Brad Parks - The Good Cop

Another shot echoed harmlessly behind me, and I was beginning to feel like I must have had some kind of force field behind me or guardian angel on my shoulder. Then the force field disintegrated, and the guardian angel flew off as two more shots rang out and definitely hit … something.

All I knew for sure is that I was starting to lose control of my car. One bullet felt like it had hit somewhere in the vicinity of my trunk, which shouldn’t have been debilitating to anything other than perhaps the golf clubs I had stored in there. Then I quickly began to figure out where the second one hit: my right rear tire.

The entire car listed back and to the right. Even with power steering, staying straight was suddenly a battle. The only thing that was saving me was that the Malibu was front-wheel drive, and the front wheels seemed unaffected.

The light at Muhammad Ali Avenue was blessedly green. Still, a pivotal decision time was coming. There had been a lot of construction in recent years, so I wasn’t entirely certain about this, but many through streets in Newark now dead-ended, and I was fairly sure Prince Street was one of them.

Partly because of that, and partly because it was the direction my car seemed to want to go, I made as hard a right onto Muhammad Ali as I dared, veering out into the oncoming lane just slightly.

The Mercedes dropped back slightly and made the turn smoothly. I could guess having all four tires intact probably helped in that regard. Then it began closing in on me anew.

And this time, maybe because my flapping right tire didn’t give me much choice, I allowed it. It was beginning to dawn on me that letting the Mercedes slowly shred my car from behind was a losing proposition. The Malibu was the only weapon I had, and I needed to find a way to use it while it was still running. Unless I could make this a demolition derby-not a carnival shooting gallery-I would be facing the prospect of a prolonged underground slumber.

Knowing the shooter was on the right side of the car, at least for the time being, I fought the wheel to stay in the left lane, giving the Mercedes plenty of room to overtake me on the right. As soon as its front bumper was even with my back bumper, I hit my brakes.

It was all happening at about fifty or sixty miles an hour on an urban street, so it all felt very fast. But as soon as my passenger side door was even with the thugs’ driver side, I went back to the accelerator, veered out slightly to my left-to give myself a little room to build some momentum-then brought whatever tonnage the Malibu had slamming into the Mercedes.

The cars hit with a jolt and a thump that sounded more like plastic-on-plastic than metal-on-metal. Without being able to see through the tinted windows, I couldn’t say this for sure, but I felt like I caught the bastards by surprise. The collision sapped us of some of our speed, though we were still traveling fairly fast, with our cars acting like they were caught on each other.

The intersection for Irvine Turner Boulevard was quickly approaching, and I saw that, on our current course, I was going to be steering the Mercedes straight into a utility pole. It was going to be a head-on collision. A nasty one.

The driver of the Mercedes obviously saw it, too, because at the last minute he peeled right, bouncing over a low curb onto the sidewalk and then through a small, empty parking lot. Then, to my surprise, he continued the right turn, hopped down on Irvine Turner Boulevard, and kept going, actually speeding up, like he was eager to get away.

I pounded my brakes and screeched through a (thankfully empty) intersection, barely missing a fire hydrant on the other side-at the price of plowing over a pedestrian crossing sign.

Still, that had to be significantly better than plowing over a pedestrian.

* * *

My Malibu finally came to rest in the side yard of some garden-style apartments. I sat in it for a moment and did some deep, grateful breathing, then got out to assess the damage to my car. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. The small crease in the front bumper could be hammered out. The glass in the passenger side mirror was gone, but at least the housing was intact. The scrapes along the right side of the car were superficial, and I wasn’t exactly worried too much about cosmetics at this point. The right rear tire was a floppy mess. I couldn’t see any damage from where the other bullet had hit.

Before long, a lanky teenager wearing a too-long white T-shirt, riding a too-small bicycle cruised up behind me.

“You aight?” he asked in a languid voice. He seemed unimpressed by what he had just witnessed, as if car chases rolled through his neighborhood every Wednesday afternoon right around two o’clock.

“Yeah, thanks.”

“They dropped they gun.”

“They … they did?”

“Yeah, it’s back there,” he said, jerking his head behind him.

“Show me,” I said.

He wheeled his bike around, and I followed him as he crossed the intersection and pedaled back up the sidewalk. Sure enough, there was a handgun lying on its side against the curb, right around the spot where I had sideswiped the Mercedes. That explained why it sped off the way it did: the occupants were no longer armed.

I squatted next to the gun and studied it, not wanting to touch it in case there were usable fingerprints on it. Using the sum total of my knowledge about handguns, I could tell this one was black, plastic, and nasty.

Out of curiosity-and because I wasn’t exactly going to pick it up and check out its action-I shifted myself to get a good view of the underside of the gun. Sure enough, there was a tiny red dot emblazoned on the butt of the handle. It was so small I’m sure I wouldn’t have noticed it unless I had been looking for it specifically.

“There’s a red dot on this gun,” I said to my bike-riding friend. “You ever heard of red dot guns?”

He smiled at me like he knew something but said, “I ain’t into nothing like that.”

Yes, I’m sure a teenaged kid who was puttering around on his bike during school hours wouldn’t know anything about a criminal enterprise. Oh well. At least I was getting shot at by the very latest in thug chic.

My buddy rode off, leaving me alone to ponder what had just transpired. Obviously, I had been attacked by the same punks who had given me the drive-by treatment outside of Mimi’s place-I didn’t need to match license plates and VIN numbers to recognize that Mercedes. But how had they found me this time? It’s not like I rang up Mimi and tipped her off I was going to see the medical examiner. Heck, I hadn’t even told Tina.

Had they been following me? They obviously knew where I was. But then, if they had really tailed me from the newsroom all the way to the medical examiner’s office and watched me park and walk inside, wouldn’t they have just waited for me there and put a slug behind my right ear as soon as I departed the building?

So was it just dumb luck? Were they driving around, doing their gang thing, when one of them happened to recognize my car? No, that didn’t work. Because when they shot at me the last time, I wasn’t in-or near-the Malibu. They wouldn’t have known it was my car, and besides, it’s not like an aging Chevy Malibu is a rare, priceless vehicle scarcely seen on the streets of Newark.

I hadn’t made much headway on the subject when I saw a Newark Police patrol unit roll to a stop near the corner. They had either gotten a report about shots being fired and had come to investigate, or they were going to give me a ticket for abandoning my derelict car on someone’s lawn.

I walked back to my Malibu just as the two officers emerged from the squad car.

“Man, I could have used you guys about five minutes ago,” I said.