Brad Parks - The Good Cop

The next thing I saw was a gloved hand protruding from the window, holding a black, metallic object of some sort. It took me a long nanosecond to parse what I was seeing. Was it a length of pipe? It wasn’t registering.

The car had slowed to perhaps fifteen or twenty miles an hour as it came close to pulling even with me. I couldn’t see the driver through the front window or any of the passengers through the tinting. I was considering the vehicle with unguarded curiosity when, suddenly, I figured out what that black thing emerging from the backseat was.

That’s not a pipe, you idiot, my brain shouted, that’s a gun. And it’s aimed at you. Dive, idiot. Dive!

I was still in the process of making myself horizontal when a clap sounded in front of me and wood splintered behind me. The gun wasn’t silenced. It was the opposite of silenced. It was deafening. More bullets followed the first in a ceaseless and terrifying procession.

My dive had put me halfway between the sidewalk and the unkempt flower bed, in the middle of the small strip of grass that made up the Kippses’ front lawn. I was utterly exposed, and I was certain to experience the flesh-tearing agony of a bullet ripping into my body any moment. Perhaps, if I had any wherewithal whatsoever, I should have crawled closer to the cars parked along the street. But damn if I could shove myself closer to that Mercedes. I could barely move at all.

I tried to go flat, pancake flat-hell, tortilla flat-as the rounds kept coming. It wasn’t an automatic weapon, just the incessant fire of someone who was pulling the trigger as fast as his pointer finger could manage. I couldn’t even count how many times I heard that awful thunderclap of exploding gas and propelled lead. All I knew was it was more than five and less than twenty million. How much less? That I couldn’t say.

And it kept coming. I heard glass shattering behind me, parked cars being hit in front of me, and bullets ricocheting all around me. At some point, I covered my head with my hands-like that would somehow be good defense-and buried my face in the ground. I wondered if the last thing I would ever see in this world was cold, dead grass.

Then it ended. The quiet was, in its own way, as loud as the noise had been moments earlier. There was no squeaking of tires, no wailing of car alarms, no shrieking of wounded humanity.

Just silence.

* * *

The first thing I forced myself to do was crawl toward the curb and the parked cars. I wanted metal at my back and something to dive under should the need arise. I probably looked ridiculous, going on all fours across the sidewalk, but it would be a little while before I felt like having the precious contents of my skull more than about two feet off the ground.

Eventually, I reached a rusting Toyota Celica, against which I stayed huddled for a minute or so, trying to resist the involuntary shaking that was overtaking my body. Still dazed, I looked back at Mimi’s house, which was pockmarked with bullet holes like a modern-day Alamo. Several of the windows had been shot out. The siding was going to need a serious patch job.

Finally, I stood up on gone-wobbly legs. The Mercedes had disappeared. For now. Was it coming back? I didn’t have much experience with drive-by shootings-watching Boyz in the Hood twenty years ago just doesn’t count-but I sure as hell wasn’t going to stick around to find out.

I ran, or maybe just stumbled, to my car, fumbling nervously with my keys until I got the door open. I dove in, turned the engine over, and started driving. For the next few blocks, I have to admit I was rather generous with the accelerator, rather stingy with the brakes.

My first thought, once my heart rate returned to something like normal and my breathing was back under my own control, was that I ought to call the police. Shooting at someone, that’s illegal, isn’t it? I didn’t have a book called Being Target Practice for Dummies handy, but I was reasonably certain the law frowned on citizens discharging firearms in the direction of other citizens.

Right. Definitely. Once I put sufficient distance between myself and all those spent shell casings on Rutledge Avenue, I dialed the number for the East Orange Police Department.

A female voice answered: “East Orange Police, Officer Heyward speaking, may I help you?”

“Yes, I’m … I’m calling to report a shooting,” I said in a voice that sounded too faltering to be my own, almost like I was going through puberty again.

“What is your address?”

“Well … I … I live in … in Bloomfield, actually … but the shooting happened on Rutledge Avenue.”

“We’re already responding to a report about shots fired on Rutledge,” she said. “Do you require officer assistance?”

“No … it’s … it’s over now. I was just on Rutledge Avenue when these guys started shooting at me.”

“Were you hit, sir? Do you require medical assistance?”

“No, I … I guess I just thought it was the sort of thing you guys liked to know about for, I don’t know, statistical purposes. I was shot at, you know?”

“Can you identify the person who was shooting at you, sir?”

“I didn’t really get a look at him. It was just these guys in a Mercedes and suddenly one of them started shooting at me”-I had said that already, hadn’t I? — “and, well, it was just a lot of bullets and…”

I could tell she was thinking, Yeah, and what do you want me to do about it? Instead, she said, “Are you still at the scene, sir?”

“No, I … I took off. I just … I wanted to get out of there.”

“I understand, sir. If you’d like, you can come into the station and file a report.”

A report? This wasn’t my briefcase being stolen out of the back of my car. These were killers who just happened to have bad aim. She wanted me to file a report?

I was building up some good, indignant outrage when I started thinking about this thing from the cop’s perspective. She was getting a phone call from a guy who was informing her of a shooting about which she already knew. And he couldn’t tell her much of anything new or useful. I realized that if our roles were reversed, I’d blow me off, too.

“Yeah, thanks. Maybe I’ll … maybe I’ll do that,” I said, and then hung up.

I became aware I had just run a red light-the honking of the person I nearly T-boned alerted me to this-and I finally pulled over. Like most guys, I’m a bad multitasker under even the best of circumstances. Thinking and driving were two things that weren’t going to be able to coexist for me at this moment, and right now I needed to think more than I needed to drive.

It is one thing to be shot at. It’s quite another thing to not know who’s doing it or why.

Everything happened so fast. I needed to slow down the scene. Maybe it would tell me something I didn’t know.

The first thing I saw was a silver Mercedes sedan with tinted windows. Immediate, knee-jerk reaction: it was driven by a drug dealer, a fairly high-level one-because the kids standing out on the corner selling dime bags for seven dollars couldn’t afford a ride like that. And it was obviously a drug dealer who didn’t particularly care about being too cliched in his vehicle choices.

But why would a drug dealer-or a drug-dealing gang, if it was one of those-want to shoot me? I wasn’t in the drug game. Guys who are don’t usually bother with civilians. And how would they have even known I was there? It’s not like I posted my itinerary online.

I thought back to my scene. The next thing that appeared was the gun. I am not any kind of firearms expert-I don’t know my calibers from my millimeters-but it was not a large gun. Then it started firing.