and Samuels had still not arrived with the paperwork. I tried calling her on my cell phone
and got her voice mail. So far, no one had showed up at my location, so I called the Two-eight desk to talk to a supervisor.
Maybe no one else knew I was even here.

The person who answered the phone said, “Captain Carlyle.”

“
Captain
Carlyle?” I said; he was just a cop.

“Oh, Bacon,” Carlyle said flatly. “Sorry, precinct’s closed. Call back on the day tour.”

“No, I’m on a DOA, and nobody’s coming!” I shouted.

“Whoa, bro. Take a pill,” said Carlyle.

“Is Sector Charlie still out on a job?”

“How would I know?”

“You’re at the desk, look on the computer,” I said.

“We have computers?” said Carlyle.

Clarabel and Samuels showed up about a half hour later, looking as if they were having a great time together. Samuels was
usually in an upbeat mood, but I was surprised to see Clarabel smiling and laughing in uniform. She always seemed so morose
when she worked with me.

Samuels drove their patrol car up to the brownstone and parked next to a fire hydrant. Rolling down his window, he waved me
toward the backseat and said, “Hop in. You must be freezing.”

I opened the back door and took a seat in the part of the car where normally only perps got to sit. I found it surprisingly
spacious, with much more room than the front compartment. There was no transmission hump or MDT between the seats, so I leaned
over on the wide cushion until I was totally horizontal.

“Gross!” Clarabel said from the passenger seat.

“Ah, man,” said Samuels. “You don’t know who’s been back there.”

“You don’t know what I’ve just seen,” I replied. Compared to Mr. Thompson’s apartment, this was the Plaza Hotel.

“Was he a decomp?” said Samuels.

“With a capital D,” I said.

Clarabel asked me, “What was the rest of his apartment like?”

“Nothing worse than you saw, but his stove had been on all this time. I turned it off and opened the windows in case there
were any gas leaks.”

Clarabel laughed. “That’s the
worst
thing to do.”

I pushed myself upright. “Why is that the worst thing to do?” I said, talking through the tiny holes in the Plexiglas partition.

Samuels said, “You let in more air, you let in more oxygen.”

I said, “But isn’t a room full of oxygen less flammable than a room full of gas?”

“Did you smell gas?”

“I didn’t.”

“There you go,” said Samuels. “If you’re worried about a possible fire, the only reason you open a window is to jump out of
it.”

“And the decomp,” Clarabel said, pinching her nose.

“Right. Fresh air speeds up the smell big-time,” said Samuels. “How long since you opened that window?”

“A couple hours,” I said. Not so long.

“Oh, boy,” said Samuels. “Whoever sees him next is going to need multiple barf bags.”

“That’s terrible,” I said. “I was only trying to help.”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Samuels. “At least you don’t have to go back. You did get all the information, didn’t you?”

“You bet,” I said, pulling out Mr. Thompson’s wallet and proudly holding his welfare card up to the partition. “See? Full
name and date of birth.”

Samuels said, “What else you got?”

“What else is there?” I said.

“A next of kin,” said Samuels.

I fell back on the seat and said, “Shhhhit.”

“You forgot to find a next of kin?” said Clarabel.

“Wait,” I said, sitting up straight again. “That girl said he doesn’t
have
any next of kin.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” said Samuels. “Without a next of kin, you have to do a missing-person report, in case someone
comes looking for him.”

“No!” I cried. “That will take forever!”

“It’s just a missing,” said Samuels. “I’m sure you don’t want to go back up in there.”

I looked at my watch: nine thirty P.M., two hours left until end of tour. I tapped my upper lip. “So how does one establish
next of kin? What am I looking for?”

“You’re not looking for anything,” said Samuels. “You could go through all of his stuff and still not find what you need.
You’re gonna wait outside for everyone, then you’re going to go back to the house and do the missing.”

I reached for the inside door handle and pulled it to get out. The door didn’t budge. This, I realized, was because I was
in the back of a rolling jail cell. I asked Samuels, “Can you unlock my door?”

Samuels hesitated, until Clarabel said to him, “Just let him go. This is what I’m talking about.”

I was about to call her out for that little jab, but I heard my inside door lock click open, and I leapt at the chance to
escape.

Inside the building, the rancid smell had reached the first floor and was at least twice as bad as before. It got progressively
worse as I climbed the stairs; by the time I reached Mr. Thompson’s apartment, I was on my knees with the dry heaves. After
I got used to the stench in the hallway, I stood up and opened the apartment door. The smell of the freshly oxygenated corpse
broke over my head like a twenty-foot wave, sending me back to the floor. I eventually got up again and bounded over Mr. Thompson’s
decaying body, heading straight for the mantel. In a second flat, I was shoving envelopes and letters and everything I could
into my pockets.

Back outside, I saw that Sector Charlie was gone, but they’d left me a blank report under a brick at the top of the stoop.
I sat down on the steps and emptied my pockets, then pored over everything for a possible next of kin. After only a few minutes,
I found it: a cosigner on the deceased’s bank account named James Thompson. He might have been a son or a brother, but all
I needed was a name.

I could still sign out on time if everyone else in the process showed up very soon. This seemed unlikely with our staff stretched
so thin, but the lack of personnel turned out to be a blessing. From the Two-eight, I needed a patrol sergeant, a platoon
leader, and a detective. With none of the usual people available, a lieutenant from the detective squad was dispatched to
my job and served as three supervisors in one. Then, with an hour left to go, EMS, the coroner, and the morgue wagon came
almost simultaneously. I just waited downstairs while they finished the job, then took my half of the toe tag as they wheeled
Mr. Thompson’s body bag out the door.

The paramedics gave me a ride back to the station house, where I met Clarabel by the sign-out sheet in the lobby. After she
signed her name, I asked to borrow her pen. She froze with her hand still in the air and said, “You can’t be done already.”

“Impressed?” I said, plucking the pen out of her fingers and signing myself out on time.

“No,” she said. “You’re gonna kill yourself.”

CHAPTER 29

I
WOKE UP THE NEXT DAY in the grips of magnet-bed, just as bad as ever. It seemed that overtime was not my biggest enemy on
the job. Thinking back to the lengths I’d gone to wrap things up before end of tour, I wondered if the culprit was just plain
old stress. This may have been an obvious conclusion for some, but not for me. In my family of workaholics, if you didn’t
feel as though you were being pulled in ten directions at once, you weren’t applying yourself. I’d come of age in the 1980s
as well, when job-related stress was just another accessory in the yuppie lifestyle.

After the DOA, I was probably as low as I could go. I showed up at work the next afternoon feeling miserable, and when I put
on my uniform, I did not get my usual rush of energy. It was my turn to drive, so after roll call I begged Clarabel to let
me take shotgun, and she grudgingly obliged.

Halfway through our tour, a security holding job at the Old Navy clothing store came over when our frequency was quiet. I
picked it up right away—our patrol sergeant might have been listening—and told Central we were two minutes out from the location.
In fact, we were at least a half hour away; this was how we punished the store security guards for calling us in the first
place. Since chronic shoplifters tended to steal things they would later sell for drugs, arresting them only amplified their
withdrawal symptoms. They could be rather unpleasant people to have handcuffed to a chair in your office for any period of
time, so our thinking was: The longer the security guards at Old Navy had to spend with the perp, the more likely they’d just
cut him loose, as they often did.

But they had quotas, too, just like we did, and even if our stalling tactics hadn’t made any difference, we’d still take at
least a half hour to get there, because, with a long night of infuriating work ahead, we’d always stop first to get food,
then park on a side street and take our time eating. It was a matter of professional dignity to never let a nonemergency come
ahead of one’s personal comfort. Nine times out of ten we’d get away with murder, so to speak. That tenth time, though, it
could get ugly.

The Old Navy security guard started things on a sour note, describing the suspect in subhuman terms as he led us toward the
back of the store. “He, she, what ever.
It
seems more appropriate.”

As we continued through the busy retail outlet, walking around clothing displays and weaving through customers, Clarabel asked
the guard, “What’d he try to take?”

“A couple sweaters as usual,” the man said. “He-she’s done this a half dozen times before.”

“Has he ever been locked up?” said Clarabel.

“Nah,” the guard said. “Usually I don’t waste my time with you guys.”

“We appreciate that,” Clarabel said curtly.

“No offense or anything,” the guard added. “I mean, I was on the job myself, so I know how it works.”

Hearing this, I sized up the man anew, noticing his bad posture and sizable paunch. Lots of people claimed to have been “on
the job” because they’d worn some kind of uniform in the past. I liked to put these types on the spot now and again, so I
asked the man, “You were a police officer somewhere?”

“Somewhere?” he said. “I was a cop in the Two-eight. I retired in 2001.”

I must have gone pale, because the man laughed at me and said, “Yep, this is what you got to look forward to.”

Moving on to more pressing concerns, I asked him, “So why’d you call us to night?”

“ ’Cuz he went totally apeshit tonight, and I can’t get him out of the security office. He’s been getting worse by the minute,
so you probably should’ve shown up earlier.”

“What’s he on?” I said.

“Crack, I think. I found a stem in his shirt pocket.”

Arriving in front of the security office door, I could hear the perp crying on the other side. His long, hysterical sobs made
him sound like a six-year-old who’d stubbed his toe, and I pictured him looking rather benign. I asked the guard if I could
take a quick look at him anyway.

“Be careful,” the guard said while pulling a ring of keys off his belt. “Don’t let him see your uniform until you absolutely
have to. I told him I was calling EMS, not the cops.”

“Is he even cuffed?” Clarabel asked him.

The guard said, “He was, but I had to uncuff him to get him to shut up.”

Clarabel shook her head at the guard, and said to me, “I think we should get another sector here before we do anything.”

I was hoping for a more expedient plan. “Everyone’s out on jobs,” I reminded her.

“Then we’ll wait,” she said.

Right
, I thought for the first time ever. Waiting was good. Waiting was not as stressful as rushing to sign out.

I raised Central for a nonemergency eighty-five at our location, thinking it might take a half hour for someone to respond.
An hour later, Clarabel and I were sitting in plastic chairs outside the security office, still waiting for backup. A regular
eighty-five would have immediately brought in cops from neighboring precincts if no one was available from our command, but
that was only for real emergencies. As it was, the perp was now snoring on the other side of the door.

“This is getting stupid,” said Clarabel. “Let’s go in.”

I walked back out to the sales floor and found the security guard to borrow his key. Returning to the office, I slipped the
key inside the lock and quietly turned the knob. I pushed the door open a crack and saw our perp sleeping in a chair in the
far corner. Even slumped forward in a seated position, he looked enormous. I closed the door again and told my partner what
we were up against.

“He’s gotta be at least six four, two hundred fifty pounds. That’s almost you and me put together. Maybe we should keep waiting.”

Clarabel wrinkled her nose, then picked up her radio and called Central for the rundown. The dispatcher said, “
No available units at
this time. The Two-eight is in backlog
.”

My partner and I looked at each other and sighed, then unsnapped our respective handcuff cases and pulled out our manacles.

I motioned Clarabel toward the door and said, “Ladies first.”

“Who you calling a lady?” Clarabel said, and stepped behind me.

I slowly opened the door again, but as it passed its midpoint, the hinges let out an alarming creak. On the chair, the suspect
stirred out of his sleep. He straightened his back and started looking around the room. I kept my face in the doorway while
keeping the rest of my body out of his sight. He turned to look at me with empty, bloodshot eyes.

“What’s your name, buddy?” I said cheerfully.

“Jer-ry,” he said slowly.

“You ready to see the doctor, Jerry?” I said. “He’s got some good stuff for you.”

Jerry’s eyes narrowed, and the corners of his mouth rose into a Cheshire cat grin. “Good stuff?”

“The best,” I assured him, then turned back to Clarabel and nodded.

I walked inside holding my cuffs behind my back, but as soon as Jerry saw my uniform, he jumped to his feet and backed himself
into a corner. “I’m not getting locked up! No! No! No!” he screamed in a surprisingly high voice for his size. Pulling his
hands up to his chest, he began trembling like an old woman who’d just seen a mouse in her kitchen.

He was bizarre, but he didn’t seem aggressive, so I stepped a little closer and tried to soothe him with lies about where
we wanted to take him. I had to say something to coax him out of the corner, because he was hemmed in by a filing cabinet
on one side and a large metal desk on the other.

While I kept Jerry occupied, Clarabel padded around the office furniture to get within cuffing distance. I matched my partner’s
steps from across the room, both of us inching nearer to our suspect, until we got too close. Jerry looked at Clarabel, then
at me, then back at her again, tensing up like he was going to run her over.

Clarabel pointed between his eyes and shouted, “You touch me, and I’ll fucking kill you!”

Jerry looked at me again. I stared back in dread. Apparently I wasn’t as intimidating as my partner, because Jerry plowed
right into me. The impact knocked us both to the floor and pushed the door closed. On our way down, Jerry’s elbow smashed
my rib cage. I gasped for air with my chest pinned to the floor.

Then Clarabel announced she was breaking out her pepper spray. I assumed she meant that she was going to use it on Jerry.
About three seconds later, I felt her mace searing my lips like liquid fire. Her bad aim turned out to be a big help. The
sudden, incredible pain gave me sudden, incredible strength, and I pushed my way out from under the giant and stood back up
again.

Jerry went into hysterics. He begged us to shoot him and started banging his head on the wall. Clarabel tried to get him in
cuffs, but I couldn’t help her out. After I got my wind back, I started to lose it again as her pepper spray went to work
on my respiratory system.

Jerry screamed himself out after a few minutes and lay facedown on the floor like he was asleep. His hands at his sides, he
was ready to cuff, and Clarabel was just about to get the first one on when the security guard opened the door and said, “What
the hell are you guys doing?”

Jerry sprang to life again when he heard the ex-cop’s voice. He sent Clarabel tumbling backward as he pushed himself up to
his feet. “You lied to me!” Jerry shouted, lunging at the guard.

I foolishly jumped between them to hold the shoplifter back. Tangled up in his massive arms, I got another taste of his elbow,
this time across my temple. The jolt made me black out for a few seconds. When I came to, Clarabel’s arms were wrapped around
me from behind, pulling me away from Jerry. In the midst of all this, the security guard pulled Clarabel’s radio out of its
holster and called for backup.

“Priority message, Central,” he said to our dispatcher. “Eighty-five forthwith to 300 West 125th Street. Repeat, eighty-five
forthwith to Old Navy security office.”

This was the last thing I heard before I came crashing down on the floor between Clarabel and Jerry. I’d succumbed to another
blackout. I woke up on my back to see the open doorway filled with cops. The half dozen men in blue were a welcome sight,
but I didn’t recognize any of them, and they all happened to be rushing toward me that very second. I rolled over like a log
to get out of their way, then crawled under the desk. Their collective weight on top of Jerry brought the tumult to a speedy
end, and I stretched out on the floor in relief.

I slipped out of the security office while my colleagues dealt with the shoplifter, figuring I’d put in my time for the night.
I walked past about fifteen cops mingling outside on the sales floor, and then past a store full of slack-jawed customers.
Stepping out of Old Navy, I gazed out at the mayhem on 125th Street. Flashing red-and-white roof lights of a dozen police
cars cast the entire area in a dizzying strobe effect. To my right and left, civilians were gathered behind yellow crime-scene
tape that was stretched waist-high across the sidewalk. On the other side of the four-lane street, about a hundred more people
were watching, some standing on the hoods and roofs of parked cars. An unmarked Chevy Impala streaked past us all, then did
a sharp J-turn in front of a city bus, which barely stopped in time. A plainclothes cop burst out of the Impala with a flashlight
in his hand and started using it to direct traffic away from the block.

Mesmerized, I walked right off the curb without looking where I was going. An incoming patrol car nearly mowed me down. I
leapt back out of the street and into the arms of a cop from the Two-six.

“Watch yerself, bro,” said the cop, plopping me back down on my feet, then walking into Old Navy with his partner, both laughing.

I stepped away from the curb and leaned against the nearest wall. I’d just started to relax when my long-forgotten friend
Bill Peters ducked under the yellow tape. “Look who’s a lazy hairbag now!” he said.

Seeing Bill again brought out my sarcastic streak. “How’d you get here so quick from the Impact Zone?” I asked him. “That’s
quite a hike on foot.”

Bill puffed up and said, “I’ve been in a sector for two years, bucko.”

“And I bet you wish you were back doing verticals,” I said.

Bill said, “I hate to say this. But for once, you and I agree.”

“The hate is mutual,” I said.

“I heard you’re working with your little loony-belle at last. I’m surprised to find you in one piece.”

“She just saved my life,” I told him, exaggerating a bit.

“Somebody has to. I don’t see anyone else from your precinct,” he said, referring to the fleet of police cars surrounding
us, all marked for outside commands.

Clarabel walked out of Old Navy, looking duly stunned by the scene before her.

Bill saw my partner and said, “Hey, the whole Two-eight is here now. Tell me, which one of you is Two, and which is Eight?”

Clarabel ignored Bill and walked toward me with the saddest eyes I’d ever seen on her. She stopped in front of me looking
restless. She put her arms out, then quickly pulled them back. She grabbed my hand instead, and I felt tears pouring down
my cheeks.

She touched my face and wiped away a few of the tears. “It’s over,” she said.

Gently, I pushed her hand away and said, “I know. I’m fine. It’s just the pepper spray.”

Clarabel started to giggle. “I’m so sorry about that,” she said, covering her mouth, then doubling over with laughter.

“It’s okay. I think it helped me get up. I’m glad you missed the perp. God knows what it would’ve done to him,” I said. I
laughed until my trachea burned, and I started to cough. I couldn’t stop coughing, and I wound up doubled over next to my
partner—a strange sight, I’m sure.

“Man,” said Bill, “This place is fucked-up.”

After he drifted off, Clarabel and I stood up straight and tried to collect ourselves. “So,” I said, trying not to laugh again.
“You want this collar?”

“I’ll take it,” she said. “You go home.”