Steve Martini - The Judge

“Get the woman in the living room. Get the kid outta here. Take her downtown, CPS,” he says. Child Protective Services.

“Touch my daughter and I’ll kill you,” I tell him.

This earns me a sharp knee, a full thrust into my kidneys, pain that is white hot behind my eyes.

“Fuckin’ hotshot lawyer. I told you you were gonna be seeing a lot of snow. So where is it? Tell me?” The words are hissed in my ear as he presses the gun harder into my neck.

I am sliding down the wall in pain. One of them has me by the hair, lifting me literally by the locks that I have left. They drag me through the door, and down the hall toward the living room.

I am not seated but thrown onto my couch, from which all the cushions have now been removed. One of the cops is busy slicing these with a sharp knife, pulling all the padding from each of them and throwing it on the floor, not a purposeful search as much as sheer destruction. They know that I did not have time to zip these open and slip the cocaine inside.

There are china cups and small dishes that Nikki left to Sarah assembled in a little tray on our coffee table. These are shattered where they sit, the remnants swept onto the floor with a baton by the cretin with the backward baseball cap. The one dish that does not break he stomps with his foot until it is many pieces.

“Daddy!” I can hear Sarah’s screams as she is being carried down the walkway by the side of the house. I glimpse her for an instant through a window in the living room. She is being carted off, her feet under the arm of one of these animals.

“Leave my daughter alone.” Without warning I thrust myself across the table with all the force my thighs can propel. I crash headlong into the gut of the cop with the backward cap, flattening his gut and forcing the air from his lungs.

In an instant two of the others land on my back, and I pay the price. Truncheons land full force on my head and shoulders, what feels like the trigger guard on a pistol cuts into the back of my head, and the gun discharges near my ear with a loud report, nearly deafening me.

“Son of a bitch.” One of them in high anxiety. “You stupid shit. Put the safety on.”

The pain of the blows to my shoulders numbs my spine, its own form of anesthesia, until I can no longer feel my legs. They are still beating on me.

“Cut it out. You’re gonna kill him.” From a daze I hear this voice.

“One less fuckin’ lawyer. Who’s gonna miss him?” Whoever says this has a knee in my back so that I cannot breathe. These are masters of pain.

I lie there on the floor for several moments while they argue over what they should do to me: more beating or put me on the couch. One of them periodically comes over and kicks me in the ribs, full force with a work boot. He does this two or three times as a gratuitous diversion from their debate. I recognize the khaki pants and the boot, though when I look up his face is hooded. It is cable man.

They drag me back and throw me on the couch. This time I remain lying on one side, conscious of only one thing: I can no longer hear Sarah’s frantic screams.

Shuffling feet in the hallway.

“Bring her in here.” They drag Lenore into the room. I can see her from my partially prone position on the couch. Her hands are cuffed behind her. There are scratches on her face, and marks where they have struck her with something on one cheek. One of the bulls has her by the nape of the neck, a hand so big that he could crush her throat without giving it thought.

“I tried to get Sarah out.” It is all she can say to me before the guy squeezes.

“Shut up.” The hooded marvel throws her across the coffee table. She lands on the couch beside me, falls on her side, and has difficulty righting herself, showing more anger in her eyes than I have seen in a lifetime.

“Where’s Sarah?” I ask her.

“I don’t know.”

One of the cops comes over and, with the full force of a backhand, lays his baton across the shin of my right leg. The pain is excruciating, so that I cry out. Nausea begins to rack my body. My brain reeling, I wonder if he has broken the bone.

“Shut your fucking mouth. Understand? You talk when we want you to.”

I hear the porcelain on the toilet being smashed, the hissing of water as the plumbing goes, flooding the floor in the bathroom.

“It’s not there.” One of them steps out just long enough to announce this. “Should I get the dog?”

“It’s gotta be there. Look again.”

I hear cupboards opening, doors being ripped off their hinges. Drawers being pulled from their runners, and the contents spilled on the floor.

Two of them in the room with us are whispering. A cold chill runs down my spine. No doubt that there is more where the first kilo came from. In hushed tones they talk, consider the alternatives available. So far I have counted four cops. Then I hear pots and pans being tossed in the kitchen. There is at least one more, maybe two. A total of five or six.

“He only had sixty seconds.” This is cable man talking. It is a face I am not likely to forget soon.

The black jackets they are wearing, the ones I have seen, all have the same logo emblazoned on the back: the word POLICE in four-inch-high white letters. I see nothing that says DEA, FBI, or identifies these thugs as Treasury or Customs agents. Unless I miss my guess, this is strictly a local party.

Suddenly there’s a lot of commotion, agitation among the cops in the room. “Who’s that?” They’re looking out the window behind me.

I prop myself up by the elbow of one arm so that I can see over the back of the couch to the front street. Two cops in uniform are getting out of a squad car, coming up across the lawn.

“Get the dog,” says cable man. “We gotta find it. Move!”

One of them is out the front door. He nearly runs over one of the uniformed officers, who has now made it to the walkway leading to the front door. He says something to the cop running by, but I cannot hear it. The man seems to ignore him, so the uniformed officer continues to the front door.

He’s a big man, well over six feet, eyes shaded by dark glasses, wearing a crisp blue uniform and a badge that could blind you in the bright sunlight.

“What’s going on?” he says. He doesn’t take off the glasses, so that the direction of his gaze is only a guess.

No one answers him.

“Jesus.” He does a quick survey with his eyes of the damage down the hall, Noah’s flood.

“You guys bring your own wrecking ball?” He carefully removes the dark glasses from his eyes, then glances at Lenore, then me. He puts the glasses in his breast pocket.

“Lemme guess. Resisting arrest?” he says. “The lady beat the shit out of each of you.” Only the other uniform laughs at this. The one who is talking is wearing sergeant’s stripes.

“What are you doing here, Hazzard?” It’s cable man’s voice that I hear.

“My patrol area,” says the sergeant. “I might ask you the same thing.”

“We got a tip on drugs.” Cable man finally pulls the hood off his head. His face is flushed, covered with sweat. He straightens his mussed hair with one hand. His patch with the name “Mike” is now covered by a flak jacket. I know this workshirt is borrowed when the sergeant in uniform calls him Howie.

I can hear dishes being broken in the kitchen. They are working their way through my cupboards.

“What are you guys doing out there?” the sergeant hollers down the hall.

Howie gives a head signal to the backward baseball cap, who sprints down the hall. Like magic, the clatter of glass splattering on my tile floor ceases.

“Why didn’t you guys call for backup?” says the sergeant. “Nobody told Patrol this was happening.”