Calumet City (2 page)

One block
. We’re doing 60 now. I know all the people who operate these stores, people who try like those who tried before them. Their lives can’t be fixed with sermons or promises. Both are popular but useless down here; it’s a war zone in every sense of the term—poverty, dope, and gangs, gangs like small countries have armies.

Cisco hits the brakes.

Lookouts yell, "5-0! 5-0!" and scatter.

Our three cars make the turn. In an instant Gilbert Court is flooded by seven white cops with dead-serious expressions, two with shotguns running to the building’s rear, me with a twelve-gauge charging the front. Cisco has the Chicago bar, Eric Jackson the hammer. We’re on the steps and I’m knocking with my foot. Sonny and the boys are right behind us ready to pour in when the door goes.

"POLICE. We got a warrant, Carlos. Open it NOW!"

Three, two, one
. I stand back, Cisco wedges the bar, Eric slams the hammer. The door and frame splinter, a good sign. Fortification usually means armament.

Big flash. Then the roar. The door and frame explode in our faces.
Machine gun
. Cisco’s down and Eric Jackson’s firing. I’m bent sideways and blind. Pistols bang from behind. I can’t see and drop to a knee. Eric sails over the railing. Concussions run together; the air’s cordite and flashes. Can’t hear—hands grab me, something clubs me in the face. An arm chokes my neck…I fight, kick, claw—
anything not to be taken,
can’t see to shoot. I’m headlocked, being dragged by a gorilla with four arms. Big shotgun blasts from the back. Guys yelling. Three gangsters rush past; the gorilla pushes me toward the center.

"Hostage, motherfucka! Hostage 5-0!"

Sonny’s firing. I’m choking out and slam a crotch with my shotgun.
Big blast
from mine and behind, then another, and I’m down on a knee. The four-armed gorilla becomes two GDs who drop me and sprint retreat through the apartment. They slam open the back door and I’m chasing before I realize I’m standing. In the tiny yard our backup shotguns are engaged by GDs with pistols banging from the building’s corners. My two make it into the alley and across, running for the nearest six-flat. One turns to fire. I duck; he falls, we scramble up, both running again. I can’t afford to shoot into the six-flat and miss. He doesn’t give a shit and fires twice.

Shotguns roar behind me. At the neighbor’s stoop I stumble, don’t think, and bolt into the hallway. Five steps in I see both GDs sprinting out the back and something surreal charging up out of the basement stairwell. Two white ComEd workers hit me like linebackers. I’m down, suddenly swimming in gasoline and there’s no air. The white guys run out a door into daylight. I cough blind and try to stand. More gunshots make me duck. Framed in the doorway a white van squeals away. I fan through the fumes for GDs—none on the floor; none on the stairs. Cough; blink. Gasoline’s everywhere.

Gasoline.

"FIRE! FIRE!"

The basement has to be full of gas, and the building’s three floors full of people. I pound on first-floor doors nobody in their right mind would open. "FIRE! FIRE! Get out!" If anyone’s smoking anything, I’ll be a torch. I take the stairs higher two at a time. "Out! Out!" More doors, more pounding. A woman opens and I grab her. "GET OUT. Building’s on fire!" She balks and I jerk her into the hall. "OUT! OUT!" Doors crack; white eyes; children crouch, heads peek down through the stair railing. Nobody’s safe here, ever; nobody’s sure. I smell like a bomb. "C’mon people, out in the alley. Now. Now. NOW."

   Dogs bark and run everywhere. The six-flat’s empty—thirty angry, scared citizens have been pushed through the fences to Gilbert Court. No one has belongings, no picture frames or dishes. Gilbert Court is chaos; the neighborhood’s already marshaling, jeering from the windows and shaking their fists. Squads scream in. Two white cops are down but alive. Two black gangsters are dead in the blood, glass, weapons, and wood shards. Brass casings and Cisco cover the stoop. Cisco’s staring at me from his back, eyes cloudy, his speech impediment half there, half not. "Smell like a S-shell station. Whata happen?"

Before I can help him a hand grabs my shoulder. I spin and punch and it’s a fireman staggering back. We’re both confused. Another one points at me, "Your clothes, asshole. C’mere," and he shoves me with a small hose. An EMT rushes Cisco, I get a shower.

A cold one. The fireman tells me to 360; the water pressure’s triple my shower at home and I have to brace against it, eyes closed. Cisco’s laughing, ringside for a body-armor wet T-shirt contest. The water quits as Cisco’s EMT pats him and flashes thumbs-up to her partner. I stumble, fogged on adrenaline and still smell like gas, just less so. Two more EMTs have Eric Jackson standing, but not under his own power. He looks loopy but his feet are moving, scuffing past the youngest of the dead GDs. I squeegee water and slick back my hair, trying to find steady, then recognize the sprawled body; I know the dead boy’s mother.

I turn back to help Cisco and his EMT. The fireman in my face says, "Strip," then points to another fellow like they do this all the time, "Give her a jacket."

I give him the finger.
In your fucking dreams, homes
. He shrugs at stupid and joins firemen running across the alley. Cisco’s on a gurney. My eyes jump to the gasolined six-flat expecting flames. No flames; no occupants died. Deep breath—
c’mon, baby, slow it down
. Dying in a fire is a bad way to go, old people especially. They seem to just curl up in a corner and wait for it to take them. More sirens; our uniforms have the perimeter of the whole block. Our own small army, like every cop in 6 and 7 is here. It’s a weird picture for the citizens and always is—the ghetto’s rhythm just floating along, then BANG, 5-0 every-damn-where. Makes you wonder what the vibe’s like after we’re gone.

Sonny’s at my shoulder, his pistol pointed at the pavement. "You all right, P?"

"Huh? Eric’s okay, right?"

"Vest stopped it at the shoulder, knocked the fuck out of him, though. Dislocated it."

I spin to find Cisco. Sonny watches Cisco waving weak as he’s put in the ambulance and says Cisco’s gonna be off work a while, but he’s too educated to die. My knees weaken as the adrenaline dies off and Sonny grabs my collar. I fracture a smile and don’t knock his hand away. "Lotta bullets for some stereo equipment."

Sonny appears to be having similar thoughts but doesn’t share. "Gonna be more medals for this, P; soaked in fuckin’ gasoline and evac-ing a building." He shakes his head, tilting toward Ireland like he does after five beers. "I’m hatin’ to admit it, but you a gutsy bit a skirt," and he headlocks me to his vest, a tear in his eye. I know Sonny Barrett; it’s definitely the gasoline.

Within minutes Gilbert Court is surrounded by angry citizens. Three media trucks arrive followed by the Homicide dicks who’ll run the crime scene while OPS—Office of Professional Standards—watches, waiting to write up the officer-involved shootings. An OPS officer’s already eyeing me and my shotgun. This means it will be a long day of interviews after the dicks clear the scene.

The crime-scene techs arrive while the uniforms push back taunting citizens, then string miles of yellow tape. I notice our Watch LT from 6. He’s the lieutenant who runs our shift, an "empty-holster motherfucker" it has been said by those less respectful than I. He and an assistant state’s attorney are shoulder-to-shoulder, arms folded, second-guessing our actions. The black bodies aren’t covered and look strangely potent on the pavement. Now they’re focal, not random and nameless. They’re connected to consequences and careers. A black woman I know calls me to the tape.

"Why you kill those boys, Patti Black?"

Although it seems really simple, it isn’t. "You know, Drea. When they shoot at us, we’re gonna shoot back." I point at the two converted TEC-9s in the street. "Those aren’t TV machine guns."

The boy next to her isn’t four feet tall. He’s watching from under the tape and says, "Like on TV?" Drea shoos him away but he just loops her hips and tugs at my jeans. "You all wet."

I squat and my knees hold. His little hand squeezes water from my sweatshirt and he laughs. I point at the fireman. "That man gave me a shower. Thought I smelled bad."

The boy squints. Drea says, "That’s Ruth Ann’s boy, Robert. Ain’t it?"

I nod, imagining Ruth Ann’s face on her porch twenty minutes from now when they come to tell her Robert’s dead. He’ll be her third. I wince and tell the pavement: "Really hate it shit like this has to happen."

And I do.

Our Watch LT has moved to my left so Channel 7’s sunbrites can pick up his name and the glint from his silver bars. He tells a Homicide dick, "She does love our African Americans."

I turn into the Homicide dick’s answer—"Almost as much as she does the reporters." He stares right at me. "Clears two or three murders, bitch thinks she’s a dick."

Our Watch LT frowns agreement and checks the camera. "Does
not
hurt to have the superintendent’s ear either."

The dick smiles, adding volume: "Ain’t just his ear."

He and I are sharing eight feet of pavement and Channel 7’s camera lens. I make him forty pounds over and figure his wife has a boyfriend, hopefully two, and different colors.

The fireman who hosed me steps between us and says, "You might want to look at this."

I can’t tell whether he’s refereeing or he really has something. If he does, he needs to talk to the dicks running the scene, not me. I walk with him mainly because it’s away from my temper and my two fans with rank. As we pass the second body, a
Tribune
reporter I know yells my name. I say, "Sorry," and point at the guys in the blazers and keep walking.

The street deputy arrives with his entourage. He’s a deputy superintendent, the highest CPD rank who responds to crime scenes and wields the superintendent’s authority. All the manpower that doesn’t migrate to him stays focused on the shoot-out crime scene. So far, only the firemen are interested in the gasolined six-flat—it’s theirs until they release it. As we cross the alley to the six-flat the fireman comments that it’s odd the building has a Gilbert Court address, then says, "Fuck those two. That move took balls, lady. You come to work for us whenever you want."

He registers as honest, a nice change from most men. His eyes linger a bit longer than they should; probably a compliment but it just makes me fidget. "What’re we looking at?"

"Basement."

Downstairs, the six-flat’s basement is flooded twenty-four inches and already stinks. I stay on the stairs. He looks at me like more water can’t hurt, but he doesn’t have to buy my gym shoes. The other firemen are ringing back from a wall section they hacked up by the furnace. I squat and squint. One shines a light that reflects on the tricolor water. There’s something white in the rainbow. A bone. No, a hand, palm up with long rigid fingers and no skin. The floating hand’s connected to a sleeved arm and part of a body buried in the wall.

Don’t see that every day
.

The fireman waves me over. I slosh across—a mistake, since this basement is now a homicide scene. Up close, the bones wear a woman’s velour jacket popular in the ’90s; she’s crunched, facing away and tied with leather ligatures that run from neck to wrist. One ligature has snapped with age. I try to see her face but can’t. The fireman points his light inside the crypt over dead worms and roaches at what looks like fingernail ruts in the wood.

He exhales in a whoosh, then says, "Went in alive."

The hand’s floating near my shin; her fingertips are jagged. Above them her wrist bones have a metal wrist restraint,
pervmanacles
we call them, sex-crime equipment that vice and child services see more often than us.

My wrists have manacle scars too, hard welts I avoid when I wash. She’s barefoot. I wasn’t allowed shoes when I was pregnant at fifteen. It was in the Bible and kept me from running away; they wanted the baby. The ankle bones glint in the light, but I don’t look. There might be manacles on them too. The basement shrinks; fouled air thickens, gasoline water wants to rise over my head. I stumble, flashing through years of piecing together a me, making a person out of the wreckage. I don’t want to fall, not in this water, not near the hand with the manacles. And I won’t, if I quit thinking.

About all the things I’ve spent twenty-three years not thinking about.

   My afternoon is eight hours of interviews at 111th and Cottage Grove, the Area 2 Detective Division, sometimes referred to as ADD by tired and shaken patrol officers who take issue with repeatedly answering the same question.

Each interview is done separately, but the questions don’t change, nor do the dour expressions and sidebar conversations. First, it’s the Homicide dicks who already interviewed you at the scene; then one at a time, it’s the rest of them—OPS, the ASA (Chicago’s version of DA/district attorney), our Watch LT, and the street deputy backed by his entourage. They all want to know why you didn’t do it differently.

I don’t complain because I understand why we’re doing this; people died, people with families and maybe even futures. Today, the intermissions are worse than the interrogations. I keep seeing the body in the wall and the hand in the tricolor water. And the manacle.

After our Watch LT finishes the gunfight segment of his questions and his third sidebar with an assistant state’s attorney who wasn’t introduced, our Watch LT asks me again, "Why chase the perpetrators across the alley into the six-flat?"

He’s been marching toward the conclusion that I abandoned my fellow officers to make the "hero move"—like he’d have an idea what that was. His name is Carson Scott,
Lieutenant
Carson Scott if you wish less shit to fall on you during your workday. Thankfully, I don’t see him often unless something awful like this happens. He’s an asshole—a racist and a weekend golfer who keeps his nose embedded in the rear seam of any plaid-pants that might get him lifted to captain or feather his ambitions for public office.