Devon Ford - The Fall

“Sarge, I’m telling you, this guy saw it happen,” Jake Peters told his overworked supervisor, as though repeating himself would make any difference.

“Look kid,” the sergeant said, turning and bumping his considerable gut into Jake’s lean frame. “We got car wrecks, the city’s in gridlock, we’ve lost guys in the explosions and in the chopper crashes, and you want me to prioritize some British guy who got himself too close to something that went boom?”

“There’s the robbery victim too,” Jake said weakly. “Come on, Sarge. It was felony assault right in front of me. I drew my off-duty weapon. I gotta write this up!”

Jake Peters was a pain the sergeant’s ass on most days, but today he just couldn’t handle him arguing to fight the good fight just like every other day he’d known the kid.

“Fine. Go get your complaint,” he told him. Jake smiled and went to turn away before he was stopped. “Tomorrow,” the sergeant said, “because right now I need you up on 23 rdstopping traffic coming up the one-way streets, okay?”

Jake never got a chance to answer. For an overweight man, the sergeant really knew how to move when he wanted to.

His deployment was unprecedented as he wasn’t usually called to guard street entrances for minor traffic violations, but he guessed that the real reason for it was to try and get a cop on every street corner and not for any traffic-related reason as that responsibility had been farmed outside of the NYPD years before. What was unprecedented, for him at least, was going anywhere on duty alone, but he guessed that needs must.

He sighed as he turned away, knowing that he would be walking the two blocks back to 23 rdwhere he had first met Cal stumbling toward him bleeding. He wished he could take something heavier than the Glock, if only to reassure himself. He doubted the general population would feel similarly reassured.

It would definitely reassure me, he thought, convincing himself that it was a childish want to take one of the shotguns stored at the station house, even though he got a foreboding feeling that he may require more firepower before the night was out. Jake stood rooted to the spot, trying to find a way to get through to his supervisor and be permitted to return to the Waldorf, but he sighed and did as he was told. The lights in the station house flickered, going dark briefly before they weakly returned to life.

He was scared, and the fear was almost as intense as his need to help people, to be the hero, only now that his chance came he felt the fear pulling him away more than he hoped it would. Against all regulations, and more out of fear than anything else, Jake took the harness to hold his off-duty weapon and put it on under his uniform jacket. He carried his service weapon, a Glock 19, which was effectively the same gun just not shrunk down, and the three full magazines for it. Wishing he could still carry something heavier, he made for the door and walked north toward his post.

It took him three times the normal walking distance to make the two blocks. Every second person stopped him to ask what was going on, if he had seen someone who they were looking for, if he could help them.

After barely being able to move for the mob around him wanting answers in the growing dark, he raised his voice and held up both hands to get their attention.

“People, please return to your homes and lock your doors. The NYPD is doing everything we can to find out what’s going on. Please, go home.”

He tried to walk on, to push through the crowds of scared people—the people he had sworn to protect—but he heard more questions shouted at him.

Why don’t the phones work? When is the power going to be restored? Who did this to us?

Jake had no answers to anything, he only repeated his advice for them to return to their homes and lock the doors until this had passed. He hoped that sounding confident would make the people believe him, like he was repeating official advice from the department, and they wouldn’t think that he was just as scared and clueless as they were.

He turned up the dial on his radio to hear the traffic in his earpiece but heard nothing. That was unheard of for any time of any day, let alone late on a Friday when the city was in panic. He pulled the radio from its pouch on his belt and checked he was on the right channel. He was, but it was dead. He tried to call up for a commo-check but there was no answer. Trying to convince himself that it was just a black spot, one which hadn’t been there on any day of the last year and a half he’d worked this precinct, he pulled his cell from his pocket. Also dead. Nothing which required a signal still worked, but Jake pushed it all aside and told himself that he would get to his post and do his job until he was needed elsewhere.

That kind of delusional thinking got him through almost two hours of yelling, pointing, and being shouted at on 23 rdStreet. He yelled at drivers to leave their cars after the first six people tried to drive the wrong way down streets to get through the traffic. Desperation did funny things to normally law-abiding citizens, and the thought of abandoning the car they had worked hard to afford was unimaginable to most people, and Jake had argued repeatedly until he realized that the cars which had piled down the wrong way only added to the gridlock on the avenues heading south and north.

People left their cars and walked, carrying their belongings, their children, even their pets.

“Hey!” a male voice snapped from behind him petulantly. Jake turned to see a man in a suit, carrying a briefcase as he stepped out from the back of a stranded town car.

“Hey!” he said again, testing Jake’s patience.

“Can I help you, sir?” Jake said, professional but with a hint of steel in his voice.

“You could do your damned job and get these cars outta my way,” the man said, earning himself a place at the absolute head of Jake’s shit list. Before he could answer, the man compounded his problem.

“Are the ferries to Jersey still running?” he snapped, shooting a cuff and checking his watch before looking back to Jake with wide eyes as though he was absolutely certain the officer was an idiot. He began to repeat his question pronouncing each word slowly.

“I don’t know, sir,” Jake said with a formality which was intended to shame the obnoxious businessman into changing his attitude.

“Well, get on your little radio and find out from someone who does know then,” he ordered Jake, as though his undisclosed status gave him the right to commandeer a New York City police officer for his own errands.

“Can’t do that,” Jake answered, dropping the ‘sir’ as he decided the man didn’t deserve even a sarcastic amount of manners.

“What do you mean, you can’t do that?” said the man, his face cracking into anger.

“I mean, sir ,” Jake said, leaning forward toward him and reinserting the sarcasm, “that police radios are down. So are the phones. And the city is in gridlock.” He let that hang, seeing the anger on his opponent’s face sag into something nearing abject fear. “So, I’d suggest that if you want to find out if the Jersey ferry is running, then take a walk and find out for yourself.” He relaxed, stood more upright and continued. “Alternatively, you could get your ass back to whatever building you came from and stay indoors until this mess is cleaned up.”

The man said nothing. His mouth opened and closed twice, wordlessly, then he straightened himself and went to walk back to the rear of the town car to wait in conditions more befitting his status.

He never made it.

A burst of gunfire erupted from a first-floor window, indiscriminate in aim and intended only to make the street below ignite into instant panic. A single round punctured the throat of the businessman, sending a flood of hot sticky blood down the collar of his hundred-dollar shirt, over the knot of his sixty-dollar tie, making his body drop back to the sidewalk as he choked out on his own blood.