Brad Parks - The Good Cop

Ruthie nodded. Any further discussion was squelched when the double doors swung open and Officers LeRioux and Jones-Hightower and Baldy-came stalking through them.

“Hey, guys,” I started, “why don’t we-”

“How many times I got to tell you to shut the hell up?” Hightower growled. “You say one more word I’m busting up that other knee. And this time I’ll go for the front of the knee, not the back.”

Baldy Jones slid open the door to the cells. Ruthie and I stood there, frozen, uncertain, a couple of scrawny newspaper reporters well out of their weight class.

“All right, come on out, ladies,” Hightower said. “We’re going to take a little walk up to the interrogation room, ask you a few questions about all that dope we took off you. Let’s go, let’s go.”

At least he didn’t noticed that our cuffs were unlocked. Ruthie eased out of the cell first, and I limped out after him. As we walked toward the interrogation room, I kept telling myself there was no way they would get away with this. No one would believe that Ruthie and I had smuggled weapons into a police station or would know how to use them even if we had. What were they going to do, put metal shivs in our dead hands and claim we tried to stab them? Give themselves superficial wounds to make it look more convincing? It was absurd.

But to a certain extent, it didn’t matter. Sure, there would be an investigation into our deaths-the paper would put up a hell of a stink-but as long as the cops stuck to their stories, what would there be to contradict them? Ruthie and I would go down in history as a bizarre cautionary tale: a pair of dope-dealing newspaper reporters who got killed by the cops.

“Keep walking,” Baldy said, as we passed through the double door and were led upstairs and down a hallway. We took a left turn down another hallway. I could see the emergency exit at the end of it. My heart started pounding and, strangely, I felt the urge to urinate. I guess there’s something to the old saying, after all, about being nervous enough to pee your pants.

I limped a few more steps down the hallway until Hightower said, “Stop here.”

We had reached the interrogation room. I casually positioned myself so that neither cop was between me and the emergency exit and saw Ruthie do the same. The exit was perhaps thirty feet away, a distance I could cover in, what, a few seconds? Would that be fast enough?

Baldy Jones started going for his keys. Hightower was resting his hand on his gun, an ominous development. Was that just a reflex for him, or was he expecting trouble? Was the gun strapped in or was it loose? Could he draw it during those two seconds I was running down the hall?

Ruthie and I agreed that the moment the key touched the door, we would both make a break for it. I bent my legs to prepare for our mad dash down the hallway and glanced over at Ruthie, who returned my gaze with eyes that had doubled in size.

Then the lights went out.

This being an interior hallway-in a building where the windows had been bricked over decades ago-we were plunged into immediate and total darkness. There was not a shred of ambient light. Not even the pinprick of a single LED. It was like being in a mineshaft.

Hightower swore and Baldy uttered a panicked, “What the…?”

I heard the creaking of leather, like a gun being removed from a holster, and I dropped to the floor. If Hightower started firing in the dark, I wanted to be as small a target as possible. I began desperately crawling in the direction of the emergency exit-how long would it take to get there on my hands and knees? — when I heard a lot of shouting and slamming coming from the front of the building. No, maybe it was the back. Or maybe it was just all over. It was hard to tell.

I had traveled perhaps eight feet when I bumped into the far wall, which I used as a guide to keep going. Then the emergency door light kicked on, casting an orange-yellow hue on the hallway. I could see over my shoulder that Baldy Jones had grabbed Ruthie. The shouting and slamming was getting closer.

Hightower had been groping in the dark for me, never realizing I had gone low. But even with the dimness of the emergency lights, he couldn’t miss me crawling along the floor. And sure enough, from the way his body turned, I could tell he had locked onto me. As he swept his gun in a smooth arc in my direction, I tried to get my legs back underneath me to scramble away-at least it would give him a more difficult shot-though I was having trouble getting my bad leg to respond with the necessary urgency.

Then a flash blinded me and smoke filled my lungs. The world went yellow and gray and burnt-smelling. I closed my eyes and my mouth and tried to stop inhaling, too. But I had been breathing too hard. I couldn’t help but take gulps of air, even though I knew it was bad.

I was immediately consumed by what had to be the worst allergy attack in human history. Some combination of tears, sweat, and snot began pouring out of every opening on my face. Then, as if there wasn’t enough moisture in the mix, the building’s sprinkler system went off. I kept gasping for air that just wasn’t there. All the oxygen had left the planet, replaced by poison gas and spraying water.

It was pure misery, but even in all the confusion, I knew it was still preferable to being shot. At some point, my brain finally grasped the idea that someone had tossed tear gas, a flash-bang grenade, or something similarly loud, bright, and smoky into the hallway. I didn’t know whether this was a mission of mercy or just a different kind of offensive from a yet-unknown enemy, but I was struggling too hard to survive to make that much sense out of it.

I kept trying to get my eyes to unscrew, but every time I did there was just more stinging and, besides, even when I could force them to open more than a slit, I couldn’t see much. Between the tears and the sprinkler, it was like being underwater.

I felt someone-no, make that two someones-grab me by the armpits and the crotch. Out of instinct, I thrashed against it, but the action was fairly futile. The pepper spray or mustard gas or whatever the hell it was had taken the fight out of me. As I allowed myself to be carried along, I could only hope that one, it wasn’t Hightower and Baldy Jones doing the dragging, and two, the officers had been just as incapacitated by the smoke as I was.

Soon I was outside the building, not that I was sure how it happened. Through my watery eyes I could finally see that I had been seized by a pair of guys in gas masks that made them look like some kind of bug-eyed aliens. They carried me in the direction of two more bug-eyed guys, who each grabbed a side of my upper half and then dragged me to a spot of empty sidewalk, where they laid me facedown.

I was beyond resistance at this point-that gas packed an indescribable punch-and I actually relaxed as I felt my hands and legs being fastened by strips of plastic. After a lifetime of never once being handcuffed, it had now happened to me twice in one day. Suddenly I knew what it was like to be a character in Fifty Shades of Grey .

Then I was left alone. I tilted my head to the right and finally began to gain focus on the surreal scene unfolding around me. There were several handfuls of other people-some of them cops, others dressed as civilians-arrayed on the street and sidewalk around me, also facedown. I spied Ruthie, lying a few bodies away from me. Otherwise, none of them looked especially familiar.

Beyond all the prone figures was a small army of men in gas masks and dark commando gear. Their job was to accept victims from the smoky building. The commandos seemed to be intent on getting everyone out. They would leave the sorting of who was who-and who was on what team-to some later time.