First Avenue (5 page)

Did she want something extra? Is that why she met him at the water, knowing there would be talk? There would always be talk. She would worry about talk when there was something to talk about.

For her there was nothing to talk about—not since the departure of the graduate student who had been her friend since college. He was put off by the hours she worked, by the work stories she had mistakenly told him, by the blue shirts she kept at the far end of her closet along with her gun, which was hidden, but not well enough. How could she hide everything? He said he didn’t want to make love to somebody who had a gun in the closet and could shoot him afterward like one of those spiders who are killed by the female after they have provided their service. “Shoot you?” she had asked. It was a metaphor of their relationship, he claimed. Clearly it was not love he was talking about, but how could she explain the emptiness she felt when he put the telephone down ahead of her, and she heard the hollow buzz on the line? It was just as well, she thought. A spider, of all things. She wished him spiders forever.

The waitress came for the third time with the coffeepot, and for the second time
Katherine
placed her hand over her cup to ward off any attempt to refill it.
Mike
had another cup. He didn’t have to think about the consequences of drinking it. The waitress, whose name was
Mildred
, managed to pour a good amount of coffee around the cup as well as into it. She was always careless with the coffee on
Mike
’s third cup. He scrambled for napkins to catch it before it ran onto his pants. It was a joke, but he didn’t get it. He swore under his breath at what he supposed was her incompetence, while Katherine stifled her laughter and caught Mildred’s sisterhood glance as she strode away with the coffeepot.

Mildred was a good soul. She had seen enough cops that they didn’t intimidate her, and she knew when they should be moving on. There were a few she didn’t mind staying longer, but
Mike
was not one of them. When it was
Katherine
’s turn to pay, she always left a generous tip for
Mildred
.

There was a call waiting for them when they cleared, a continuation of the night’s disturbances. Like troubled waves that broke across the battered wall of civility, these disturbances would build and roll all through the night. Most smelled of alcohol. It continued to amaze Katherine how little it took for people to disagree when they were drunk, and it made her wonder if they should try prohibition again. Occasionally somebody went to jail, but usually it was “you go this way and you go that way,” a concept to solve problems that seemed difficult for some to understand without hand signals and guided directions. It would be cheaper if the city hired tour guides to walk in and out of the bars.

Mike drove across the oncoming traffic and double-parked in front of the Driftwood Tavern. They got out of the car at the same time.
Katherine
stuck her nightstick into its wire holster so that it dangled from her left hip and held the flashlight in her left hand. She looked up and down the sidewalk. Sometimes the troublemaker was heading down the street. Sometimes he or she was approaching. She went inside the tavern ahead of
Mike
and stopped close to the doorway to allow her eyes to adjust to the dim light.
Mike
stopped behind her.

It was clear that something was wrong, something more than the “unwanted customer” that Radio had described. At the middle of the bar one man sat alone, hunched on a stool and protecting his drink like an alley cat with a piece of food. The bartender stood at the far end of the bar. All the other customers, the whole distinguished group, sat at tables as far from the solitary man as possible. Everybody was looking up—everybody except the man at the bar.

The bartender lifted the bar gate and came toward them in a semi-circle with the solitary man in the center. Keeping her focus on the man at the bar,
Katherine
waited for the bartender to approach. At the same time she positioned her right hand closer to her gun.

“He’s got a knife,” the bartender said in a voice low enough to indicate secrecy, but not so low that the man at the bar could not hear. Still this man did not move except to sip from the glass, and he did not look at them. “A hunting knife. He’s got it in his coat pocket. The guy’s crazy. He said I shorted him and threatened to kill me if I didn’t fill his glass. I want him out of here.”

The bartender wasn’t sure to whom he was talking. His eyes darted back and forth between
Katherine
and
Mike
and finally settled over her head as he finished.
Katherine
walked to the right side of the bar, staying ten feet from the man who now picked her up in his vision.
Mike
moved closer, too, but stayed between the man and the door. She put her right hand on the bar and lifted her right foot onto the railing as though she were about to begin a conversation.

“We’ve got a complaint about you,”
Katherine
told the man. “Can you tell me what’s going on?”

The solitary drinker studied his beer glass and turned it slowly on the counter as if there were instructions written around its circumference. He had a big, clenched, whiskered jaw and wore a dirty jacket.

“I want you to take the knife out of your pocket and drop it on the floor. We’ll talk about the bartender shorting you after that.”

The man ignored her, although she knew he was watching her. He gave her the creeps. It was clear that he would not talk down easily. She flicked on her flashlight and shone it on the man’s body. He seemed to wince.

“Okay, mister, let’s drop the knife,”
Katherine
said with as much authority as she could muster. She was disappointed by the faintness of her voice.

The man grunted and took another long drink from his glass. Then he swiveled around on the barstool and faced her. The lines of his face formed a cruel expression, and she knew at once that he was no harmless drunk.

“Come and get it.”

Without moving closer, she shone the concentrated spot from her flashlight directly into his eyes and unsnapped the leather strap across her gun with a flick of her thumb. She placed her hand on her gun handle but left the gun in its holster. He shielded his eyes with his left hand and squinted without fear into her soul.

“What are you going to do, bitch? Shoot me? Yeah, go ahead.”

Mike moved toward the man so that he was closer to
Katherine
but still out of the man’s reach. The bartender moved, too, farther toward the corner away from them.

From his new position
Mike
spoke to the man. “Drop the knife. Nobody wants any trouble.”

“Here, you want the knife?” He stood up and pulled the hunting knife from his coat pocket. He held the knife in a tightfisted grasp away from his body. “I want the bitch to come and get it.”

The man had a long ugly scar that traversed his face from his right ear to the curl of his sneering mouth. It showed he was intimately familiar with knives.
Katherine
had no intention of stepping forward and sharing his experience. She drew her gun and brought it to the level of her flashlight. The light acted as her gun sight.
Mike
drew his gun at the same time. The man’s expression didn’t change, as if he had expected to see the guns. Slowly she lowered the beam of light from his face down his body to his crotch. In a voice only he was meant to hear and from a source she didn’t know existed, she said, “Drop the knife or I’ll blow them away.”

She could feel how she had begun to hate this man and how her face had begun to resemble his and her voice his and her meaning. The man’s sneer faltered, and despite the strongest effort of will, he glanced down to the target clearly illuminated by her flashlight. The light beacon did not move.

“I got witnesses here,” he said.

“For what?” she asked. Her voice was no longer faint, and the light didn’t move.

“Bitch,” he growled as he dropped the knife and began to look around the room for his indifferent witnesses. The light remained a moment more as a potent reminder of his impotent protest.

“Turn around,” she said. “Put your hands on the bar.”

With the least possible degree of cooperation he turned around, and she saw him again look down toward his crotch. She wondered if he thought the light might shine through his backside and expose him still.
Mike
holstered his gun and stepped forward to handcuff him. He kicked the man’s legs out farther and frisked him. He pulled one hand back at a time and clamped handcuffs on the man’s wrists. She lowered her gun but did not put it back into its holster until the handcuffs were in place.

A steady flow of abuse streamed from the man’s mouth once he was handcuffed.
Mike
pushed the man’s stomach against the bar and used his handcuffed hands as a lever to tilt him so his face pressed against the soiled counter. Then he reached down to the floor for the knife.

“Let’s get this jerk out of here,” he said.

“I’ll get the bartender’s name,”
Katherine
said.

The bartender tried to fade into the back wall like one of the ancient, yellowed beer posters. He began to fool with some empty glasses resting on a table and didn’t look up from his busywork as she approached with her notebook.

“I need your name,” she said.

“Look, I just wanted the guy out of here. I don’t want to get mixed up in any trouble.”

“Yeah right,” she said in response to the line often repeated when the trouble was over. “You can either cooperate here, or I’ll bring in another car. We’ll close the bar and take you downtown and talk about it there. Your choice.”

“You can’t do that.”

“Yes I can.”

“
Bill
Webster
.”

“Let me see your driver’s license.” She saw that he had given her his correct name, and she wrote it down quickly along with the other information they needed for their report—address, age, telephone numbers. “Has he ever been here before?”

“No. First time I ever saw him.”

“Tell me what happened. Make it short.”

The bartender repeated the story he had told them before. He added bits of manhood—how he had stood up to the scarred man and only poured the drink to avoid trouble. “You sure got his attention, lady, I mean officer. Did you see the way he looked down at himself?”

“Come on, Murphy, let’s get this guy out of here.”

“That’s all I need for now,”
Katherine
said and abruptly walked away from the bartender.

The arrested man continued to talk, even with his face pressed into the bar. He was getting more worked up the more he talked.
Mike
’s jaw was like the taut line of the other man’s arms, which he had leveraged to their maximum expression.
Katherine
grabbed the man at the elbow, and together she and
Mike
jerked him away from the bar and bumped him through the door and out to their car.
Mike
gave her the keys that he had stuck in his belt buckle, and she quickly unlocked and opened the doors. He pushed the offender headfirst onto the backseat and followed behind him without releasing his grip on the handcuffs. From the opposite door she pulled the man toward her as far as she could. Then
Mike
held him down with one knee while he crouched inside the car.

Katherine drove rapidly toward the station and kept watch on the backseat to make certain that
Mike
was all right. It should have been her place.
Mike
had been the driver. While still blocks away, the suspect began to fight and
Mike
rode him like a rodeo rider. She drove faster then, turning her emergency lights on before each intersection and gunning through them when they were clear. They bucked up the ramp into the police garage and the roar of their engine reverberated from the walls of G deck. She screeched to a stop, taking up all the prisoner unload stalls next to the jail elevator, and jumped out to open the back door. The prisoner’s feet flailed the air and kicked her in the chest. She was knocked back several feet, but she didn’t have time to catch her breath.
Mike
had all he could handle just to hold the man down. He was like a wild animal in a cage. She ran around to the other door and flung it open. Together, they pulled the man headfirst out of the car and dumped him onto the concrete deck. Two other officers who were coming out of the patrol report room saw the commotion and hurried over to help. All four cops jumped onto the man’s backside, and there was hardly room for each of them to get a piece. She had the right leg, which she held down with the weight of her body, while the man thrashed and screamed insanely.