Craig Johnson - Kindness Goes Unpunished

When Chavez slid the cruiser behind a derelict van, he and Johnston got out of the vehicle; the young officer reached back and lifted the handle to allow me to join them on the street.

“Lose your batons and hats.”

Johnston turned and looked at me, neither of them having heard a word I said. “What?”

“Lose the batons and hats; they’re going to fall off anyway. Turn your jackets inside out so that none of the metal reflects.” They both looked at me for a moment more and then did as I told them. They looked so young.

Chavez, having prepared himself, studied Johnston. “You still look like a cop, man.”

Johnston smiled. “Yeah? Well, you do, too.” They both turned to look at me. “He doesn’t.” I smiled and took off my Phillies cap, placing it on Chavez’s head.

He pulled it off at an angle, gangsta style. “You gonna be all right while we’re gone?”

I looked up and down the street, where there was only one light on in a second-story window at the end of the block. “Looks pretty quiet in my part of the neighborhood.”

“That could change.” He reached back in the open window and unlocked a black Mossberg 590 DA 12-gauge and handed it to me. “You know how to use that?”

I checked the breech and safety. “Yep.”

He smiled. “I bet you do.”

The requisite amount of time had passed, and in the next few minutes Michael and his team would begin a very noisy descent from the roof. We were counting on it.

I watched as Chavez and Johnston moved around the discarded van and started working their way across the street and over the sagging fence. They stayed apart, and I didn’t hear any warning sounds coming from the Fort as they slowly covered the fifty yards to the abandoned car.

I draped the Mossberg down along my leg after rechecking the safety, resting the end of the barrel on the toe of my boot. I figured if anybody were looking out the window, it would be prudent to not advertise the shotgun. I moved along the side of the van for a better vantage point and watched as the squad cars returned after pulling a quick U-turn. Michael and his group should now be descending the stairwell inside the building.

I could hear the thud of the back door being kicked in and watched as Chavez and Johnston disappeared into the darkness. People were yelling all over the place, and I could make out someone from inside shouting that they were the police and that whomever they were talking to should freeze. There was more yelling, and I watched as the beams from the cops’ Maglites flashed inside the row house, some on the third floor and some on the second.

There were people running everywhere; the patrolmen coming from around the front tackled a few. Some of the more lithe individuals were able to slip by and disappeared into the streets and alleys beyond.

It was then that I heard the first shot, that cattle-prod reaction to the sharp sound of gunfire. It doesn’t sound like in the movies; it is more like a quick smacking sound that makes you second-guess. I heard the sound again and was pretty sure it was coming from the second floor. I looked down at the 12-gauge in my hands, noticing that I had already clicked off the safety.

I moved across the street and was approaching the sagging fence when I saw some commotion at the second-story window and heard the report of a handgun. I sped up.

An uneven image crowded the window, and I watched in horror as what looked like two men scrambled and then tumbled from the second story. They crashed through the partial aluminum awning of the first floor and slid onto the back porch. There were more shots with a lot of screaming and yelling before one of the figures stood and leapt from the stoop, clearing the back of the collapsed porch in one leap. He turned as other people crowded the doorway and reached for something at his waistband. He tripped but converted the fall into a lope that brought him back up on a course for where I now stood.

It appeared as if his eyes were right on me as I stood there at the fence with the shotgun trained at his middle. I could make out Chavez’s voice screaming for him to stop and prayed that they wouldn’t open fire with me directly in line, but no bullets came whizzing from the Fort, only a half-naked man who still seemed to be fussing with something in the low-hanging pants at his midriff.

The police behind him screamed again, but he wasn’t listening, intent only on his line of escape. As he got closer, I could see the well-defined muscles that covered his body and figured he was roughly my size, but in a lot better shape.

I looked over the shotgun and then thought about what I was doing and where I was. I clicked the safety back on. As he got closer, I could see the tattoos that seemed to cover his body. He was a monster. I stayed alongside the abandoned car for a moment and then took two steps, catching him halfway over the fence.

There were two things they taught me when I was an offensive lineman at USC back in the Dark Ages. One: after a holding call, grab anything that moves because they’re not going to make two holding calls in a row. Second: never underestimate the power of a good clothesline tackle. I felt the liquid thump of a body giving way as my right arm came up and caught him in the middle of the chest, forcing the air out of him,

He didn’t make it over the fence, but what was in his waistband did; a small 9 mm semiautomatic pistol that struck the sidewalk and skittered over the curb and into the street, next to a sewer grating.

I watched as he gurgled for a moment, then breathed in an unsteady motion, clutching his abdomen and rolling from side to side; I noticed in a moment of irony that he was wearing black alligator cowboy boots. As one of the cops made it to the fence, I slipped the shotgun under my arm and walked into the street to look for the automatic, but I was pretty sure it’d dropped into the sewer.

There was a gaggle of police vehicles and EMTs, all with their gumballs going, at the front of the Fort, so before anybody with more authority could get back to where we were, I handed the shotgun to a patrolman named Fraser. His partner rolled the already complaining man over and cuffed him.

“This one had an automatic, but I think it dropped into the sewer grate.”

Fraser smiled. “We’ll light it up and take a look.”

“Everybody okay over there?”

“Moretti stepped on a nail, so the big pussy’s going to have to get a tetanus shot.”

The large man in the cuffs cocked his head and stopped groaning long enough to yell toward me. “Hey, motherfucker, my ribs are broken!”

I looked back at Fraser. “What was all the gunfire?”

“Hey, motherfucker, who are you?!”

He motioned to the drug dealer. “One of his buddies threw a few into the stairwell before shooting himself in the leg.”

“Motherfucker, I asked you a question!”

The other cop yanked him a little to the side. “Shut the fuck up, DuVall!”

“Who went out the window with this guy?”

The patrolman looked serious for a moment. “Johnston.”

Two of the EMTs were working on Rayfield by the time I got there. He had dislocated his shoulder and broken a collarbone, but he was smiling when I leaned against the porch, eye to eye with him. They were stabilizing his arm and preparing a gurney to transport. “How you feeling?”

He groaned. “Like shit. How’d we do?”

I looked around at the assembled cops, spotting Chavez and some of the others smiling like guys who had gotten away with something. “I think pretty good.”

My nostrils flared, and my nose hurt. I rubbed it cautiously and looked at Cady. I thanked Lena and apologized for being late, but I didn’t ask the usual changing-of-the-guard question, whether there had been any improvement, and Lena hadn’t volunteered any information. I wondered if that was the first phase in giving up, if I had passed over some threshold of hope. I didn’t want to start saying Cady as I had said Martha, with a level of such misery and despair that I just couldn’t say it without people looking away.