Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
“Maybe,” Cash offered with little conviction, “he just wants to be a
real
cop.”
“Yeah,” the chairman said, reaching once more for his fork. “And I’m Harry-fuckin’-Truman.” He leaned in across the table, speaking more softly. Cash had to strain his ears to make out the words. “Camden has about twenty-three hundred violent crimes per hundred thou population, compared to the national average of about four hundred fifty. It’s been named the most dangerous city in the entire country time after time. The state had to take over the entire police department and school system because they’re so fucked up. Tell me, why would the son of Curtis Miles, the guy who wants to be governor, maybe president someday, want to work in Camden? The kid’s a Rider University graduate, for Christ’s sake.” The chairman sat back. “He’s a fuckin’ plant for his old man. You have any idea what motivated and hostile eyes can find in that environment?”
Cash sipped his wine before responding. “So you figure his father for a white knight sending his kid in to help?”
The chairman laughed. “White knight my ass. He’s no better than anybody else. He’s already greased some wheels for his son. The kid isn’t on the job six months, and he’s assigned to HIDTA already. The
worst
fuckin’ place for him, far as we’re concerned. No, Curtis Miles is no white knight. He’s just so ambitious he’s willing to throw his own son into the fire to help get him what he needs to nail Democrats.”
Cash shook his head. “We’ve chosen a nasty business for ourselves.”
“Yes. And that kid working High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas can turn things even nastier.”
“Why are you telling me all this?”
The chairman shrugged. “You’re the union lawyer. Sooner or later, this kid will most likely wind up in your lap. I want you to understand what you’ll be dealing with. I haven’t survived in this shit all these years without learning to anticipate.”
Cash drained his wine glass and reached for the bottle. “I understand.”
Now, forty minutes after leaving his bed, Frank Cash stared out the hospital window into the Camden night and sighed. He remembered long-ago advice from his politician father.
There are winners and losers. Be a winner. It makes life bearable
.
He turned as the door to the small consultation room opened. It was the union representative, Peter Negron.
“Hello, Pete.”
The man entered the room and closed the door softly behind him. “Hello, Mr. Cash. I didn’t figure you’d come down personally.”
“Yes, well, I have. Has Miles been sedated?”
“Yeah, the chief resident saw him soon as we got here. They jacked the kid up on Xanax. Five minutes later, two spooks from the county prosecutor’s office showed up. I told ’em the kid was medicated and couldn’t talk to them … They left, said they’d see him tomorrow. They seemed pissed off.”
Cash grunted. “They’ll get over it. We needed to buy some time so I can get a handle on this.”
Negron nodded. “Okay. I was with Miles when the shooting went down. We were workin’ HIDTA citywide, me and Miles and Sanchez.”
“Where’d it happen?”
“Line Street, between South 6th and Roberts.”
“Tell me what happened.”
When Negron finished, Cash ran a hand through his hair thoughtfully. “Sounds pretty clean,” he said. Then pointedly added, “
If
that’s how it went down.”
Negron smiled and raised his right hand. “I swear on my eyes, counselor, I ain’t dumb enough to lie to the lawyer. ’Specially for this kid.”
With their eyes locked, Cash nodded. “Go get him. Bring him to me.”
Negron turned and left.
When Miles entered the room, Cash was immediately stricken by his youthful appearance. Although twenty-two, he looked seventeen. His black hair was long, unkempt. It spilled over the collar of the faded navy peacoat he wore. Dried vomit stained the front panel of the coat, its sour odor touching at Cash’s nostrils. Dark blood was splattered across the left cuff and forearm. The young man’s eyes were hollow and listless. A stubble of light whiskers covered his chin and cheeks, giving him a dirty, unpleasant look. While the clothing and grooming fit well with Miles’s antinarcotic assignment, he seemed a little too comfortable in the outfit. Cash found a mild disliking begin to dawn.
“Have a seat, Miles,” he said, and watched as the cop slid a chair back from the small, round table. Cash sat opposite him, folding his hands on the smooth plastic tabletop. How much bad news, he wondered, had been discussed in this very same room?
“All right,” he said as Miles’s eyes lifted to meet his own. “My name is Frank Cash. My law firm represents members of the local chapter of your union, the Fraternal Order of Police. I’m here to help you deal with all this.”
Cash saw Miles’s gaze fall away, dropping to the tabletop, his body shaking with a sudden chill. His appearance seemed to suddenly morph into that of a frightened boy caught in some youthful transgression and summoned to his father’s study. Cash found his initial suspicions and dislike begin to waver. In all his fifty-one years, he had never taken a life, not even that of a small animal or rodent. And here was this boy, barely out of school, who had violently sent a man to hell in what surely must have been a horrifying, desperate moment.
“All right,” Cash repeated, gentler this time, softer. “State, county, and city headhunters will be hounding you tomorrow, son. I need you to tell me what happened,
everything
, every detail. Get it straight in your head. Let’s see where I can help. Just start from the beginning and go slowly. Tell me everything, even if it doesn’t sound very good. It’ll sound worse said cold tomorrow, believe me.”
Miles raised his eyes. “Negron said he told you everything already.”
Cash nodded. “Yes. He told me what
he
did and what he
thinks
he saw. I need
you
to tell me what you did. What you saw.”
Miles’s eyes filled with tears. “Yes. I understand.”
The young policeman shifted himself in his seat, fixed an unblinking stare at the darkened window behind Cash, and began to tell his story.
“We were on patrol, the three of us, me in the front recorder seat, Negron driving, Sanchez in back behind me. It musta been about two in the morning. We were cruising known drug locales; just eyeballing. Cold, crappy night like this, most of the deals were going down indoors. Anyway, we wind up on Line Street, heading east, just rolling past the broken-down houses along there.”
“Where is Line Street?” Cash asked.
Miles shrugged. “’Bout six, seven blocks south of here, just east of Broadway.”
“What neighborhood is that?”
Another shrug. “I don’t know. Whitman Park, I guess.”
“Go on.”
“So we’re just rolling along, real slow—maybe ten, fifteen tops. The street is narrow, a few parked cars here and there, some just abandoned. So we cross South 6th Street heading toward Roberts. Northwest corner of Line and 6th is an empty lot where some condemned buildings got demoed. There’s a fence around it, chainlink. Even though we’re kinda looking around as we roll, none of us saw this old lady till she was right in front of us, like she just appeared out of the dark, you know? Negron almost ran her over. Well, she makes us for cops and starts banging on the hood of the car and screaming at us.”
“Was she black? Hispanic, Caucasian, what?”
Miles glanced briefly at Cash. “Hispanic.” He paused for a moment before continuing. “Anyway, she’s all excited, so Sanchez gets out of the backseat and approaches her. He tins her and starts talking in Spanish, and she starts bawling and pointing to the only house on the north side of Line Street that’s still standing. It was the house she had come out of.”
“Had you seen her come out of it?”
“No, like one second the street was empty, the next second there she was, in front of the car.” Cash noticed the trembling begin to intensify, apparently overcoming the dosage of Xanax the cop had received. When Miles spoke again, there was a rise of pitch in his voice. “So anyway, I get out of the car and Sanchez winks at me and makes a face, like he’s saying,
Look at this old bitch, do you believe this?
”
“How old would you say she was?”
Miles shifted in his seat and leaned forward slightly, still directing his words at the black rectangle of the window. “Old. Pushing sixty. I don’t know.”
Cash smiled slightly. “Go on.”
“So when I reach them, she starts speaking English, telling us there’s a black guy up on the second floor of the house, been acting crazy all night, people coming and going and she was trying to sleep and told him something and he cursed her and tried to hit her, and she got scared and ran out and saw us. So by now, Negron is standing there too, and he asks her if she called the cops. She says no, there’s no phone in the house, no water, no electricity, nothing. We can see it’s boarded up, abandoned, and we figure her for a squatter. She tells us the black guy deals H, sometimes crack, the building is his base, everybody is afraid of him and all this kind of shit. So Sanchez starts writing it down, you know, to sort of appease her a little. We figure maybe she’s stoned, you know, old and stoned and half nuts. So then Negron says he feels like a little action, let’s check it out. Well, I’m a little bored myself, it was a slow tour and I figure, what the hell. So Sanchez stays at the car with the old lady to call in our ten-twenty. Me and Negron start walking toward the house.”
“Describe the house.”
“Two-story brick, like all of them around there. Most of the windows boarded up. There was a narrow, covered front porch with side steps leading up to it. The front door was missing, it was just a dark open hole. The east side of the house was just like the west, another empty lot.”
“All right. Go on.”
“Well, me and Negron get to the house and I walk around the porch to the side steps. Just as I reach them, I hear Negron cursing. He stepped in dog shit. At least he
hoped
it was dog shit. The place really stinks—piss, garbage, shit, everything. The nearest streetlight is burned out, it’s dark as hell …”
Now Miles’s body seemed to tighten on itself, the trembling turning sharply into a steady shake. He tried desperately to moisten his mouth before speaking again.
“So, I’m laughing at Negron, he’s wiping his shoe on the edge of the porch. I start up the steps.”
“How many steps?”
“Four, maybe five.”
“Where’s your gun at this point?”
“Well, I have two guns on me. My Glock is in a belt holster under my coat, and a .38 revolver is in the right coat pocket.”
“Both regulation sidearms?”
“Yeah.”
“Is your coat open or buttoned up?”
“Open. You know, it was warm inside the car, so it’s open.”
Cash glanced at the now tightly closed coat, the warmth of the room unable to reach Miles’s chill. “Go on.”
“The old lady told us this guy didn’t have a weapon, none that she saw, anyway. We figured it for a dispute between two homeless squatters, we’d check it out and then leave. So while Negron is still scraping shit off his shoe, I go up maybe two, three steps and I hear something coming from inside the doorway.”
“What did you hear?”
Miles’s shoulders twitched and his right hand jerked out of his lap, fisting. “A sharp double metallic click. Like a weapon being locked and loaded. Negron heard it too. He said,
Fuck!
and I saw him duck in front of the porch and go for his gun. I just stood there, frozen.”
Cash sat back in his seat, eyeing the young, trembling cop. “Go on,” he said softly.
“All of a sudden this guy, this enormous fuckin’ guy, is right there, right in the doorway, maybe eight, nine feet away from me. A huge, crazy-looking guy, and he’s got a fuckin’ rifle in his hands. A
rifle
!”
The words were pouring out now, and Cash held his questions. Let him spit it out, get it all out and over with. The details, actual or invented, could wait.
“I almost peed myself. I mean, this guy looked like a real maniac, sweating, cursing to himself, stepping out onto the porch and swinging that rifle back and forth.” Miles spasmed slightly. He took a deep breath, held it briefly, then continued. “So I say,
Hey
, you know, like a fuckin’ idiot, and the guy zeroes in on me, he don’t hesitate for a second. I’m telling you he was
crazy
, and he starts yelling at me, something about his old lady, about his kid, something like that, and he’s pointing the rifle at me and I know he’s gonna kill me, and I’ve got my left hand on the banister, you know, I was climbing the stairs, and so I push myself backward. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing, just throwing myself down the stairs. Then I hear this tremendous explosion and there’s a giant flash of light and I’m rolling down the stairs into the dirt, and Jesus Christ, I swear I did pee myself. I mean, I felt it, you know, the warm piss in my pants. I thought it was blood, I thought I was shot. Mr. Cash, I swear to God, I don’t remember taking it out, but my .38 was in my hands and I’m pointing it at the guy and he’s swinging his aim over toward Negron who’s down behind the front of the porch yellin’ something about us being cops and the guy starts screamin’ he’s gonna kill us and he swings the rifle back at me, right at my fuckin’ chest, and he jacks another round into the chamber and my gun goes off and the guy just blinks like bullets can’t hurt him, and so I figure I missed. Then he fires again and I think I’m hit again, I’m going to die, and I start firing over and over. The last shot I see his shirt, he’s wearing a T-shirt, and I swear to God I see the shirt tear. It’s like slow motion. The shirt gets pushed in, like somebody poked him with a pencil or something, and then it pops out, out of the hole in his chest, and it’s torn, you know, the shirt is torn and it’s red with blood, and it just popped in, then out of his chest. Blood sprayed out of the hole—some of it hit me. It was like slow motion. Then he falls down, sits down actually. Negron goes rushing past me. The guy drops the rifle and it slides down the steps and Negron, he’s all red and excited and he sticks his Glock in the guy’s face and says,
You son of a bitch
, and the guy just plops onto his back and his head hits the porch, and that’s it. That was it.”