Authors: John Katzenbach
She followed his eyes. There was an exterior set of stairs at either end of the flat, rectangular building. An open-air corridor ran the length of each of the three stories. She thought it was a singularly ugly set of buildings, and wondered how it had ever acquired its distinguished name. The politics of neglect, she thought. Martinez turned away just as Robinson returned his pistol to his shoulder harness. For an instant she tried to imagine what it was like for him or for Sergeant Lion-man or for any other black officer to come in the middle of the night to the King Apartments searching for another black man with a warrant for the first-degree murder of a white person. She
wanted to ask Walter Robinson about this, but could not.
Not at that moment. So instead, she spoke words that seemed to jump out of some forgotten part within her:
‘Hey, Walter,’ she whispered as he was getting out of the cruiser, ‘you be careful.’
He laughed his response. ‘Careful is my natural state of being.’
The Lumberjack and another detective stepped out of another unmarked car and approached Robinson. Across the street, he saw the two City of Miami sergeants giving instructions to several uniformed officers. They were the backup. After a moment, the two sergeants hurried across the street.
Juan Rodriguez spoke first. ‘Lion-man’s all set, Walter. A couple of guys around back. The rest, right behind you. Let’s do this real quick. In and out. Grab the slime-bucket before his neighbors raise hell. Then we can take our time with the search of his place. Comprendo?’
‘Sounds good. Who’s going around the back?’
‘I think the young guys.’
‘Come on, Juan, rookies?’
‘Hey, they gotta learn. They’re okay. Real fire-eaters. Been on the street almost a year. Both of them. And anyway, there’s only one little bathroom window on the back end. The perp’s gonna have to have wings to get out that way. Walter, buddy, the King Apartments are just like some jail. Hell, most of the places even got bars on the windows. Only difference is, they’re trying to keep folks out instead of locking them in. But the effect is pretty much the same. All we got to do is take out the cell door on number thirteen and sweep up what’s inside. Like the song says: no place to run, no place to hide.’
‘You’re making it sound real simple. I like that,’ Robinson said. ‘All right. Everybody ready? Lion-man, you wearing your vest?’
‘Yeah. I put the damn thing on. It’s goddamn hot and uncomfortable and it makes me look fat, and I don’t like that.’
‘Rather have your vanity or a sucking chest wound, Lion-man?’ Rodriguez asked sarcastically.
Espy Martinez cut in quickly. ‘Ahh, but Sergeant, many women like a big man. If you know what I mean …’
The other policemen all grinned as Lionel Anderson tipped his hat toward Martinez, trying to conceal a slight embarrassment at the double entendre.
‘Yes ma’am, of course they do. But size where it counts.’
Espy Martinez leaned over and punched the sergeant in the chest. ‘Just wear the vest,’ she said.
‘For you, of course.’
‘Maybe for that Miss Yolanda too.’
‘Ahh, I had not considered that issue, Miss Martinez.’
‘Everybody wear their vest,’ Martinez said to the assembled men. Heads nodded. ‘Except me,’ she continued, ‘because I’m staying here where it’s safe.’
The men laughed, as if thankful to have whatever tension that had gathered eviscerated by Martinez’s light-heartedness. She wished she could tell them all that the joke and the grin and everything else in the nonchalant way she stood in the center of the group was a lie, but she did not. Instead she turned to Walter Robinson. He nodded at her. He knows, she thought.
Robinson held up his hand to get everyone’s attention. ‘No screw-ups,’ he said. ‘Everybody take another look at this guy Jefferson’s mug shot.’
He passed these around.
Lionel Anderson looked at the picture hard. ‘You know, I think I remember this guy. What’s his street name?’
‘Hightops.’
‘Gotta be the same guy. Played a little ball for Carol City
High maybe ten years ago. Strong to the hoop, but no outside touch.’
‘He’s got a different kinda outside touch now,’ Robinson said. ‘Assault, burglary, burglary, weapons violations, misdemeanor possession, felony possession reduced. I mean, we’re talking a book-length sheet. The all-American bad guy. Probably armed. I mean, definitely armed. Let’s just snatch him quick. Any questions?’
There were none. He hadn’t expected any. This was well within the policeman’s routine: a person who had been wrong for years had finally stepped up and killed someone. The only thing surprising about the arrest was that the suspect hadn’t murdered beforehand. Of course, Robinson thought sardonically, I haven’t seen his juvenile record. He shrugged inwardly.
‘Everybody set? Let’s do it.’
He handed the arrest warrant to Lionel Anderson, and the policemen headed off into the King Apartments. Espy Martinez felt a sudden unsettled feeling. She reached down into her pocketbook and took hold of her small semiautomatic pistol. She chambered a round, then exhaled slowly, holding the weapon tightly, bracing it up against her side, waiting for something to happen so that she would not have to stand for long in the encapsulating night that she hated so intensely.
Leroy Jefferson, a young man who did not expect to ever grow old,’ sat quietly in his underwear at a scarred and stained, shaky wooden kitchen table inside number 13, imagining how his life would improve if he could ever get enough of a stake together to start dealing drugs, rather than simply consuming them. It was a fantasy of the mundane; he pictured himself in newer clothes, driving a large car. He was partial to the color red, and he wondered
idly whether his suit or his vehicle should be that shade, only, upon reflection, to decide that perhaps both would not be excessive.
He reached out and toyed with the glass pipe on the table. Leroy Jefferson had long, bony hands. Athlete’s hands: the fingers were curved in a predatory fashion, like talons, the veins stood out on the backs, as if pushed up by sinew, muscle, and strength. An artist would probably have thought them beautiful, in a rough-hewn, violent sort of way.
He ran one cracked fingernail down the edge of the pipe.
His girlfriend slept in an adjacent room; he could hear a light snore, almost a wheeze, as she turned over, tangled up naked in a single sweat-damp sheet. They had not been together long, and he did not expect that they would stay together much longer. They had fallen together more out of affection for the drug than for each other. Their coupling was an occasional act of mutual convenience.
Beneath his finger, friction made the glass pipe feel hot, but then, he realized, the whole world was hot. His girlfriend shifted position again noisily, and he wondered how anyone could sleep with the temperature in the small apartment creeping steadily up through the thickest part of the night.
What was it? he asked himself. Seventy-five? Eighty? Ninety fucking degrees? You can’t even breathe the air; it was almost like it tasted of bitter wet heat. He wanted a beer from the small refrigerator, but knew there was none. There wasn’t even a soda, or a tray of ice. The tap water was brackish and lukewarm. He thought of standing under the shower but had trouble unfolding his long legs from beneath the table and taking a step in that direction. He blamed his lethargy on the heat as well. He stared angrily
across at the living room jalousie window, cranked open to let what little breeze there was meandering about Liberty City enter the apartment.
Cold air, he thought to himself. That’s what he wanted more than anything. Just nice cold air that would slip over his body like a light shirt. He lifted one of his hands to the back of his neck and swept away some of the sweat that had gathered there. It glistened in his palm. In Miami, he thought, rich people never sweat - unless they want to.
This thought infuriated him, because he knew it was true.
He continued to eye the open window, as if he could force it to provide some relief, almost as if he expected to see the wind as it slid between the glass plates. His frustration made him alert, so that when it was sound that penetrated the window rather than cool air, it only took him a second to realize what was happening.
One set of footsteps, moving unsteadily and haphazardly on the stairwell, that would be a neighbor, stumbling home drunk.
Two sets of footsteps, moving slowly, deliberately, that would be a drug dealer and his muscle, looking to collect on an overdue debt.
But the rat-a-tat-tat of several pairs of heavy shoes moving fast on the stairs could only be one thing; Leroy Jefferson rose sharply, dashing the pipe onto the floor, knocking over his chair and crossing the room in one large stride. His girlfriend snorted once and opened her eyes in surprise as he pushed her aside, reaching for the pistol he kept beneath the mattress. He half whispered, half shouted the word ‘Police’ just as a fist thundered against the door to apartment number 13, and the same word was shouted out by Sergeant Lion-man. The policeman and the murder suspect had almost spoken in unison.
The girlfriend grabbed the sheet, pulling it toward her breasts and screamed: ‘Leroy, no!’
But Leroy Jefferson ignored her. Spinning in a half crouch by the mattress and raising his pistol, he fired two shots from the bedroom, across the living room and into the front door just as it buckled sharply from a sledgehammer blow, the two pistol reports bracketing the crash of iron against the wooden door frame.
As soon as he had knocked and announced. Sergeant Lion-man had sprung aside, giving the Lumberjack room to swing the sledgehammer. The burly detective howled like an injured animal when, just as he delivered his first blow to the door frame, the second of Leroy Jefferson’s shots deflected off the metal plate of the dead-bolt lock and slashed into the bulging bicep of his left arm. Skin, blood, and sinew exploded in a vibrant scarlet mass. He twisted around, the hammer falling with a thud to the corridor floor, slamming backward into a metal grate railing. The Lumberjack continued to wail, his head back, his legs jerking spasmodically, like a runner helplessly trying to accelerate in deep sand. His screams were bursts of unworldly noise that rose through the sudden cacophony of shouts from the other policemen as they dove for cover or threw themselves against the apartment complex cinder-block walls.
The two rookies sent to the rear of the apartment heard the shots, heard the Lumberjack’s tortured screams, and sprinted, guns drawn, for the front of the building, where they were immediately sure they were needed.
Sergeant Lion-man, cursing as he saw the detective squirming and quivering with pain, reached down and seized the sledgehammer. He swung back, like a dead pull hitter centering on a lazy fastball, and crashed the hammer
into the door frame. The sound of wood splintering, giving way, mingled with another shot from within the apartment. This shot also penetrated the wooden door and creased the air above Sergeant Lion-man’s head, and he roared a second vibrant flood of expletives as he smashed the sledgehammer into the frame again.
Walter Robinson grabbed the Lumberjack and pulled him away from the potential line of fire. Behind him, he could hear Juan Rodriguez swearing in Spanish, a torrent of mierdas mixed liberally with a Hail Mary and then shouting for Lion-man to keep back. He could hear another member of the arrest team calling in a 10-45, officer down, on his portable radio. Lion-man bellowed again, furious, possessed, and lifted the hammer for a final blow that would separate the door from the frame. Robinson heard, amidst all the jumbled clatter of screams, footsteps, curses, and the sound of glass breaking, a tone that he could not quite decipher in the split second that it took for Sergeant Lion-man to deliver his last assault on the door.
As the door frame cracked and splintered and then suddenly gaped wide, thanks to a resounding kick by Sergeant Lion-man, Robinson rose and burst forward.
He tumbled through the opening, followed immediately by Rodriguez and two other policemen. They were all shouting ‘Police! Freeze!’ and swinging their weapons right and left, two hands on the grips, as they had all been taught. The first thing they saw was Leroy Jefferson’s girlfriend, standing naked in the center of the room, shrieking. She threw a kitchen water tumbler in their direction; it exploded in shards on the wall behind them, and one of the City of Miami officers ducked and fired his weapon at her. He missed. The bullet smashed into the drywall behind her, no more than six inches from her ear,
sending a plume of white dust into the air. Juan Rodriguez had the presence of mind to reach out and seize the officer’s hand, pushing it down so that he would not fire again, screaming incoherent anger in two different languages as he did so.
Walter Robinson peered about. There was so much confused noise that it obscured his vision. It was almost, he thought, as if he could feel the abrupt absence of his suspect. He turned toward the naked girlfriend, who was standing rigidly, eyes open, making no effort to cover herself, as if astonished to be shot at and still be alive.
‘Where is he?’ Robinson screamed.
She stared blankly at him.
‘Where is he?’ Robinson shouted again. This time the girlfriend’s head jerked to the side, and he followed the brief look she tossed toward the bathroom.
‘Damn,’ he said beneath his breath. He vaulted across the room, like a high jumper approaching the bar, and pushed himself against the wall next to the closed bathroom door. He gingerly reached out and tried the knob. Locked. He took a single deep breath, and stepped back, before delivering a massive kick at the flimsy door.
It buckled and sprung open.
He leapt into the tiny bathroom, instantly spotting the broken-out window. He threw aside a chair that had been used to smash the glass. He jumped into the tub, almost slipping on the smooth surface, and reached for the windowsill. He steadied himself and looked out into the night precisely at the spot where the two rookie officers were supposed to be. But he saw only the vague, ghostly shape of Leroy Jefferson, two stories down, rising unsteadily from the backyard dust, illuminated by weak gray light, gun in hand.