Only a Pawn in their Game
By Jack Frayne-Reid
-1-
“Aw shit.”
“You hit something.”
“Yeah. Heard it thump on down the stairs.”
“Well, let’s go see–”
A woman screamed.
“Aw fuck.”
“Police!”
“He ain’t breathing!” she cried, crouched at
the bottom of the stairs that connected floors eight and seven in the New Alamo
tenement building. She was 20-something and black, and knelt over the body of a
man of the same sort of demographic, the flickering of the stairwell’s
dilapidated lightbulb bringing her teary eyes and his empty ones into sharp
focus for split-seconds at a time. Officers Lawton and Mazursky edged down the
stairway, training their 9mm service revolvers on her. Lawton’s foot brushed
past a stray Brooklyn Dodgers cap. “Fuckin’ pigs!”
“Stay on the floor! Don’t move!”
“Why? What did I do? What did he?”
“Why d’you run?” Mazursky said, repeating with
vehemence. “Why d’you run?!”
“We wasn’t runnin’! I don’t know what you’re
talking about! He bleedin’!”
“You were running! We could hear your
footsteps! Now I wanna know if either you got any drugs or weapons on you?”
“He’s bleeding.
I think maybe he dead! Look what you
done-”
Mazursky had knelt down opposite the woman and
was patting the man down. He pulled his hand out of the guy’s jacket pocket and
grimaced, shaking warm blood off his hand.
“Looks clean.” He stood up and gestured towards
Lawton, who walked over to the corner of the stairwell with him. “Dead as a
dinosaur’s dick”, he whispered “thought he might have a piece on him, but
nothin’.”
“What the fuck am I gonna do?” hissed Lawton.
“You need to call an ambulance!” the woman
screamed.
“Look, we gotta follow protocol, ok? We ain’t
even reported back to command yet. Give us time to do things by the book,
goddamnit.” said Lawton, who then resumed his hushed conversation with his
younger colleague. “Look, you ain’t gonna hear the end of this. No point
pretending you didn’t fire the gun; there’s enough fuckin’ do-gooder liberals
and bureaucrat assholes out there already who’ll wanna string you up for this fuckin’
bullshit. Just remember I got your back and so’s just about all NYPD. We stick
together here. You just gotta get your story straight and your reasoning sound.”
“I couldn’t f…it was dark, I couldn’t fucking
see his face.”
“And that is not gonna be your excuse, unless you been considering quitting the
Big Apple so’s you can police 1960s Alabama. That shit don’t fly today. You
tell Antonioni that you thought you heard the click of a pistol bein’ loaded…’cause
I heard that click.”
Lawton nodded and whipped around, facing the
woman.
“Where were you going? Why were you running?!”
“We was going to the movies,” she sobbed “we
were, like, a quarter hour late for the shit. And we weren’t even running, just
walkin’ quick.” She was overcome with a sudden surge of emotion. “Now where the
fuck that ambulance at?!”
A mechanical squawk came from Mazursky’s belt;
“619 at 8th Street, requesting 10-46, multiple units for a 10-10,
shots fired on Levinson and 3rd. Sounds
like a 10-54, so bring an ambulance. Call
came from the tenement block, the New
Alamo…”
Mazursky looked at the woman. “Looks like
someone beat us to it, huh?” He picked up his walkie-talkie. “10-4, 755 already
at location. Stairwell, eighth floor.” He placed it down again.
“Seventh,” the woman pointed out.
“What?”
“It’s the seventh
floor.”
“619, got a 10-7. Seventh floor, not eighth.”
“Alright,
10-4, received.”
“How the fuck they onto this already?” panicked
Lawton.
“You!” Mazursky spun maniacally around to
admonish the woman. “Who’d you fuckin’ call?”
“I don’t got
no cell phone on me. Walls made of paper up in this motherfucker, you think
nobody hearin’ this?”
The elder cop raised his fist at the wall
lamely, beginning to shout some expletives but spluttering prematurely to
silence.
They had not heard the door swing open, but a
small gaggle of residents were watching the commotion from up the stairs,
squinting in the poor light. One stood almost precisely in the spot where
Lawton had fired his weapon. Soon enough, a wealth of law enforcement began to
arrive on the scene, shooing away the voyeurs and cordoning off the bloodied
stairwell.
“Was he GM?”
“No gang history.”
“CCW?”
“No concealed weapon.”
“Just DOA, then, I guess.”
Sergeant Antonioni roughly slapped a hand
around Mazursky’s shoulder and led him out to the seventh floor landing.
“Between you and me, Mazursky, letting that fucking rookie fire his gun was
extremely – perhaps criminally – fucking
negligent.”
“Aw, come on now, don’t use that word…”
“The heat’s on, Zursk. No fuckin’ around here.
NYPD got the life of another citizen to answer for. And did he have to be,” he
lowered his voice “a fuckin’ moulie?”
“Had nothin’ to do with it…”
“You turned on the TV lately? It’s all
chokeholds and SWAT vans and big cops loomin’ over dead black bodies. We’re hated. Fucking hated. And you know who
hates us the worst?” once again, his voice dissolved into an acid hiss. “the fuckin’ blacks. Don’t look at me
like that, I ain’t bein’ racist – not that you’d give a fuck. It’s true. They
fuckin’ hate us. And maybe,” his timbre rose “you know, maybe it’s got something to do with the fact we keep killin’ ‘em.”
“Hey!” Mazursky pulled his gun out. The only
ray of light in the corridor came from a safety-shuttered window at the far
end. Somebody was edging along, cloaked in the shadows. He thought he saw an
alarming outline; “Is that a gun?”
“Police, don’t move!” yelled Antonioni,
spinning around with his revolver outstretched to keep all angles covered.
“Fuck,” he breathed heavily. “This could be Biallo all over again…”
Something metal crashed to the ground. The
elevator repairman let out a little squeal and dropped to his knees in the
flittering light, begging the police not to shoot. In his hand was a spanner.
-2-
“Hey baby, how was w-“
“Motherfucking paid leave!” Lawton grabbed a
vase from his front windowsill and lobbed it at the kitchen doorframe.
“What?” asked his wife, Betty. “How have you
gone from overtime to leave in the space of a day?”
“Because of some fucking stupid shit! I’m
fucking fed up with it!” bellowed Lawton in no particular direction. “Some
fucking-” Seemingly poised to yell some more, Lawton abruptly dropped the tough
law enforcement officer’s macho façade and broke into anguished sobs. “Some
fucking kid’s dead and it’s all my fault.”
“You didn’t…”
“I did.”
“No…oh my god,” Betty went and hugged him. “Were
you in some kind of a chase? Did they point a gun at you?”
Lawton, slumped against his front door, only
began to sob harder.
“No. Neither. I fucked up. Made a mistake.”
“And…” she paused, taking a deep breath, trying
to compute it all. “…they put you on paid leave?”
“Yeah. I kinda expected, maybe…oh, I dunno…”
“What?”
“Maybe just desk duty. What the fuck am I gonna
do with myself now?”
“God…shit, well,” she tried valiantly to
highlight the bright side of the situation. “at least I’ve got you at home with
me.”
Lawton pulled himself up off the floor and
began to pace around. Betty was still sat where he had been a minute
previously.
“Are you…? Hm…”
“What?” he snapped.
“Are you ok? I mean, really.”
“Do I look fuckin’ ok?”
“Jesus, Mike, you know what I-”
“I got mandatory weekly meetings with the
police psychologist. Don’t worry, NYPD aren’t gonna just hang your little
psycho killer out to dry. Qu'est-ce que
c'est.”
He cracked open a beer. From then on, it was TV
day in, day out…
“…if
they’d’ve only called an ambulance, done something to help, then maybe my baby
might’ve lived. But they didn’t do nothin’ ‘cept stand there talkin’…”
“…and
after the cop had beaten me he, uh, sodomised
me with a broken broomstick handle. Whilst he was doing this he was shouting ‘It’s
Giuliani time, nigger!’”
“…the
study shows that in one year at least 136 unarmed African Americans were
legally shot – now that includes by police, Zimmerman-style vigilantes, and
private security. It’s 313 if we include the ones that, like half of America,
were carrying guns…”
“…of
course the police aren’t wholly responsible for racial discrimination, nobody’s
saying that! But what they are is a cog in the machine of disenfranchisement,
in the…in the system that keeps black men and women impoverished and without a
political voice…”
…naturally, not everybody was on the same page…
“…and, y’know, I think these people looting and pillaging like darn Vikings are doing a grand disservice to the constitution upon which this great nation was founded…”
“…and, y’know, I think these people looting and pillaging like darn Vikings are doing a grand disservice to the constitution upon which this great nation was founded…”
“…look,
I’m sorry, but you cannot just demand respect – you need to earn it. If you
don’t wanna get in trouble with the police, it’s advisable to curb your criminality…”
“…you
know how many brave men and women in law enforcement give their lives every
year in service of we American citizens? Well, I could show you figures…and all
you seem to be hearing at the moment from all sides is ‘Eff the Police’…”
…even the Chief Commissioner himself showed up
on the airwaves…
“…now,
there’s nothing to suggest that this fella’s record was as clean as you folks
in the media are making out. Time and time again, he was busted for selling
untaxed cigarettes…”
…plastered in front of that television,
Lawton’s life was starting to resemble a bizarre media collage; images
fluttering by in front of him as he half-registered the avalanche of
information, sometimes catching a glimpse of his own face. They’d revealed his
name to the public within two days of the shooting and now he wasn’t leaving
the house. Betty taught at a local public school during the days and was
growing equally worried and frustrated with him for sinking only deeper into
his malaise, always to be found in the same place when she returned,
goggle-eyed and slumped in the couch potato position like a slovenly sack of
shit.
Meanwhile the whirlwind of notoriety continued
to whoosh around them. A prominent film director had gone vigilante and tweeted
what was supposed to be the Lawtons’ home address, but turned out instead to be
that of a pair of retired 70-something paediatricians, to whom he had
apologised and offered financial compensation for the deluge of racially
charged hate mail they had received, and the hawkish journalists who lurked
outside their house digging for reactions even after it became apparent that
neither of them had shot Allen Render.
Allen Render. Allen Render. Allen, Allen – Al
for short, just like the Civil Rights leader who seemed so omnipresent in the
media in the days following the shooting, although Render’s weeping parents
showed up on CNN to set the record straight on the matter, divulging that he
was, in fact, named for the New Orleans R’n’B singer-songwriter Allen
Toussaint. Render was the man of the moment. His was the name on everybody’s
lips; cops, activists, politicians, supposed witnesses, neighbours and friends,
serious journalists and populist pundits; everybody was talking about him and
everybody was outraged about
something. If Render was the man of the moment, outrage was the flavour of the
month. Everybody was feeling the heat. Corrupt police. Those unpatriotic,
un-American protestors. Common criminals. Nobody was absolved of the blame in
this nationwide rupture – at which point it was impossible to deny that
something in America just wasn’t working; that the post-racial dream of 2008
had been placed in a firm and fatal chokehold. The grandest canyon of all was
widening. America’s most deathless debate raged on with the same facts and
factoids, arguments and names repeated in perpetuity until they started to feel
mantraic in nature, and the names dropped the most were Render, and…
“…Michael
Lawton needs to go public and tell his side of the story. Michael, if you’re
watching, please get in contact with us…”
…he switched to the commercial music station.
Remarkably, it was actually playing music, rather than reality television. But
it was hip-hop; not Lawton’s kind of scene. Moreover, rather than the bastardised
mainstream blend of product placement and casual misogyny it was the hip-hop
that Chuck D would recognise as “CNN for
black people.” The MC was explaining that he didn’t “give a fuck” about anything until he too switched on his TV and saw
“cops chokin’ and smokin’ niggas” –
now, newly politicised, his intention was to “tear shit up.”
“How many
of my brothers must
Go from
ashes to ashes, dust to dust?
Before we
get a police we can trust,
Protectin’,
servin’, lookin’ out for us.”
This was the final straw. Lawton
chucked his beer bottle at the TV screen, leaving a gaping hole where the
rapper had been delivering his undeniably rock-hard bars.
“FUCK!” He screamed. “I need to get
back on the job, man!”
-3-
“How the fuck did we get into this state after the days of Giuliani?”
“The golden days.”
“These ‘I Can’t Breathe’ motherfuckers make me sick. I wish they couldn’t.”
“Have a doughnut.”
“Mm. Who says cops are bunch of stereotypes?”
Mazursky chuckled, his cop moustache dripping with coffee. “You know the thing
I like best about this new situation? I’m partnered up with real police such as
yourself. A member of the old guard. Strong values. Knows when to dive in, when
to turn away. Paid-up Republican. Good taste in doughnuts. We’ll go far.”
“Glad to hear it, Zursk.”
“Desk duty was a pain in the ass.
Command knows I’m made for these streets. Can’t even hardly read anymore. I
always felt the lawman starts to lose a bit of his mystique when he dons a pair
of glasses. Look at – Hey, Steve!” Officer Steve Marks gave a bespectacled
smile and waved from across the room. Mazursky grimaced. “Total pussy.”
“You’d take a bullet for the guy,
though.”
“You’re damn right I would,”
Mazursky coffee-toasted Detective Ornolino. “He’s NYPD. Without solidarity
whadda we got?”
“Mm. Shame what happened to your
boy, speaking of which.”
“Oh yeah, I don’t s’pose he’ll be
making Detective anytime soon.” they strode out to their patrol car. “I failed
him, you know. I should’ve trained him up. Had that responsibility.”
“Where he’s at now, y’know…we’ve all
been there.” Ornolino got in the driver’s seat.
“Yeah, but I hope he’s smart about
it. No doubt I can vouch for him when
they call me forward, but…” Outside the gates of the 67th precinct
the crowd that had amassed over the last week showed no signs of thinning;
recalcitrant African Americans and Hispanics lined the street, joined by the
usual ragtag hippie-hipster students, and even some earnest, besuited liberals
– this was the anti-police lobby out in force. “Fuck you.” drawled Mazursky, sticking his middle finger up at the
protestors. “Run ‘em down.”
Ornolino gave a muted guffaw as the
crowd reluctantly parted to make way for the squad car. “Fuckin’ animals.” He
scrunched his brow, eyeing them suspiciously in his rear-view mirror.
“Yeah, so, I can speak for the kid,
but I don’t know if he can speak for himself. He’s only been 18 months on the
job – might even get me into some
shit without knowin’ what he’s doin’.”
“He’s a good kid. Probably just a
shock for him, everybody bustin’ his balls like this.”
“All’s I know is he can’t tell ‘em
what he told me – that he couldn’t see the guy properly ‘cause it was too
dark.”
“But those buildings in the projects,
half of them got no lights. Those vertical patrols, man, they’re a fucking
killer. Could’ve been a situation like, uh, Bia-”
“Biallo, yeah. I thank God there was
no crack dealers around to ice one or the both of us. There’s a big chance Mike’s
telling the truth, I’d say. Kid’s never shown any inclination to be a
bullshitter. Or much of a gunman, for that matter. But you can’t word it like
he did. People start to think we got a problem…”
“…748
to 757, got a 10-10S on Wexler Avenue – suspect is an African-American male,
young, 20s-ish, likely armed. Got, uh, curly black hair and…uh…last seen
fleeing on foot in an easterly direction…”
“Take a left turn here, should get
us to Wexler in half the time,” Mazursky suggested. Ornolino hit the gas and
skidded left, through a wide-berthed alleyway and back out onto a high street.
Mazursky was overcome with adrenaline, and he dramatically loaded his gun under
the dashboard, readying himself for urban warfare. The squad car shot down the
high street and took a sharp turn onto Wexler, both cops frantically scoping
out the street in the hope the suspect might avail himself to them.
“No sign that anybody took a
bullet,” pondered Ornolino.
“Guess the scum squeezed off a
couple shots then ran. Probably didn’t connect with nothing. Hm…”
Mazursky’s eyes turned to a
sweat-drenched man in a tracksuit, running in what looked to all intents and
purposes like an easterly direction. He nudged his partner and pointed.
“He fits the description.”
“Eh? Wasn’t much of a description.”
“Aw, c’mon, Lou, don’t go soft on
me.”
“You think that’s the guy?”
“That’s the fuckin’ guy.”
Their siren screeched to a halt as
Ornolino swerved messily over the side of the curb. The car stationary,
Mazursky was the first out, leaping onto the sidewalk with his gun
outstretched. The runner turned his head, saw them, and started to back very
slowly away from the advancing officer, raising his hands in submission.
Mazursky did not slow his pace, tackling the man to the ground and giving him a
couple of punches in the gut to keep him down.
“Where’s the gun? Where’s the
fuckin’ gun, motherfucker?”
“Get the fuck off me!” screamed the
winded suspect.
“Gimme the fuckin’ piece, asshole.”
Ornolino weighed in physically,
helping drag the man up off the floor.
“I ain’t got no gun, man…”
“Oh, hear that? He ain’t got no gun.”
“…the fuck you want with me, man?”
“You ever been a gangbanger?” asked
Ornolino, cuffing the suspect as he struggled. “like to throw your weight
around, do you?”
“I ain’t no gangbanger, man, I work
at the post office-“ he tugged away, but Mazursky only tightened his grip. He
did his best to be reasonable. “Shit, man, I’m too old for that shit anyway.
Little motherfuckers would eat me alive…”
Mazursky punched him in the stomach.
“You think you can resist arrest, you fucking thug?”
“Arrest? Why you wanna arrest me? I
ain’t no ‘thug’. I never done nothin’; not to you, not anybody.”
“Bundle him in the back,” Mazursky
instructed Ornolino. “This time I’m drivin’.”
-4-
“Where we going? You taking me to the
precinct?”
“Shut up a second,” snapped
Mazursky, concentrating on his route. The presence of a third party had stopped
the flow of the partners’ easy rapport, and they sat in stony silence as
evening began to fall on New York, darkening the skies but accentuating the
city’s neon glow.
“C’mon, man, we passed the station
already.”
“I said shut it, or I’ll dump you in
the fuckin’ Hudson.”
“Man, this is some bullshit…”
“The bullshit ain’t even started
yet, boy.” he stared ahead with abject concentration.
“Who the fuck you calling boy?”
silence. “I mean it – where you get the idea you can call me that?” more
silence. “Man, you cops think you run the game. I know my rights. You may be
the law, but you ain’t above it. This ain’t gonna be the last you’ll hear of
this time-wastin’, harassment bullshit. Naw, I’m tellin’ you, this is some
Civil Rights shit. You gonna be hearing from Farrakhan, nigga. Rev Sharpton
gonna be kickin’ down your door.”
“SHUT THE FUCK UP,” Ornolino turned
and yelled. “Fuckin’ moulinyan!”
“Now it’s all comin’ out. ‘Moulinyan’ – for the Italian-American
gentleman too pussy to say ‘nigger’ when he’s thinkin’ it.”
“Just- just shut the fuck up a
second,” Mazursky interjected. “We’re almost at our destination. Just let me
concentrate worth a fuck.”
“…you leave fuckin’ Italia outta this, eh.”
“LOU,”
said Mazursky. “you’re my brother in arms but you can shut your goddamn trap
too. Please. And you,” he turned to the suspect. “I oughta bag up your head.
Keep it the fuck down back there.”
They had arrived at the epicentre of
a neighbourhood in disrepair, their headlights shining off the peeling
exteriors of schools and medical clinics that looked like they had felt the
wrath of considerable funding cuts. One such structure reared above them, looking,
with its redbrick blankness and roll-up aluminium doors, like a warehouse or a
deindustrialised factory, but for the entrance to the street, upon which sat a
yellow barrier, adorned by a sign that read ‘ROAD CLOSED TO THRU TRAFFIC’. An officer took a look at the passengers
of the car from her checkpoint;
“Identification, please, gentlemen.”
“You know me, it’s Zursk!”
“Mazursky, it’s a formality. IDs, please.”
“You know me, it’s Zursk!”
“Mazursky, it’s a formality. IDs, please.”
Sparsely lining the chain
link-fenced car park were unmarked cars and forensic service vans; one of the
few giveaways that this building was police property, beyond the man who smoked
as he paced the perimeter in a black windbreaker jacket backed with the word ‘POLICE’. As they neared a parking space
close to the entrance, it became apparent that some of these vehicles were such
muscular machines of brutality that they would be better suited to application
in the steamrollering military campaigns of the War on Terror than to the free
and liberated streets of New York City. Yet, aside from these incongruously
high-tech bits of gear, from the outside it looked no more like a
state-of-the-art policing facility than the past-its-prime station house besieged
on the last night before its closure in John Carpenter’s 1976 thriller Assault on Precinct 13.
Floodlights shone down blindingly
from the roof as Ornolino and Mazursky hauled the suspect out of the car and
into the building. The place was quiet - there mustn’t have been ten cops on
the whole floor. Guided by Mazursky’s dead-set determination that he’d got his
man, he and Ornolino took the suspect in to be photographed for the biometrics
database.
“Alright, your name’s Gregory
Thomas?”
“That’s right, now you wanna tell me
where my attorney at?”
“Date of birth?”
“May 19th 1981. Now you
wanna t-”
“No, I don’t. We’re done here.”
“We done?” Thomas asked hopefully.
“Stand up.” Mazursky turned to
Ornolino. “Point him in the right direction.”
Ornolino grabbed Thomas by the
shoulders and turned him towards a door at the back of the room. The officers
marched him down a long, draughty cinderblock hallway and into a room that
proved chain-link fencing to be not merely the domain of the facility’s
exterior. It held five 12x12ft chain-link cages that stretched from the floor
to the ceiling, containing only a cold, hard metal bench, and with narrow
latticework that would render the brightly lit but windowless outside a blur to
the occupant; not that there was much to see anyway in this frankly
cage-centric room. Mazursky cuffed each of Thomas’ wrists to the back of the
bench, which was bolted to the floor.
Together, they inhabited the cage like a boxing ring, only Ornolino
wasn’t much of a referee.
“So, let’s start at the top, boy…”
“Fuck you!” Thomas lashed out,
yanking his bondage.
“Hehe,
I bet you don’t like that the way things’ve turned out involves me locking you
up in chains.”
“Don’t fuck with me, man…”
“You thought it’d go a bit
different, didn’t you? You thought, that
ain’t the way things go today, nuh-huh. I
can fire off my gat wherever I goddamn well please because I’m a bad
motherfucker. Bet you thought that, didn’t you, huh?”
“No,” he sighed. “I did not think any
of those things.”
“Well now we got you shackled up.
And, you know, that’s the way I like it. The natural order of things. Now, if
you ever wanna see the light of day again, you’re gonna answer our goddamn
questions.”
“I still ain’t got a fucking clue what you’re talking about.”
Mazursky spat in his face. “Who the
fuck do you think you’re talking to?” he roared. “We’re police! You don’t wanna
help the police? Are you fuckin’ crazy? Are you a fuckin’ socio-psychopath? You
little bastard, what part of obstruction of justice sounds to you like a grand
fuckin’ plan? If we don’t get answers
we gotta start bustin’ heads. How
many heads you see, Lou?”
“None, Zursk, besides you, me, and
this sorry ass, ugly motherfucker.”
“Then yours it’ll have to be,” he
told Thomas. “You want a busted head?”
“Can’t say it’s on my list of
priorities.”
“Smart kid. Now, who d’you run
with?”
“Who I run with? You want me to name
all my boys?”
“Maybe. You in a gang?”
“Man, I’m a grown-ass man in the
postal service. I ain’t got time to run with no gang.”
“Did you ever?”
“Did I ever?” he said. “Yeah, maybe
I did run with a crew once or twice in my youth. Not a gang like you’d think of
it. Nowadays I’m busy bein’ 34.”
“Do you sell drugs?”
“Do I sell drugs? What part of ‘post office’ do you motherfuckers not
understand? There ain’t enough time in the world to sort through letters all
day and run a crack empire…”
“Crack empire?” Mazursky’s eyebrows
twitched.
“We never said nothin’ about no
crack,” warned Ornolino.
“Man, it was a figure of speech, I
was-“
“Who’s your distributor?”
“Man, I ain’t got no distributor…”
“Do you use the stuff?”
“No I don’t use crack goddamnit! Do
I look like a crackhead to you?” The policemen did not respond. Thomas realised
he already knew their answer to his rhetorical question.
“Do you use marijuana?”
“Maybe I been known to puff a bit of
the collie from time to time, but that’s all behind me, y’know…I turned over a
new-“
“’Empire’s
very, uh, grandiose language, is it not?”
“Man, there ain’t no fuckin’
empire!”
“It’s just street-level?”
“There is no crack business I am involved with.”
“So who is?”
“Who is what?”
“Who’s running the crack game?”
“Man, it’s your job to know that shit, not mine.”
“So you just know the street
dealers?”
“Are we goin’ round in circles? I
don’t know anybody who’s into crack. I work at the post office.”
“What were you running from today?”
“I was going for a jog, man. Told
you, I’m turning over a new leaf. No more drink, no more bud, gettin’ into a
physical state I can feel proud of.”
“Ok.” shrugged Mazursky.
“What?”
“Ok, sounds fair. We’ll check back
in an hour or so. See how you’re holding up.”
It was jarringly sudden, but Thomas
was grateful for a respite from the rapid-fire interrogation. He was starting
to feel a little weary from the awkward upright position his chains kept him
in, and he wanted to close his eyes, but even through the narrow slits of his
fencing the lights burned down unrelentingly. After an hour and a half of
fleeting attempts at rest, Mazursky and Ornolino re-joined their captive, their
moustaches dusted with doughnut sugar. They were filled with energy, which
Mazursky demonstrated by punching him three times in the face.
“Welcome to New York, boy! Where’s
the gun?”
“What gun?” he spat the blood out of
his mouth.
“The one you fired into the liquor
store on Wexler.”
“That weren’t me, man. I only ever
ran past the place.”
“Bullshit.”
“Look, I don’t get it. Supposedly I
fired bullets into this liquor store – why didn’t I go in? Did I rob the store?
Did I…hurt anybody?” The loquacious cops once again gave him the silent
treatment. “I’m tellin’ you, I don’t know anywhere near enough about the shit
to have done it.”
Ornolino laughed; “That’s what they
all say.”
Mazursky nodded; “All the guilty
motherfuckers. They all try and claim innocence through ignorance. But, us,
see, we’re veterans – we know the drill. Sooner you point us t’wards the gun,
sooner we all get outta here.”
“You know’s well as I do that if I
point you t’wards a gun, I ain’t never gettin’ outta here.”
“Sounds like a man with a gun to
me,” piped up Ornolino.
“Like a man with somethin’ to hide.”
added Mazursky, who kicked Thomas in the groin, holding him up against the fencing
with his foot as he squirmed in his chains.
The questions and the extraordinary
rendition techniques continued for seventeen hours, with a break of a few
whilst the officers went home to sleep, and Thomas, chained by the wrists and
ankles, was kept from doing likewise by stifling heat and the dazzling visual
stimuli of the chamber’s lighting. The officers pushed him about and repeatedly
tightened his constrictive cuffs. He was thrust into two line-ups, and no
witnesses recognised him in either. When what little evidence that might
somehow have held up in a court of law was proved wholly inconclusive, he was
turfed out of the station the following afternoon, staggering towards the
nearest bus-stop with Mazursky and Ornolino standing in the cloistered station’s
doorway, waving goodbye and blowing kisses.
-5-
They
offered him six figures, so Lawton obligingly met them in an upscale Manhattan
hotel room;
“We don’t have an agenda with this,
you know – we just wanna tell it how it is,” the host dripped with Californian
smarm.
“That’s why we were prepared to part
with such a hefty sum,” said the producer, “so’s we could hear it from you
yourself, not some second-hand shit.”
“It’s gonna be, like, such real reportage,” squealed the host; a
onetime investigative journalist whose network’s corporate reorganisation had
seen her come to afford more journalistic scrutiny to the true artistry of
Beyoncé’s latest audio-visual spectacular than the Crimean situation or the
rise of Isis. “There’s no way I can thank you enough for this scoop, Mr Lawton.
I don’t mean to sound hyperbolic, but you might just’ve saved my career.”
But Lawton didn’t want to save
anybody’s career – he wasn’t even sure as to the condition of his own; whether
he was ever going to patrol the streets again with this epic besmirchment on
his record. All he wanted to do was put the story out there the way he
remembered it; the way it really went
down. He wanted to reassure the American public that he was more than just some
trigger-happy KKK lackey. The small fortune certainly did nothing to dissuade
him from trying.
The makeup girl attended to his
face, whilst the interviewer seemed to have a somewhat larger team doing
likewise, manually airbrushing every last blemish from her doting visage;
“You ok over there, Mr. Lawton?
Everything fine? You want a cup of coffee?”
“No, uh, I’m ok, thanks…” he
mumbled.
“C’mon, baby,” she clapped her hands
together. “Let’s make this TV presenter a journalist again.”
“Lights…camera…action…”
“A federal Grand Jury has ruled that NYPD Officer Michael Lawton
will not be charged in the fatal shooting of Allen Render. CFBC have obtained
an exclusive interview with Lawton, whom we have here today to tell us his side
of the story. For the first time, a nation hears from the officer at the centre
of the case that has divided it. Mr. Lawton…”
“Hello,” Lawton intoned politely,
folding his legs.
“So, this verdict must have been a
big weight lifted off your shoulders?”
“It was very relieving. Extremely
so. I mean,” he paused. “you could say that the unknown is now known.”
“Were you not worried that it might
go in the other direction?”
“You know, I considered it…but I
have nothing but faith in this great country’s extraordinary justice system.”
“And now you’re a free man, with
nothing hanging over you.”
“I wouldn’t quite say that. A lot of
people still hate me.”
“But, legally, you’re exonerated.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you want to tell us what
happened, step by step?”
“Well, are you familiar with the
concept of vertical patrol?”
“Would you like to explain it for
our viewers at home?”
“I think the name is a fair
giveaway. A vertical patrol is when two or more officers go up to the top of a
residential building and then descend vertically from the roof to the basement,
apprehending and questioning anyone who looks suspicious.”
“And you were on vertical patrol on
the night of the shooting?”
“Yes. We were patrolling the New
Alamo housing projects in Brooklyn.”
“‘We’ ‘meaning…”
“Myself and my professional partner
at the time, Detective-Inspector Ed Mazursky. We were on patrol in the New
Alamo and were walking down a stairwell – and it was dark,” the moment he
opened his mouth to say it, he could feel Zursk’s spirit close to him, cursing
him out. “the place needs new lights, y’know. We couldn’t see anything. And
then, y’know” he straightened out his story, “the both of us heard some kind of
clicking sound, like somebody loading up a firearm. We heard footsteps; heading
off away from us in a rush. And I, uh, I reacted.”
“You killed Allen Render in a single
shot.”
“From what I’ve been told, the
bullet pierced his lung as he was turning the corner at the bottom of the
staircase. Hearing these scattershot footsteps, we assumed he was running away
from us, and was gonna escape because of the constant twists and turns of the
stairwell. So time was of the essence.”
“Did you intend to kill him?”
“I intended to disable the suspect.
But I knew there was a chance the shot might connect more seriously.”
“And Detective Mazursky did not
fire?”
“Ed is blameless in the whole thing.
All he did was try to keep the peace.”
“This was the first time you ever
fired your weapon in the line of duty?”
“Yes.”
“How long had you been on the job?”
“Eighteen months.”
“Does that not seem to you like the
NYPD are placing a lot of responsibility on the shoulders of relatively
inexperienced officers?”
“Look, uh,” Lawton stammered. “the
least experienced officers are often assigned to vertical patrol. Admittedly,
it’s not without its dangers, which is why our service weapons are drawn – four
officers have been killed on vertical patrol in the last twenty years…”
“But does that not pale in
comparison to the number of African-Americans killed by police over the same
period?”
“I haven’t seen any figures for
that.”
“And you’re telling me that, if
Allen Render were white, nothing would have happened differently?”
“Nothing whatsoever. That’s the
wrong way to look at this case, y’know – it was an accident. The instincts I’d
been instilled with in training kicked in at the wrong moment. And now it’s
over. I just want my life back.”
-6-
Mazursky
was sat on a brittle plastic chair outside Antonioni’s office, drumming his
fingers on his leg from nicotine withdrawal. He felt like a naughty kid called
to see the headmaster; that wop bastard, who’d joined the force with him back
in the golden years – a different force, long before Rodney King made them as
concerned with PR as with keeping the streets clean – and risen from detective
to sergeant while Mazursky was still out there busting his ass collaring street
scum. Zursk had been waiting on that promotion for years, sweating it on
vertical patrols with pig-ignorant rookies whilst his hair greyed and his gut
ballooned and his back and his temperament got seriously bent out of shape, and
now Antonioni was keeping him waiting some more, the fucking cheek of it.
The time to hesitate was through.
Mazursky stood up and barged through the unlocked door, spitting blood at
Antonioni and his guest;
“What kind of a motherfucker do you
take me for? Havin’ me sittin’ outside your office when all units are out
hunting the cuntbag who sparked Steve Marks…you’re a real motherfucker, you.”
“Siddown, Mazursky.” said Antonioni.
“I got someone to introduce you to.”
“No doubt you just wanna give me it
to me about that fuckin’ parasite I
roughed up and you got some fucking brass
in here to gimme the lecture on civil
rights, and human rights and all
that crock of shit – well fuck you, a
soldier is dead, I ain’t your performing monkey-”
“Mazursky…shut the fuck up,”
Antonioni shot back, and the stoic guest coughed. “This is Don Alexander. He’s
with the government.”
“Please,” indicated Alexander.
“shake my hand. I’m here in my capacity as Senior Security Coordinator with a
US military Join Task Force. Some of our people have been observing the methods
you’ve applied to your policing for some time and we have to say we’re very impressed
– particularly with regards to your highly sophisticated grasp of enhanced
interrogation techniques.”
“Well, what can I say?” I’m just,”
Mazursky blushed “…old school.”
“Oh, your old ways haven’t dated as
badly as you might think. I just don’t think they’re welcome in New York anymore.”
“Oh no, he sure as fuck isn’t.” added Antonioni.
“You’re a bachelor, Zursk.”
Alexander said. “We know all about
you. You haven’t got shit all else in your life but policing, and if you hated
desk duty, wait ‘til you see the career you got on the horizon if you spend one
more minute in the NYPD. Oh sure, after your period of paid leave your case’ll
go before the grand jury and the jury may well acquit your white ass…”
Antonioni nodded, “…such is the way
of things. But holy fuck, and you’re
hearing this from me, even if you ever do somehow get back on the force, hell
will fucking freeze over before you’re back on active duty. You understand me,
dickface?”
“Couldn’t have put it better
myself.”
“Thank you, Don.” said Antonioni.
“Now would you kindly take this fucking public image liability to whatever
fucked up corner of the globe you’re doing all your shady shit in, and let him
wallow in the filth and dogshit of his own natural habitat.”
“Err, gladly,” Alexander turned to
Mazursky. “Well – do you want a job?”
-7-
20,000
blue uniforms blurred into one in the dying light of the Brooklyn day as they
gathered to honour their fallen comrade, American flags billowing in the
pissing rain. Mazursky was comforting a weeping officer when he noticed
somebody standing across the road from him, dressed in full uniform.
“Sorry, let me just… Mike,” he
shouted. Lawton noticed and walked over towards him, meeting him halfway. “How
are you, buddy? Long time no fuckin’ see. Saw you on the television. Sweating.
”
“Oh, uh, yeah…that was, well…this is
the first time I’ve worn this thing in a while, I can tell ya.”
“You resigned, didn’t you?”
“Mhmm. I could’a gone back, but…” he
paused, stumbling on a thought. “I don’t think I’m police, man” he whispered.
“I mean, I don’t feel at home with anybody but these fuckin’ guys here but,
y’know…I know for certain the mayor of this city and the president of the
United States both think I’m a murderer. I can’t represent New York on the
streets, man.”
“The mayor’s a liberal cocksucker
with his dick lodged up cop killer ass and the president…where to start with
that fuckin’ commie? Who gives a fuck? You’re an American hero.”
This energising rhetoric may once
have inspired Lawton, but all he could muster now was a “thanks, Zursk. How you
keepin’ yourself?”
“Not so bad, not so bad, Mike,” he
told him. “Ran into a bit of trouble with the brass…”
“…fuckin’ brass…”
“…fuckin’ A, and now I been
sorta…reassigned.”
“What, drug squad or something?”
“Nah, not quite, not quite.
Something a little more of an adventure for my creaky old ass. With the
services.”
“The services!” Lawton slapped him
on the back with bonhomie. “Fuck, Zursk, don’t tell me you gone military?”
“Military, schmilitary – it’s all
public service.”
“Man, how is that for a turn of
events? Old Zursk off flyin’ the flag for our American freedoms. Shit…well I
never…”
“And what about yourself? The fuck
you gonna do now you ain’t wearin’ blue no more?”
“Guess I’m gonna keep living off
that severance package ‘til I’m forced to become a private investigator or some
shit – just gotta pray I never have any African-American clients…”
“Hold, up, hold up – that fuckin’
windbag de Blasio’s stepping up to the stage. Alright, boys and girls,” said
Mazursky, addressing all the cops in his vicinity as the mayor approached the
microphone, his image projected onto video screens. “Backs turned! C’mon
everybody – let’s get ‘em turned on this motherfucker!”
