Cascade, p.22
Cascade, page 22
* * *
The only good thing about the city doing its little freak-out was that he’d been pulled off foot patrol in the Mag Mile. His aching feet thanked whoever was responsible. He was paired with Todd Gardner, a ten-year veteran with a huge bald head that looked like a—
Whiskey had seniority, so he was driving. When they were stopped at a light he turned to Gardner in the passenger seat. “Is a garbanzo bean the same thing as a, whadayacallit, chickpea?”
The big pale man blinked at the unexpected question. “I think so, why?”
“Because that’s what your head looks like.”
Gardner reached a hand up to touch his head. “Male pattern baldness is due to excess testosterone,” he proclaimed.
“You just keep telling yourself that.” Whiskey smiled as a thought came to him. “My daughter calls them baby butt beans, because that’s what they look like, little baby butts.”
Gardner blinked at that, and cocked his head as he thought. “They do, don’t they.” Then he snorted.
“What?”
“I can tell she wasn’t adopted.”
“What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”
Then the radio lit up with a call for them. “Eighteen Two One.”
Gardner grabbed the handset. “Twenty-one.”
“See the woman, 415 West Chicago Ave., apartment 3B, that’s three boy. Domestic disturbance with physical assault. Nine-one-one is still on the line with her. He threw some hands. She’s out of the apartment now, waiting on your arrival. Currently he’s still in the apartment, trashing the place. We’ve gotten a number of calls on this from neighbors, apparently it’s quite loud.” The call popped up on the monitor mounted below the dashboard.
“Ten-four,” Gardner said. He looked at Whiskey. “What better way to spend a sunny fall morning, than beating on your woman?”
Whiskey nodded sagely. “It’s what Jesus would have wanted.”
There was no doubt about the address, when they pulled up there was a crowd outside waiting for them. Half a dozen people, worried and anxious. Gardner let dispatch know they were on-scene. Then they were surrounded by excited people.
“Dude fucking went nuts.”
“That screaming, there’s something wrong with him.”
“He’s been trashing the apartment.”
Whiskey zeroed in on a shocked woman with some swelling on the side of her face, phone in her hand. “Did you call?” She was dressed in an expensive-looking pink sweatshirt over leggings. And bare feet.
She nodded, almost guiltily. “He just went crazy, I don’t know what happened. He was quiet, not feeling well, and then when I went to check on him he just started punching and grabbing.” She pulled up one sleeve of the sweatshirt and showed claw marks down her forearm. The red crescent moons of fingernails, dug in deep. Whiskey and Gardner traded a look. The law was that if there was even a reasonable suspicion a domestic assault had taken place, they had no discretion in the matter, they had to arrest the person responsible. A swollen face and claw marks were more than enough. More than what he usually had before putting the bracelets on someone. Separating the two parties in a domestic was always a good idea anyway.
“Okay, take us up, we’ll talk to him,” Whiskey told her. “Have you ever had any problem like this before?” he asked as they walked.
“No, never,” she said. Which was likely true. Previous calls to an address were stored in the department’s computers, and nothing had come up on the monitor in their car. “We’ve been together two years, he’s never even yelled at me. I just don’t understand it.”
“Hmm. Has he been drinking? Taking any drugs?”
“He had a couple of beers on Friday, but yesterday he wasn’t feeling too well and mostly stayed in bed.” She sniffed, and wiped at her nose.
“Do you have any weapons in the apartment? Guns, knives?”
“Guns?” She seemed surprised by the question. “No. But there are knives in the kitchen.”
There were several more residents in the second-floor hallway. “He stopped screaming and banging,” one of them told the complainant, looking very nervous. She glanced between the cops and her neighbor and back.
Whiskey and Gardner positioned themselves on either side of the door and waved the neighbors back. There was no sound from inside the apartment. Whiskey was on the knob side, and took the key from the complainant, then nodded that she should back up as well. “Don’t hurt him,” she said, her voice small and scared.
“Ma’am, that’s the last thing we want to do,” Whiskey said honestly. “Mister Dixon!” he called out loudly through the door. “Chicago Police Department. We’re coming in.” He turned the key, then pushed the door open. “Mister Dixon?” He peered past the door frame.
The first thing he noticed was the blood. Smeared on the walls. He could smell it, too, the bright coppery scent that signaled danger on an instinctual, genetic level. Past the door there was a short hallway, which opened out into a room off to the right. The apartment was very dim, and the lights from the hallway threw their shadows into the apartment. Then the suspect appeared.
He was a big guy, in a saggy t-shirt and stained sweatpants. He had blood on his hands from cuts, as he’d smashed all the lights in the apartment he could reach. Blood was dripping from his hands to the floor, and he’d smeared it across his face and the walls as he’d stumbled around. To Whiskey it looked like a textbook psychotic break. That, or PCP, but you didn’t see much of that these days. “Mr. Dixon, we’re coming in,” Whiskey said, wanting to take this out of sight of the bystanders, just in case, but before he could even take a step the man charged with a roar, toward the noise and the light coming from the open door.
“Shit,” Gardner grunted. His hand was already on the grip of his Taser, and he pulled the stun gun from its holster with a violent jerk. The Taser fired with a loud snap, and the bloody man locked up and faceplanted in the hallway, sliding forward a few feet. Gardner held the trigger down on the gun as Dixon’s wife shrieked and held her hands to her mouth.
Whiskey reached for his handset to call for another unit before moving in to cuff the man, and he was shocked when Dixon jerkily got up on his hands and knees, blood gushing from a fresh cut in his forehead. “Hit him again!” he called to Gardner.
“I am hitting him,” Gardner said, and the truth of it was obvious from the rapid-fire clicks from his Taser, indicating he was pumping electricity into the man. But Dixon clawed his way to his feet and surged at Gardner even as Whiskey reached for his Taser.
The two officers backed up into the hallway and Whiskey fired his Taser as Dixon reached the doorway, bloody hands up and grasping. As the barbs flew and dug in, the man jittered back and forth on his feet, then jumped at Gardner.
With a shout the two men fell onto the ground. Gardner dropped his Taser and punched and kneed the man as Dixon clawed and struck at him. The residents in the hallway were shouting and screaming. Dixon was fighting as if Whiskey had never Tased him, as if he wasn’t holding down the trigger to fill the man with lightning. Maybe the barbs had dislodged?
Whiskey threw the Taser to the floor and pulled his ASP baton out of its holster. With a flick of the wrist the steel baton extended and locked into place. Whiskey hit the man across the back of his thighs, then his buttocks to no effect. Then Gardner screamed, and Whiskey saw there was blood across his partner’s face.
They taught you never to hit anyone above the shoulders with your baton unless the situation justified deadly use of force, because you could easily kill someone with a blow to the head, especially in the heat of the moment when tempers were high. Whiskey cracked the ASP across the thrashing man’s head, instantly opening up a long split, and the man went limp.
With a shouted curse Gardner shoved the limp body off of him and crawled backward, gasping and panting, covered in blood. Whiskey knelt atop Dixon and cuffed him as blood started flowing from the gash across the back of his head. Then he rushed to his partner’s side, ignoring the horrified residents filling the hallway.
“Let me see it,” he said, fighting Gardner’s hands away. He jerked a little in surprise at what he saw. Half the man’s ear had been bitten off, and was hanging by a thin string of flesh. There was blood everywhere, but that seemed to be the only serious injury his partner had suffered. “Don’t touch it. Shit, I thought he’d got your throat.”
“He was trying to eat my face,” Gardner said, half in shock, still panting from the exertion of fighting for his life. If he hadn’t gotten his forearm against the crazy man’s throat…. He couldn’t seem to catch his breath. Both men stared at Dixon, face down and unmoving in the middle of the hallway. His head wound was bleeding profusely, but he was breathing. His wife was kneeling a few feet away, hands over her mouth, looking at the man like she’d never seen him before. She’d definitely never seen him covered in blood and trying to rip out someone’s throat.
“Seriously, don’t touch it,” Whiskey said again, slapping one of Gardner’s hands down. “It’s just your ear, they should be able to sew it back together, but your hands are all dirty.”
“Dirtier than his mouth?”
He had a point. Whiskey got on the radio and called it in. Then he asked the complainant to get a towel from inside her apartment, and he used it to put pressure on her husband’s head wound. He didn’t want him bleeding out. The Sergeant arrived just after the ambulance.
Whiskey followed the ambulance to the hospital, and waited for a doctor with Gardner in one of the examining rooms. A nurse had already come in and brusquely examined the ear which, with pressure, had stopped bleeding. The hospital was nearly overrun with patients, the waiting rooms and corridors filled with injured people. “Should be able to sew it back on, but understand I’m not making any promises,” she told him. “I’ll get a doctor in as soon as possible, but as you see we’re slammed, and it’s not life threatening.” And then she was gone, out the door in a rush.
“Glad to see they still care,” Gardner said, glowering.
“At least you’re not in the waiting room,” Whiskey said. He looked out the window. “Hey, your wife’s here. I’m going to head out, give you guys some space. Talk to the Sarge.”
“Yeah. And Whiskey. Thanks.”
Whiskey nodded. “Whatever you need, I’m here for you, Evander.”
Gardner looked at him, mouth open. “You son of a bitch.”
With a smile Whiskey opened the door, just in time for Gardner’s wife. When she saw the big bandage on the side of her husband’s head she made a strangled sound, and shot a killer glare at Whiskey. For letting it happen to her husband? Whiskey wasn’t sure. He was already second-guessing himself. Should he have fired his Taser sooner? Gone straight to the ASP and beat the ever-living fuck out the perp? But who could have predicted the man would shrug off two Taser strikes and dive in like a fucking shark, teeth snapping? Remembering the clicking sound of his teeth made Whiskey shiver.
* * *
The house was a narrow two-story made of tan brick, with white trim and a red shingle roof. All the houses on N. Lindner were narrow, set close to their neighbors, with a small patch of lawn behind them, and a garage set on the alley to the rear.
Almost every house had a garage, and yet still both sides of the one-way street were usually lined bumper-to-bumper with parked cars. Whiskey miraculously found an empty space for his Ranger only three doors down, and climbed tiredly out of the truck. He trudged down the sidewalk and up the six steps to the front door, which he thumped with a big fist. He heard movement inside, and a shadow before the peephole, before Paul Lopez opened the door.
“You look like hammered shit,” Lopez said.
“Then I look better than I feel. You up for some company?” He lifted the cold six pack of Bourbon County Stout. The annual limited release from Goose Island Beer Company was considered the best Chicago brew, and often harder to find than winning lottery numbers. Lopez’ eyes opened wide at the sight of the dark bottles.
“Hell yeah.” He stepped to the side and motioned Whiskey in. “I heard about Gardner. He going to be okay?”
“Nothing life threatening. If they’re able to reattach the ear you probably won’t even notice the scar. But it was a close thing.”
Lopez peered at him. “Going over and over it in your head, trying to figure out what you did wrong, or that you could have done better?”
“Yeah.”
Lopez nodded. “Welcome to the club. Come on in, and walk me through it.”
The Bourbon County Stout lasted an hour, then they moved on to the unopened case of Modelo Negra Lopez had in his refrigerator. In another hour they were well and truly drunk.
“That’s the thing, I don’t know if I should have done anything different, you know?” Whiskey said. “Maybe I did everything right. And still Gardner almost gets his face chewed off by a wingnut. That’s what’s bothering me.”
“You’ve been doing this a lot longer than me,” Lopez pointed out. “You know, sometimes you do everything right and bad shit still happens. Hell, in the military, you know you’re going to lose guys. You just have to try to lose as few as possible. Fewer than the enemy.”
“We’re not at war,” Whiskey told him.
“The hell we’re not. For a number of years, before we pulled out, there were more cops dying in the U.S. than soldiers in Afghanistan. And that was before all this bullshit defund the police stuff, so-called peaceful protestors chanting ‘pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon’.”
“Yeah, but,” Whiskey said, leaning forward, “that’s not our job. Military, you’re supposed to kill people. Blow shit up. If you lose somebody, that’s the job. We lose somebody, if we have to kill somebody, it’s because somebody in uniform fucked up. Not controlling the scene properly, or whatever.”
“That’s what the brass says, but you know it’s not true. Not necessarily.”
“I know, but…shit. We’re supposed to help people.”
Lopez laughed. “What, are you a rookie now? You don’t believe that, not any more. I sure don’t. We don’t help shit. We’re the garbagemen, cleaning up messes. Human messes.”
“No. Well, yes, but that’s not all. We’re the goddamned thin blue line. Sometimes we help just by being there. By people knowing we’re there. Keeps the shitheads from doing shithead stuff. Well, more shithead stuff.” He sighed, finished the bottle in his hand, then checked his watch. “Oh, hell. Give me a sec. I was going to call Ellie tonight.”
As he stood up from the couch in the front room Lopez gave him a go-ahead wave and pulled his own phone out of his pocket. He started scrolling through social media as Whiskey listened to the ringing in his ear. His wife—not ex, not yet, and he refused to think of divorce as inevitable—answered.
“Am I too late? Is she still up?”
“She’s brushing her teeth,” Sheryl told him. “Hold on.” Whiskey could tell she was moving through the house, then heard sink noises. “It’s your father,” he heard, her voice muffled. “Don’t talk too long, you’re already supposed to be in bed.”
Then… “Daddy!”
Whiskey’s face broke into the smile he couldn’t fight whenever he spoke to his daughter. “Hi, Bumper. How was your day?”
“It was great! We went on a field trip to the zoo.”
“That’s right, you said you were going there. Did you get to ride any dinosaurs?”
“Daddy,” she laughed. “There aren’t any dinosaurs at the zoo. They did have sharks, though, in the aquarium.”
“Sharks are practically dinosaurs. Underwater ones.”
“No they aren’t.”
“They are, it’s true, I saw it on SpongeBob.”
“SpongeBob isn’t real.” He could hear her eyes rolling at him.
“What do you mean, it’s not real? We watched it together.” He continued to mess with her for a few minutes, until her mother made her say goodnight, and she gave him a loud smacking kiss in his ear. He heard his daughter’s bedroom door close.
“How are you doing?” Sheryl asked him quietly as she moved away from Ellie’s room. “I heard about riots on the news.”
“Just the usual craziness,” he told her, downplaying the danger to himself as he always did. “Nothing like the Bulls winning the championship. And there’s supposedly riots in New York and L.A., too, so apparently it’s riot season again, like when Trump was running for President. Job security,” he said, with false lightheartedness.
He could tell simply from the sound of her breathing that she didn’t believe him, but she didn’t call him on it. Hell, knowing her, she could probably tell he’d been drinking just from the sound of his voice, and that usually meant he’d had a really bad day. Instead she just said, “Okay, well, I know you don’t need me to tell you, Jameson, but I’m telling you anyway, you be careful.”
He smiled. “Yes, ma’am.”
“You are coming out for her birthday next month, aren’t you?”
“You couldn’t keep me away.”
“Okay. Well, good.” After a few seconds of silence, they said their awkward goodbyes.
“Not telling her about Gardner?” Lopez said, looking up from his phone. “She knows the job, she was a nurse, right?”
Whiskey shook his head. “Wouldn’t accomplish anything productive. Just get me another lecture about quitting, or coming to work out in one of the low-crime KC suburbs or something.”
“Well, you’d know. Hey, come here and look at this, it’s all over Instagram, Facebook, YouTube….”
“What?” Whiskey came over and stood beside the man.
“Police shooting video. Happened this morning. Bystander video, from phones. There’s actually a couple different angles of it, this is the best one.”
“I’m not really in the mood….”
“No, seriously, you need to fucking watch this. Probably went over the radio as a disturbed person call.”
The video was taken from inside a car stopped in traffic, someone’s iPhone. A woman in a muddy shirt was standing between a line of cars, pounding on a window with her fists. Past the glass a bookish man sat inside the car, wide-eyed and terrified. She seemed to be trying to punch through the safety glass, and hitting it hard enough to break the glass, or her knuckles, or both, but she gave no sign she was feeling any pain. The meaty thuds of her hands on the glass and her wordless shouts were disturbing. The sounds coming out of her mouth somehow didn’t sound…human.
