Brad Parks - The Good Cop

It was around this time I felt a real panic setting in. I was stuck in this netherworld where the cops and the crooks were indistinguishable. And there wasn’t anyone who was going to save me from them. The pit of my stomach was dropping quickly out of my body. I was, not to put too fine a point on it, screwed.

Up until that moment, I had been walking on my own across the street, albeit prodded by Hightower, who had a bruise-inducing grip on my right arm. No more. It was time to put up at least a token effort at resistance, if only so someone coming along realized the funny-looking white guy was being taken against his will.

I yanked my right arm, planted my right heel in the asphalt, and tried to make a break for it, pushing off as forcefully as I could. I didn’t know how far I could make it, running with handcuffs on, but I at least had to try.

It turns out the answer was: not very far. My bucking and squirming did exactly no good. Hightower, with his octopus hand, never relinquished his grip. One of the other officers, the one with the mustache, anticipated my move, which he had probably seen a hundred times before, and took the opportunity to knee me in the groin.

He didn’t get me square in the kiddy-maker, but he got close enough that I felt a momentary lurch of nausea and doubled over. The mustachioed officer grabbed my left arm, and with Hightower still on my right, they dragged me up the front steps of the precinct-just like the cab driver, John Smith, on that long-ago hot summer night.

I could still hear Famous’s raspy laughter as the doors closed behind me.

* * *

Inside the precinct, the first thing I saw was the desk sergeant, a different one from the other day. I didn’t know if he was involved with the red dot scheme or not, but I was growing desperate. If nothing else, I didn’t want to go quietly.

“I’m a reporter with the Eagle-Examiner ,” I said in a high, panicked voice. “These officers are involved in a major gun-selling operation that I’m about to expose and now they’ve taken me-”

“Would you shut up, you freakin’ hophead?” Hightower outshouted me while giving me another thunk on the head, this time on the side. “You want us to add slander to all those CDS charges against you?”

The desk sergeant didn’t even look up. I guess he was accustomed to loud, crazy, half-coherent people being dragged past him, shouting their various conspiracy theories and claiming police brutality. I might not have even been the first one that shift. All he did was nonchalantly buzz us in.

I inhaled and was about to start shouting again-this time with a little more diaphragm behind it-but Hightower seemed to anticipate it. In a low, deadly serious voice he said, “If you don’t shut the hell up, I will crack your skull like an eggshell and scramble whatever I find inside. Yeah, I’ll end up on administrative leave for a month. But you’ll end up eating through a tube for the rest of your life. You get me?”

For emphasis, he took his nightstick and placed it about four inches from my forehead. I quickly took stock of my situation and realized that in my current state-I was the handcuffed hostage of a gang of killer cops-a concussion wouldn’t do anything to help matters. So I took this as an opportunity to keep my thoughts to myself and retreat into a period of personal reflection.

Ruthie, who was still on his feet, wasn’t trying anything daring either. And so, together, we were shunted down a hallway, then through some heavy double doors into what appeared to be a holding cell area. The fourth cop, the one who was neither dragging me nor shoving Ruthie, opened up one of the cells and in we went.

“Face the wall,” Hightower ordered, and we did. Didn’t seem like much point in resisting now.

I felt hands going for my pockets and was soon relieved of their contents: cell phone, keys, wallet, notepad, pen. Then the hands ran roughly up and down my legs, arms, and chest.

“Aren’t you at least gonna kiss me before you cop a feel, Officer?” I asked.

Hightower answered with another palm to the base of the skull that, to me, sounded like all the low keys on the piano had been hit at once. I thought that was going to be the worst of it, then out of the corner of my eye I saw him remove his nightstick from his belt, wind up, and take a swing at the back of my right leg.

The next thing I knew I was on the floor, my leg having momentarily lost the will to hold me up. For the first few seconds, I wasn’t feeling any pain-just disorientation-and then a piercing ache rushed up from my knee.

“Fffaaa!” I shouted. I’m not sure what language “fffaaa” is, but I’m sure it’s an expression of pain in some primal protolanguage.

Hightower kneeled one leg on top of my chest, then rested his baton on my nose, grinding it into the cartilage for good measure.

“You keep your mouth shut, princess,” he said. “You got that? You keep it shut or this is going to get a whole lot worse.”

“Hey, get off him!” Ruthie shouted.

“You want it next?” Baldy Jones said. I heard something impact Ruthie’s midsection and most of the air rush out of him.

I whipped my head to the side, to get Hightower’s stick out of my face. He roughly brought himself back to standing, using my sternum as a trampoline. Hightower wasn’t the thickest guy, but he had to weigh two forty, easily. I felt like I was lying in the middle of the street on road-paving day.

As he walked away from me, he gave my right knee a sideswipe with his boot. It wasn’t a full-on toe kick and didn’t have too much momentum behind it, but it still sent another shock wave up my leg. I twisted into a fetal position, if only to get my throbbing knee some protection.

At that moment, rolled up in a ball on the floor, I decided it was time to stop being brave. And cute. What little satisfaction it was bringing me just wasn’t worth the agony. I heard Ruthie moaning and saw he was doubled over, leaning against a bench for support. I suspected he was reaching the same conclusion.

“Ordinarily, I’d remove the cuffs right now,” Hightower said. “But not for a couple of dangerous drug dealers like you.”

Then, as abruptly as they had arrived in our lives, the four officers left.

I took a moment’s worth of stock in our situation. We were alone and trapped in a windowless dungeon. No one knew where we were, and we had no way of communicating our whereabouts or predicament. Our captors were police officers who could presumably use their perverse version of the law to keep us here for quite some time, assuming they didn’t kill us first. And my leg felt like it had glass shards inside it.

In short, we were in a bad way.

“You okay?” Ruthie said, panting and still leaning against the bench.

“No,” I replied, because honesty is the best policy.

I was about to ask him how he was doing, but before I could, he staggered over to the small metal toilet in the corner of the cell and vomited. Twice. That seemed to answer the question.

He spit a few times, then eventually straightened partway up and lurched over to the bench. He sat down with his head between his knees. I was still in my baby ball, but at least the throbbing in my knee wasn’t getting any worse for the moment. It helped that no one was hitting it anymore.

“So what happens now?” he asked, spitting again.

“I don’t know. Probably nothing good.”

“You got any brilliant ideas for getting us out of here?”

“Nothing that comes to mind.”

“I guess asking for a phone call the next time they come back is out of the question?”

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” I said.

“What are they going to do to us?”

I didn’t answer him. I didn’t want to. We eased into something like a respite, neither of us saying anything, each of us nursing our hurts.