James Burke: Burning Angel

“Where’s it say that? This handwriting looks like a drunk chicken walked across the page.”

“You want anything else?” he asked, taking a wax paper-wrapped sandwich out of his desk drawer.

“Yeah, the prisoner back in our custody.”

He nodded, bit into his sandwich, and opened the newspaper on his desk blotter.

“I promise you, my man, you’ll be the first to know,” he said, his eyes already deep in a sports story.

After you’re a police officer for a while, you encounter certain temptations. They come to you as all seductions do, in increments, a teaspoon at a time, until you discover you made an irrevocable hard left turn down the road someplace and you wake up one morning in a moral wasteland with no idea who you are.

I’m not talking about going on a pad, ripping off dope from an evidence locker, or taking juice from dealers, either. Those temptations are not inherent in the job; they’re in the person.

The big trade-off is in one’s humanity. The discretionary power of a police officer is enormous, at least in the lower strata of society, where you spend most of your time. You start your career with the moral clarity of the youthful altruist, then gradually you begin to feel betrayed by those you supposedly protect and serve. You’re not welcome in their part of town; you’re lied to with regularity, excoriated, your cruiser Molotoved. The most venal bail bondsman can walk with immunity through neighborhoods where you’ll be shot at by snipers.

You begin to believe there are those in our midst who are not part of the same gene pool. You think of them as subhuman, morally diseased, or, at best, as caricatures whom you treat in custody as you would humorous circus animals.

Then maybe you’re the first to arrive on the scene after another cop has shot and killed a fleeing suspect. The summer night is hot and boiling with insects, the air already charged with a knowledge you don’t want to accept. It was a simple BE, a slashed screen in the back of a house; the dead man is a full-time bumbling loser known to every cop on the beat; the two wounds are three inches apart.

“He was running?” you say to the other cop, who’s wired to the eyes.

“You goddamn right he was. He stopped and turned on me. Look, he had a piece.”

The gun is in the weeds; it’s blue-black, the grips wrapped with electrician’s tape. The moon is down, the night so dark you wonder how anyone could see the weapon in the hand of a black suspect.

“I’m counting on you, kid,” the other cop says. “Just tell people what you saw. There’s the fucking gun. Right? It ain’t a mushroom.”

And you step across a line.

Don’t sweat it, a sergeant and drinking buddy tells you later. It’s just one more lowlife off the board. Most of these guys wouldn’t make good bars of soap.

Then something happens that reminds you we all fell out of the same tree.

Imagine a man locked in a car trunk, his wrists bound behind him, his nose running from the dust and the thick oily smell of the spare tire. The car’s brake lights go on, illuminating the interior of the trunk briefly, then the car turns on a rural road and gravel pings like rifle shot under the fenders. But something changes, a stroke of luck the bound man can’t believe — the car bangs over a rut and the latch on the trunk springs loose from the lock, hooking just enough so that the trunk lid doesn’t fly up in the driver’s rearview mirror.

The air that blows through the opening smells of rain and wet trees and flowers; the man can hear hundreds of frogs croaking in unison. He readies himself, presses the sole of his tennis shoe against the latch, eases it free, then rolls over the trunk’s lip, tumbles off the bumper, and bounces like a tire in the middle of the road. The breath goes out of his chest in a long wheeze, as though he had been dropped from a great height; rocks scour divots out of his face and grind red circles the size of silver dollars on his elbows.

Thirty yards up the car has skidded to a stop, the lid of the trunk flopping in the air. And the bound man splashes through the cattails into a slough by the side of the road, his legs tangling in dead hyacinth vines below the surface, the silt locking around his ankles like soft cement.

Ahead he can see the flooded stands of cypress and willow trees, the green layer of algae on the dead water, the shadows that envelop and protect him like a cloak. The hyacinth vines are like wire around his legs; he trips, falls on one knee. A brown cloud of mud mushrooms around him. He stumbles forward again, jerking at the clothesline that binds his wrists, his heart exploding in his chest.

His pursuers are directly behind him now; his back twitches as though the skin has been stripped off with pliers. Then he wonders if the scream he hears is his own or that of a nutria out on the lake.

They fire only one round. It passes through him like a shaft of ice, right above the kidney. When he opens his eyes, he’s on his back, stretched across a cushion of crushed willows on top of a sand spit, his legs in the water. The sound of the pistol report is still ringing in his ears. The man who wades toward him in silhouette is smoking a cigarette.

Not twice. It’s not fair , Roland Broussard wants to say. I got a meth problem. That’s the only reason I was there. I’m a nobody guy, man. You don’t need to do this.

The man in silhouette takes another puff off his cigarette, pitches it out into the trees, perhaps moves out of the moon’s glow so Roland’s face will be better illuminated. Then he sights along the barrel and puts another round from the .357 Magnum right through Roland’s eyebrow.

He walks with a heavy step back up the embankment, where a companion has waited for him as though he were watching the rerun of an old film.

Clete listened, his powder blue porkpie hat slanted down on his forehead, his eyes roving out into the hall while I talked. He wore an immaculate pair of white tennis shorts and a print shirt covered with parakeets. The back of his neck and the tops of his immense arms were flaking with sunburn.

“Kidnapping a guy already in custody is pretty slick. Who do you figure these characters were?” he said, his eyes leaving two uniformed deputies on the other side of the glass.

“Guys who knew the drill, at least well enough to convince a night jailer they were FBI.”

“The grease balls.”

“Maybe.”

“It’s not their normal style. They don’t like to stray into federal jurisdiction.” He glanced through the glass partition into the hall again. “Why do I get the feeling I’m some kind of zoo exhibit?”

“It’s your imagination,” I said, my face flat.

“I bet.” Then he winked and pointed at a deputy with one finger. The deputy looked down at some papers in his hand.

“Knock it off, Clete.”

“Why’d you ask me down here?”

“I thought you’d like to go fishing.”

He smiled. His face was round and pink, his green eyes lighted with a private sense of humor. A scar ran through part of his eyebrow and across the bridge of his nose, where he had been bashed with a pipe when he was a kid in the Irish Channel.

“Dave, I know what my old Homicide podjo is going to think before he thinks it.”

“I’ve got two open murder cases. One of the victims may have been Sonny Boy Marsallus’s girlfriend.”

“Marsallus, huh?” he said, his face sobering.

“I tried to have him picked up by NOPD, but he went off the screen.”

He drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair.

“Leave him off the screen,” he said.

“What was he into down in the tropics?” I asked.