Cop Town (11 page)

He said, “Rule number two: you type all the reports. I’m not here to do paperwork. That’s why you write down every single fucking thing
that happens. Mark the time, what the weather’s like, what people look like, how they sound—they crackers or hillbillies? Southside or West?” He paused, waiting for Kate to finish. At least that’s what she thought he was doing. She couldn’t help but notice that his eyes never went above her chest.

“Rule number three: I’m the boss of this car. I say where we go, when we stop, where we stop. If you gotta pee every ten minutes, you bring a cup to piss in. I don’t wanna hear about it. Got me?”

Kate kept her head down, thinking if she just kept writing, the words wouldn’t matter.

“Rule three, section A, I always drive, and you shut the hell up about it.”

Kate didn’t have to write that one down.

“Four: Ask. Tell. Make. You
ask
somebody to do something. They don’t do it, you
tell
them to do it. They still don’t do it, you
make
them do it.”

Her hand was cramping. She could barely keep up.

“Number five: forget rule number four. It don’t matter. You’re not talking to anybody. You’re not looking at anybody. You stay in the car when I get out and you still be in the car when I get back in.”

Kate looked up. This was the exact opposite of what they told her during her training. You never left your partner’s side. Even Jimmy’s own uncle had said as much during roll call.

Jimmy seemed to read her mind. “I don’t care what they taught you. There’s different rules for men and women. You go out into the street, you’re my responsibility. I can’t look after me and look after you at the same time.”

She stared down at the point of the pen pressing into the white notebook paper. “You don’t find it possible that I can look after myself?”

He laughed, but not because he thought it was funny. “Look at this shithole.” He waved his hand out the window. “You think you can handle yourself outside this car?”

Kate felt her eyes go wide. She’d been too busy writing to notice the scenery had changed. They were smack in the middle of the projects.
Young black men were clumped around the street corners. Scantily clad girls strolled the sidewalks. She suppressed a shudder of fear. They were the only white people around.

“Capitol Homes,” Jimmy announced, as if it wasn’t obvious they were in a government housing project. “Look behind you.”

Kate turned. The gold capitol dome shadowed the complex.

He said, “Funny thing, ain’t one of those windows looking this way. They all look toward downtown, where the money comes in. They don’t see the filth and the trash the city shits out behind them.”

Kate took in her surroundings. Scores of two-story brick buildings dotted the complex. There were no trees, nothing on the lawns but red Georgia clay. Children who should have been in school were playing outside, their bare feet kicking up dust. The temperature was low, but people had their windows open. She saw old men sitting on front stoops. Women leaned out the windows to yell at their kids. Litter was everywhere. Graffiti. Condoms and needles collected around the drains in the street.

And the smell. The stench was indescribable.

Jimmy slowed the car to a crawl. “You get a whiff of that?”

Kate tried not to gag. The air burned her eyes and nose, cut into her pores. Sweat, urine, rancid food. Kate didn’t know what the odor was, but she would never forget it as long as she lived.

He said, “Roll down your window.”

Kate didn’t want to, but she grabbed the handle. Her hand was sweating so badly she couldn’t get the lever to turn.

Jimmy leaned across her and cranked down the window. He yelled, “Romeo, get your ass over here.”

A black man sauntered over, his fingers tucked into the waist of his pants. He was dressed in wide yellow bell-bottoms and a vivid green shirt. The buttons were open so low that Kate could see the hair trailing down from his belly button. And then she saw it closer, because he was standing so near that Kate’s shoulder almost touched him.

Jimmy said, “Stop fuckin’ around, Romeo.”

The man finally leaned down and stuck his head through the open
window. Kate pressed her spine so hard into the seat that her handcuffs pushed apart the vertebrae.

Romeo asked Jimmy, “Whatchu want, honky?”

“You hear about Don?”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t dick me around,” Jimmy warned. “Tell me what you know.”

“I know y’all lookin’ to do some beatin’ today.”

“You wanna be my first?”

Romeo winked at Kate. Like Jimmy, he seemed incapable of looking at anything higher than her chest. “Shit, man, you know I don’t know nothin’ about that. I’m just a bidness man goin’ ’bout my bidness.”

Jimmy lightened the pressure. “You got your ear to the ground.”

Romeo nodded his head. “That might be true.”

“You get me a name, I’ll give you a coupla passes.”

“I’m gone need more than a coupla somethin’. My black ass’ll be toast folks find out I’m helpin’ you crackers.”

Jimmy’s face was stone. “Whatta you want?”

“I’ll thinka somethin’.”

“You get me that name, you better think fast. I don’t leave no open tabs.”

“I hear ya, brother.” Romeo turned his attention to Kate. She held her breath. The odor off him was foul—something sickly sweet, like burned candy. He showed her a row of gold teeth. “You a foxy little thing.”

To Kate’s horror, Jimmy said, “She is, ain’t she?”

“Blonde hair. Pretty white skin. Got them fine, full lips. I liked to feel me some a them lips. You ever suck a chocolate creamsicle, baby?”

Jimmy chuckled. “I bet she ain’t.”

“Lemme show you, baby.” Romeo’s face got closer. Kate moved so far away that she was almost in Jimmy’s lap. “Why don’t you pucker up them fine lips for me, gal?” Romeo’s shoulder moved. She could tell his hand was touching the front of his pants. “Come on. Open up that sweet mouth for me.”

Kate willed herself not to look down. Not to breathe. Not to scream.

“Do you recognize that burned-cotton-candy smell?” Jimmy asked,
like Kate was sitting in a classroom instead of about to be raped. “That’s heroin. They put it in a spoon and cook it to a boil with a lighter.”

Romeo’s tongue darted out. “Got-damn, you the whitest white bitch I ever seen.”

“They pull the liquid into a needle then shoot it in their veins.” Jimmy said, “That right, Romeo?”

Romeo wouldn’t be distracted. His hand was doing things below the window that Kate didn’t want to know about. “You just stay there just a little minute more and I—”

Jimmy hit the gas. Romeo slipped out the window. Kate was flung back against the seat. She struggled to turn around, to get her bearings. Jimmy was laughing so hard that he had tears in his eyes.

“You stupid bitch,” he said. “Holy shit, you shoulda seen your face.”

Somehow, Kate managed to sit back in her seat. She clenched her hands in her lap, tightened her jaw so hard that her head ached. She hissed out, “You asshole.”

“Asshole?” Jimmy kept laughing. “You cringe like a nun when I say ‘motherfucker’ and now you’re calling me an asshole?”

“Asshole.” Kate practically spit out the word. She was shaking. Her fists would not unclench. A volcano raged inside of her.

“I’m the asshole?” Jimmy swerved the car into a sharp turn. He slammed down the brakes. Kate grabbed the dashboard before she hit it again. “Let me tell you, sister—what happened back there? That’s why you don’t belong out here.”

She stared at him. He wasn’t laughing anymore.

“Why’d you let that pimp talk to you like that? What are these for?” Jimmy grabbed at her flashlight, her nightstick, her gun. “These for show, girlie girl? You like the way they make your hips look?”

“Stop.” Kate tried to push him away. He was made of stone. Nothing would move him. She started to panic. “Please.”

“Shit,” Jimmy muttered, finally returning to his side of the car. “Better it comes from me than some pimp raping your ass.” He stared at Kate with obvious disgust. “Go on and cry. Get it out so I can take you back to the station.”

Kate would gouge out her own eyes before she cried. “What the hell do you want from me?”

“What do I want?” Jimmy leaned over again, crowding her against the door. “I want you to get out of my car and take off that fucking uniform and go find a husband and have some kids and bake pies and play house like a normal fucking woman.”

Her fingernails cut into her palms. She struggled to bring air into her lungs. “Get away from me.”

Jimmy leaned closer. “Why don’t I drive you back to Romeo? He’d cut your slit open like a fish. And then he’d pump you with H and toss you back into the street until you’d suck a fucking dog to get that needle in your arm.” Kate tried to turn away. Jimmy grabbed her face with his hand. “I watched my partner’s head explode. I got bits of his brain in my eyes and teeth. I tasted his death in my mouth. You think you can handle that? You think you can come out here every day knowing what death tastes like?”

Her throat filled with sand. He was almost on top of her. Her face was covered in his spittle. His fingers dug into her cheeks.

“Can you?” he demanded.

From somewhere deep inside, she found the courage to ask, “Can you?”

Jimmy wrenched away his hand. “You got no fuckin’ idea what you’re talkin’ about.”

Kate touched her face. She could still feel his fingers digging into the flesh. “What is this?” she whispered. “What happened?” She wasn’t talking to Jimmy. She was asking these questions of herself. “What gives you the right to talk to me like this—to treat me like this—just because you don’t want me here?”

Jimmy shook his head like she was the stupidest person on earth.

Kate pushed open the door. She got out of the car.

“Where are you going?”

Kate started walking. The smell wasn’t so bad. She could deal with it. The capitol dome would guide her back to police headquarters. She had a spare key in a magnetic box over the back tire of her car. She would
drive to the hotel, get her things, and then go to her parents’ house. There was nothing her family could say that would be worse than what she had just experienced.

Jimmy got out of the car. “Where the hell are you going?”

Kate took off the hat. She unbuttoned her shirt collar. The temperature was just under forty degrees, but she was burning up. She breathed through her mouth, pulling great gulps of filthy air into her lungs. Jimmy was right. The awful women in the locker room were right. Her mother was right.

She wasn’t cut out for this.

“Hey.” Jimmy grabbed her arm. She shook him off. He grabbed her again and spun her around. “Just stop a minute, okay?”

She punched him in chest. He wasn’t expecting it. He stumbled back on his bad leg. Kate knew exactly what to do next. It came to her like breathing: she kicked his leg out from under him.

Jimmy looked stunned. He slammed flat on his back into the ground. The air huffed out of him. Dirt clouded up.

“You asshole!” Kate wanted to kick his head in. “I
had
a house. I
had
a husband. I had a
life
before all this, you fucking animal.”

He tried to sit up.

She shoved him back down.

“What the hell is—”

“Shut up.” Kate leaned down to get in his face the same as he’d done with her. “If my husband were alive, he would kill you. Do you know that? He would wrap his hands around your neck and strangle the miserable life out of you.”

Jimmy stared at her, his eyes wide with surprise. He didn’t have a comeback, couldn’t seem to find the words to cut her with, so he just shrugged, as if to say,
So what?

It pulled the rage out of her. It brought her back to her senses.

Kate saw that an audience had gathered. Men, women, and children. They’d probably never seen such a show. She had certainly never been a part of one. Kate had never hit anyone in her life. Even at the academy, they’d only let them punch padded dummies.

So what?

Jimmy was right. Patrick wasn’t going to save her. No one was going to save her. Wasn’t the point of this idiotic experiment to prove that Kate could save herself?

Why had she remained silent when Romeo first leaned into the car? Why hadn’t she told Jimmy to stop? Why hadn’t she
asked, told
, then
made
them stop? Kate had an arsenal at her disposal—her back had been aching from her belt the moment she’d loaded it: The heavy flashlight with its four D-cell batteries. The metal nightstick with the rounded tip. The revolver with five bullets in the cylinder.

Any one of them could’ve been used to stop either man, and Kate had just sat there like a helpless simpleton.

Jimmy sat up. He brushed the red clay from his pants. “What happened to your husband?”

She looked down at him. He was kneading his thigh to work out a cramp. “None of your goddamn business.”

“You got a mouth on you, lady.”

“Shut up.” She turned on her heel and headed toward the car.

Jimmy asked, “Where are you going?”

“Back to work.”

“That’s it?” He laughed at her again, this time with surprise. “After all that, you’re just going back to work?”

She turned around. He was still on the ground rubbing his knee. “Yes.”

He held out his hand. “Help me up.”

“Help yourself, motherfucker.”

The crowd of spectators cleared a path as Kate walked to the car.

8

Fox felt that tickle in his throat that came from smoking too much. He took a swig of bourbon from the pint he kept in the glove box. Just enough to wet his whistle, as his father used to say.

He hated that his father was on his mind so much lately.

But it wasn’t his father, really. It was his mother. The two were indelibly linked, the yin and yang of Fox’s life. Black and white. Dark and light. She had been a kind woman. Always forgiving. Always looking to keep the peace. That these qualities had made her a victim was a fact that Fox had a hard time accepting, even all these years after her death.