Red Light (30 page)

“He’s fuckin’ dusted, waving a gun around—he went into the bathroom with the OD, and that’s how we’re out here now.”

Fuck. PCP users were probably among the most dangerous and unstable of the overdose crowd. There was every chance, every strong chance, this could get very ugly, very fast. We had just passed the curb and hit the asphalt, maybe six feet from the rig, as I keyed the radio.

“Fuckin’ Rico! You piece of shit!” a male voice screamed.

I looked over my shoulder and past Jean’s hand to see a young man, approximately twenty, dragging another to the stoop by the hood of his stained sweatshirt and waving a gun in his free hand.

“You fucked my
sister
!” he screamed, and as I opened my mouth to request PD backup, Jean threw me to the ground.

The world slowed to a cartoon-like crawl as three shots rang out, the first two almost simultaneously. The sound shut off. The radio skittered from my hands, and I watched the word “Motorola” flip over in the air before it delicately bounced on the ground; noted the position of my hands, realizing the bulk of impact would be on my forearms; and knew that it was inertia that kept my bag suspended above my hip before the strap that ran over my shoulder pulled it forward and down.

I saw Diaz gracefully twist to protect the O
₂
tank from crashing to the ground and potentially exploding, while Lukaski reached out over her like a catcher stretching for the play at home base.

I felt Jean’s body slide against my back and the medic box hit the ground half a heartbeat after I did.

Then the sound came back.

“How do you like that, motherfucker? Huh? How do you like that?” the perp screamed as Jean, Diaz, and I crawled under the rig.

Diaz got the radio first, and as I twisted and peered out from under the bus, I saw Lukaski, flat on the ground. He hadn’t moved, and I didn’t notice the cold or wet of the choppy asphalt that seeped through my pants as I belly-crawled back over to him.

He glanced up at me, and his eyes gleamed in the streetlight. “Got my leg,” he whispered hoarsely, surprise etched across his cheeks.

I thought I heard Diaz call the ten-thirteen into the radio and glanced to my left when a sheen caught my eye: dark and shiny, like oil on her pant leg. Jean had gotten sprayed with Lukaski’s blood.

“I gotcha, buddy,” I said, even as that band squeezed harder, not just my chest, but my head too, and it sent icy heat through me, a strange burn flowing up my neck.

The perp was yelling something as I seized the shoulders of Lukaski’s jacket.

“Can you crawl?” I asked him as he shifted onto his elbows.

“Yeah.” He nodded. “I think so.”

He propelled himself forward with his arms as I inched backward, dragging him by fistfuls of his jacket, and just as he was close enough for me to hook my hands under his armpits, he pitched headfirst.

Jean crawled over me, and together we got him under the rig.

Diaz had already set up the O
₂
and was taking care of his airway and breathing, and she passed Jean a flashlight as I sheared through the bloody remains of Lukaski’s left pant leg and boot.

What a bloody mess. I had no pedal pulse, which meant there was very little if any blood flow to his foot. I found the entry and exit wounds, and the visible cavitation, the damage caused by the bullet’s trajectory, was ugly; the bullet appeared to have entered his boot just above his ankle. The leather had probably deflected the bullet’s trajectory enough so that it had traveled up the bulk muscle of his calf to exit below and behind the knee; the fibula reflected starkly back at me under the glare of the flashlight. I now knew what “blown away” really meant: Lukaski’s gastrocnemius, the visible main muscle of the calf, was splattered on the inside of the cloth I’d had to cut away.

Stop the bleeding. Jean handed me bandages and Kling tape, and after a quick rinse with saline and a quicker “Hail Mary” that no bits of asphalt remained in the wound, together we applied and secured a pressure bandage. We didn’t have room to elevate his leg or to move anywhere else except to try to get Lukaski and us between the tires, as two more shots rang out and sirens wailed in the distance.

We needed to get out of there; we needed to get Lukaski to an ER, and fast, and as the sirens came closer, the perp screamed again.

“Ten, Rico, ten fucking years old! Mom, I’m so sorry, I’m so fucking sorry—God!”

I could see tires of responding vehicles surround the bus on three sides.

“Put the gun down!” a voice commanded, and despite Jean’s warning grip on my arm, I peered out around the tire, hoping to find a clear path between us and another vehicle to get Lukaski out of there and onto one of the rigs I knew had to be close by.

“My fault, my fucking fault!” the gunman wailed. “What, you want me? You fuckin’ want me?” he yelled, incredulity obvious in his voice as he turned to face wherever it was the cop had shouted from.

I glanced quickly and saw the original patient, or what I assumed had been the original patient, who lay slumped in the doorway, the stain that had covered his sweatshirt now soaking through his jeans.

“Fuckin’ take him, take
him
, he fucked my sister—God,” he wailed again, “my baby sister…” He took the gun and raised it to his head, and before anything else could happen, another shot rang out.

I saw the millisecond of shock register on his face before it seemed to disappear into a wet haze.

I don’t remember how we got out of there, although I do recall being forced to sit with Jean and Diaz on the back step of the bus so we could get quickly checked as other units loaded up Lukaski, the original OD, the wounded gunman, and his sister, who had been found huddled in a room somewhere in the apartment.

I don’t even know how we got back to the station, but when we did, a patrol supervisor, whom I’d never met before since he worked the shift after mine, politely asked us to accompany him to the precinct as soon as we’d stowed our gear.

“Bo heeka, baby, bo fuckin’ heeka,” Diaz muttered as she slammed her locker shut next to mine.

“What?”

“Bee oh aitch, eye cee aye. BOHICA,” Diaz repeated as we walked toward the Suburban. “Bend over, here it comes again. Got it?”

We sat through what felt like hours of questioning as my wet pants first chafed, then dried on my skin, and I occasionally fussed with the newly frayed spot on my knee.

Who drew first, who shot what, did the perp shoot himself, could the shot have come from another direction—those were the questions we were asked, over and over, in every conceivable fashion. I couldn’t understand why the officers asked, since I figured ballistics would show whose gun it had been.

We were finally free to go, and as Diaz and I marched out of there back to the Suburban that would give us a ride back to our station and back to my car, we passed Jean in another small office being interrogated by yet another officer. I gave her a tight smile and a thumbs-up as I walked by, and she nodded back.

An idea occurred to me. “Hold up a sec,” I told Diaz. I fumbled in my pocket for my key ring and unhooked the ones to my apartment, then knocked on the door of that little office.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” I told the detective when his head swiveled toward me, “I’ll just be a second. Hey, Scanlon?” I focused on her as she sat there, all coiled energy contained in a chair that was probably older than both of us combined.

“Yeah?”

I held out my key ring and gently tossed the keys to her. “Later.”

“Yup,” she agreed as she caught, then held them in her hand. I gave her the barest ghost of a smile, which she returned as I left.

“What a skell show, huh?” an officer asked, smirking at us as we passed. Colgano, I noted, his name tag said Colgano.

Skell. That word brought back some very fresh memories of one of our instructing lieutenants screaming in a student’s face that were he ever to hear
any
of us use that word, a word that technically meant a homeless derelict but was used as a catchall to mean “subhuman,” he would have that person’s shield.

The word was meant to be both dehumanizing and degrading. I wouldn’t use it, and it bothered me that anyone would be so free with it, but considering how tired and stressed I was pretty sure we all felt, this wasn’t the time or place. I nodded politely at Colgano as we passed, but he had more to say.

“Fuckin’ junkie gets his sister screwed up, shoots another junkie, and injures an MOS. People fuckin’ care who blew his fuckin’ head off? He was killing himself anyway and taking others with him.”

I felt more than saw with my peripheral vision the grim twist that crossed Diaz’s face, and I reached for her forearm, arresting her motion. I didn’t know what she was going to do, but heat bled off her in waves, and that wasn’t a good sign.

“It was a rough night,” I said mildly, “and we’ve got to get back to our station.” I smirked back at Colgano, then walked out the station door.

Diaz caught up to me on the steps and tapped my shoulder. “Thanks for that,” she said, gesturing over her shoulder with her thumb.

“Hey, no worries.” I grinned at her. “I’ve got your back, you’ve got mine. Right, partner?” I held out my hand.

She gave me a slow grin in return as she shook it firmly and agreed, “Right, partner.”

I called Jean’s cell right before I left the station and couldn’t believe it was two in the morning. “They’ve got some more paperwork for me to fill out, and a new team wants to talk with me because Lukaski and I were first on scene,” she told me, sounding tired and frustrated. “Turns out the OD? He’s probably gonna live—might not ever walk again, probably pee into a bag forever, but—”

“And they want to find out as much as they can to see what kind of charges they can press against him?”

“Yeah, exactly,” Jean confirmed, then sighed. “Anyway, figure another hour before I’m out of here, and give me twenty minutes after that to get to you.”

“Hey, I heard Lukaski’s pulled through surgery. Won’t know for a while about the leg, but you know how that goes.” I didn’t know if anyone at the precinct had thought of telling Jean, or if they even knew, and
I
knew Jean had to be worried.

“Yeah? Good, good,” she said, and I heard her swallow. “Thanks.”

“Yeah, no problem, and as for later? Just get there when you get there, don’t kill yourself. We can wait until tomorrow if you want.”

“Hell, no!” Jean answered with a slight chuckle. “We still need to have our hat debate.”

“You got it.”

I didn’t know what to do with myself once I pulled into the driveway. I took off my boots and left them by the door, hung up my jacket—dry-cleaning would take care of that—and carefully stripped off my uniform. The shirt was fine but my pants were ruined, and as I bagged them and tossed them right outside the door so I could remember to put them out in the morning, I wondered why I hadn’t changed at the station.

Must have been the rush to simply get home after filling out an incident report, I mused as I took a long shower. The lieutenant had tacked another three comp days off to our scheduled swing weekend, but I’d save them for another time, I decided as I dressed again.

I
still
didn’t know what to do with myself. I was exhausted but restless and trying very hard not to see Lukaski’s leg in pieces under my hands. I shuddered as the band that had crushed my chest earlier came back, an icy grip this time as I once again saw the blood on Jean’s pant leg. The part of my brain that does nothing but calculate estimated how close to her the bullet had come.

“He’ll be all right. Patrol said he was gonna be fine,” I muttered to myself, my voice too loud even to me in the empty garden house as I paced from room to room.

I didn’t think the gunman had shot himself; I was pretty sure a cop had got him first. I knew what my mother would say about that: the victim had rights, and even if he
had
been about to shoot himself, that would have been his decision, a suicide, just as he’d been doing, albeit slowly, all along with the drugs.

But to have been shot down…was it murder? A suicidal person was a danger to all, and yes, he’d shot Lukaski, although strangely enough, I wasn’t sure he’d meant to. Not that it would have made a difference to Lukaski, I supposed, or to any of us, had it been someone else.

That Jean could have been hurt was enough to make me wish that I’d been armed…and he’d shot that other guy for hurting his sister. Who was the criminal, then? The abusing OD, or his shooter? Or the cop who shot him?

If that had been my sister, my sister who’d been hurt… There’d be
no
place on this planet safe to hide, I thought grimly, and I would’ve taken great pleasure in watching the person who’d done it hurt, then hurt some more. Same if it had been Jean. Or one of my partners. Hell, Lukaski, too. Lukaski hadn’t deserved that; he’d just wanted to help, that was all, just being a good person.

So what did that make me? Normal people, reacting in normal ways, to abnormal circumstances. That’s what we’d been taught in the academy. But what was normal, anyway? That…was the average of deviance. And I wasn’t feeling anything close to “normal,” whatever that was.

I ran my hands through my hair in agitated frustration; I couldn’t take what was going on in my head anymore, questions that brought up more questions and the smell of Lukaski’s blood that could have so easily been Jean’s still in my nose.