Whorl Page 13

Officer Stone had been much more laid back and easygoing than Kennedy. He also apparently could go an entire eight hour shift without having to take a piss. He joked that his wife called him “Camel Kidneys”. Dave had learned to pace his Diet Coke consumption accordingly on day shift, but Kennedy made frequent stops. That was the only thing Dave enjoyed more riding with Kennedy than with Stone.

  Kennedy clumped into the room and dropped into a seat at one of the back tables, and then Dave moved forward and sat down next to him. Kennedy had a big round head and was balding. His hair looked like it might have been red, once, but now was the color of dust. He wore glasses and had a barrel chest above a sizeable gut made even bulkier by the addition of body armor. The Warren Police wore black uniforms, but at least with Kennedy, black wasn’t slimming.

  “Afternoon, sir,” Dave said. Kennedy grunted in reply and pulled out his pocket-sized spiral notebook.

  Everyone seemed to pile out of the locker room at the same time, and the roll call room filled up quickly.

  Sergeant White stood at the front of the room behind the small wheeled podium and waited. To Dave, White had the build—and bushy moustache—of a 1970s football player.

  White waited a few minutes, then said to the shuffling officers, “Everybody done playing grabass? Williams?”

  “Sorry Sarge.”

  White looked down at his notes. “Not a whole lot going on today. Looks like day shift has been quiet. Just a reminder that Roseville has been seeing some increase in gang activity of some sort, graffiti, couple of fights, so keep an eye out those of you on the east side of the city.”

  “They wouldn’t know what the hell to do if they had an actual gang problem,” Drake scoffed from the second row. He’d hired on with Warren after doing three years with the Detroit Police Department. “Bunch of spoiled bored teenagers who’ve watched too many movies.”

  “Well,” White responded drily, “on more than one occasion I have asked the Mayor to outlaw teenagers, but until he puts that ordinance into effect you’ll just have to deal with them. And they’re not out there singing West Side Story. Car assignments……Adam 10 is Drake, we’ve got Team Jacob in Boy-40….” the Sergeant said with a smile.

  There were some hoots, and Williams in the front row flipped the bird to everyone behind him. There had been some references to “Team Jacob” in the weeks prior, and Dave had finally figured out that both Williams and his usual partner were named Jacob.

  White read off the names of the rest of the officers, and their assignments. Two two-man cars, the rest were singles. Dave didn’t count as an officer, so Kennedy’s unit was considered a single-man unit—callsign Frank 10. The Warren PD divided the city into zones, A through H, with A, B, C, and D bordering Detroit. Police used name designators (Adam, Boy, Charlie, David) instead of the military ones when calling out license plates, but Dave could tell which of the cops had military experience as they’d sometimes slip and revert back to the Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot system. -10 cars were single man cars working a single zone. -20 cars were two man cars working a single zone, and -40 cars were two man cars working two zones. Two man cars always worked the south end of the city, on the Detroit border.

  “There have been some reports of wild dogs roaming the south end, and a little girl was bit a few days ago. The Mayor has specifically asked us to watch out for any loose dogs, and if we see one to immediately call in animal control.”

  “So animal control is working past five o’clock today?” somebody in the back of the room called out.

  White looked up. “No. Okay, bunch of vacation checks today.”

  White proceeded to read off several addresses of homes where the residents were out of town and had requested the police do occasional drive-bys. Everyone agreed the drive-bys were nearly worthless apart from the good PR with the citizens, but that didn’t mean someday somebody wouldn’t chance upon someone walking out of a front door with a TV…..

  Kennedy wrote down all the addresses, not just of the houses in their zone, because you never knew. Frank ran north from Ten Mile Road to Twelve Mile Road, from Van Dyke Avenue east to Hayes. Frank was rather small and far enough from Detroit that Kennedy usually drifted beyond the borders and “poached” tickets and drunk drivers and radio calls where he could, just to stay busy.

  White looked around the room. “Uh…Peterson. You’ve had a couple days off, so just let me remind you and everybody else that the crew doing the bank robberies in the area is still out there. FBI thinks the same crew has done six banks over the last two months, and two of those have been in our city. They did a Huntington in Troy right by Oakland Mall last week, pistol-whipped a lady real bad. Nobody’s been killed yet, but we’ve got two or three black male suspects going in each time, in Halloween masks, all of them with handguns.

  “If you remember, they fired a shot into the floor at their first or second robbery, so we know at least one of the guns is real. Driver waiting in a car outside, and they’ve used at least two different cars, a black Chrysler 300 and a silver Chevy sedan, maybe a Monte Carlo or Impala. Security cameras caught the plate on the Chrysler once, but it came back stolen. Last bank they hit in Warren was the Comerica at Twelve and Mound almost three weeks ago. They’re not pros, they’ve just watched too many movies and have been lucky so far. Things are going to go bad sooner rather than later if we don’t shut these guys down.”

  “FBI have a catchy name for the crew yet?” Stone called out. “Bruthas in Arms, maybe?” Stone looked around the room, saw Dave watching him, and winked. Dave had to smile.

  “What about The Dark Knights?” someone else offered.

  “Boyz II Men?” someone said quietly.

  “I don’t care if you call them Barbershop Quartet, I want these guys,” White said. “I don’t know if the FBI is working any leads or not, as they don’t tell us shit and never have, but if any of you gets bracelets on one of these shitbags, I’m buying the beer. You should have the info sheet, but if not, come see me. Okay, that’s it, stay safe.”

  Dave tagged along as Kennedy collected his car keys and a shotgun from the armory, a fresh disc from the Sergeant, then they headed into the underground parking garage. Kennedy opened the trunk and, after checking out there were no surprises in it, deposited his small bag there. He loaded the blank DVD into the trunk-mounted recorder for the video camera bolted to the roof next to the rearview mirror, then clipped the mike to his uniform and somehow found space on his belt for the battery pack. Kennedy then thoroughly checked out the back seat, making sure there was nothing left there from the prior shift—Dave had learned that every officer at one point or another had found a weapon or drugs wedged down between the seat back and cushion by a suspect taken in on the previous shift.

  Dave just stood out of the way and watched. He’d volunteered to help search the car, or look over the exterior for damage (which would then be noted on a checklist), but Kennedy didn’t want his help. “It’s my ass, not yours, if you don’t spot something, so if it’s all the same to you I’ll do it myself,” Kennedy had said to him.

  Today’s car was a much-abused Ford Crown Vic. They seemed to get a different car every day, and most of the Crown Vics were camera cars, although not all the PD’s cars had cameras. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to how the camera cars were distributed around the city, or whether they were assigned to one or two man units. Dave liked the looks (and performance) of the newer Dodge Charger cruisers, but once you stuffed a computer, radio, and shotgun mount into the front seat, there wasn’t a whole lot of room left for a passenger in either car. Kennedy loaded the shotgun and then locked it into the floor mount next to the radio and behind the computer. The officer punched in his password into the laptop computer which gave them a digital readout of their radio runs, then grabbed the mike. “Radio, Frank 10, radio check.”

  “Frank 10, loud and clear,” their dispatch responded. “Stand by for a run holding over from day shift.”

  “Already?” Dave said.
>
  “Probably a bullshit call, which is why day shift didn’t bother with it,” Kennedy said. With the computer angled so the driver could see it Dave could hardly read the lines that popped up on the screen. Kennedy hummed for a second, then said, “Yeah. Welfare check. Senior citizen not answering their phone, called in by a family member who can’t get hold of them.”

  Kennedy picked up the mike again. “Radio, Frank 10, show us en route.”

  “Frank 10, ten-four.”

  “What do you think it could be?” Dave asked.

  Kennedy shrugged. “Could be nothing, or the lady could be dead in her bed of natural causes. Ninety-eight percent of these calls are one of those two.”

  “And the other two percent?”

  “The other two percent is why you have cops,” Kennedy said. He put the cruiser into gear and backed out of the parking space.

  “Are we rolling straight there?”

  “No,” Kennedy told him gruffly, “first we’re heading to my house, because I left my fucking cell phone sitting on the dining room table.”

  “Oh.”

  Dave didn’t know what to expect, what kind of houses cops lived in, but Kennedy lived in a red brick ranch with a white-sided second story addition just off 13 Mile, slightly north of their designated patrol area. There was a detached two-car garage behind the house, and a movable basketball net off to one side. It looked like every other house on the block.

  Dave opened his mouth to ask the officer if he had kids, but then thought better of it. Between the basketball hoop and the small boy’s bike tucked in behind the house, the answer was pretty obvious. He got enough black looks from the chunky cop without asking questions he knew were borderline stupid. He followed the cop through the front door and into the dim house.

  Kennedy grabbed the phone off the table, and kept on going toward the back. “Gotta hit the head, hold on a minute,” he told the kid.

  Not knowing what to do, and getting the feeling that sitting down to wait wasn’t the right move, Dave just wandered around in slow motion, ending up near the fireplace. He was staring at a photo on the mantel when Kennedy reappeared, his gunbelt creaking.

  “Who’s this?” he asked.

  “My wife,” Kennedy said.

  “No, I mean, who’s the guy?” Dave asked him.

  Kennedy stopped, and stared at him. “That’s me,” he said curtly.

  “That’s you?” Dave said in confusion. He leaned closer and studied the guy in the photo. The guy in the photo was young, had a trim waist, and was obviously a serious weightlifter. He was shaped like a V. No glasses, and all his hair, but after squinting for a bit, Dave could see the resemblance between the guy in the photo and the cop six feet away giving him the stink eye. “Oh,” he said lamely.

  “Shit, I guess it doesn’t look like me, not anymore,” Kennedy admitted. Back then, right after joining the department, he’d been all twisted steel and sex appeal. Now, twelve years and two kids later…his wife didn’t look the same either, but at least she still had all her hair.

  “Come on, let’s go see if this old lady is dead or what.”

  Heading south in the cruiser Dave tried to find a comfortable position for his left leg. If he let it relax, the outside of his knee rubbed against the sharp corner of the clamp locked around the shotgun receiver and barrel. Just to the left of that was the control box for the lights, siren, PA, and shotgun lock. He remembered what Kennedy had said to him that first day they’d been in the car together.

  Kennedy had pointed at one of the buttons on the control box. “That unlocks the shotgun,” he told Dave. “There’s four in the tube, but the chamber’s empty. You ever shoot a shotgun?”

  “Yeah. I own a Remington 870 like that one.”

  “That’s nice. I don’t care.” He jabbed his finger at the box. “Don’t ever fucking touch that button, until it’s time to touch that button,” he nearly growled. “You understand me?”

  “Yes sir.” Officer Jim Stone had said just about the same thing to him the first day they’d ridden together….he’d just said it in a much nicer way.

  Dave observed that Kennedy, like a lot of cops, drove his cruiser like he was mad at it. Sharp turns, sudden decelerations, and violent use of the gas pedal were the norm, even when they weren’t heading to a call. And then there were all the curbs they drove over, which sounded like blacksmith hammers against the bottom of the car. The amount of abuse the cars took astounded him. He made a mental note to never buy a used police car.

  The address they arrived at was a small ranch constructed of off-white brick that, like most of Warren’s neighborhoods, had sprung up in the post-World War II boom. Kennedy parked on the street in front of the neighboring house and heaved himself out of the car. Dave had already learned to never park in front of the address you were going to, or stand in front of the door you were knocking on, in case there was somebody inside in a shooting mood.

  There was no sign of life at the house, and no vehicle visible, although the door of the detached garage in back was closed. Dave stood off the porch, halfway between the front door and the driveway, as Kennedy tried the screen door, found it was unlocked, and pounded on the front door with his big fist.

  “Police! Hello, police!” He waited about ten seconds, but there was no response. “Police!” he yelled again, banging even harder. He tried the front door, but it was locked.

  Dave watched as Kennedy stepped to his left and looked into the big bay window on the front of the house. He cupped his hands around his eyes and peered inside, then knocked on the glass. “Ma’am. Ma’am! Police! Ma’am!” He knocked harder and harder on the glass, until Dave was sure it was going to crack. Kennedy apparently had the same concern, because he then started waving his arm up and down. “Ma’am! Ma’am!” Then, more quietly, “Jesus, finally.”

  Kennedy walked back over to the front door, which opened a few seconds later. Dave saw a frail-looking white haired lady looking up at Kennedy. “Can I help you officer?” she asked in a tremulous voice.

  “Yes, ma’am, are you okay?”

  “What?”

  “Are you okay?” Kennedy asked her. “Your daughter couldn’t get hold of you and she was worried.”

  “What? I can’t—oh, I’m sorry, the batteries in my hearing aids must be dead, I can’t hear a darn thing. Hold on a minute, can you?”

  The old woman shuffled away from the door out of sight, and Kennedy turned to look at his ride-along intern. He had a “told you so” look on his face. Dave just smiled.

  Ten minutes later they were back in the cruiser. The nice old lady had, with shaking hands, finally gotten new batteries into her hearing aids, then called her daughter on the phone to let her know she was okay. She’d then forced some oatmeal raisin cookies on them for their trouble. Dave had taken one only after Kennedy had accepted one off the silver, doilied tray.

  “We’re technically not supposed to accept gifts,” Kennedy told him when they were in the car. “But not taking a cookie would have been rude. Stick this somewhere, will you?” He handed Dave his aluminum clipboard. Dave heard and felt a few hard things moving about and clicking inside. He cracked the bottom and looked inside to see a few driver licenses sliding about. Officers were supposed to confiscate them from anyone they arrested for drunk driving (in Michigan legal parlance Operating Under the Influence of Liquor—OUIL) and then destroy them, but he’d seen they were always forgetting to cut up the licenses.

  Dave nodded, and glanced at Kennedy’s gut. Actually, he was amazed at the amount of crap the cops had to carry on their belts—pistol, spare magazines, radio, handcuffs, Taser, pepper spray, and the ASP, which was an extendable steel baton. They almost needed to be fat, just so they had enough room on their waist to fit all the shit they were required to carry around.

  Seeing as Kennedy appeared to be in a good mood, Dave asked him, “What about the discounts you guys get at restaurants?”

  Kennedy just looked at him for a few seconds, an
d Dave was afraid he’d pissed him off again, but then the cop nodded. “You’re right. Lot of guys won’t eat at a place that won’t give them a discount, and a lot of places give us discounts because they figure we’re providing security. Who’s going to rob a place with cop cars in the parking lot? They also figure if something happens, they get broken into at night, the owner gets pulled over for speeding, they’ll get special treatment. And they’re not wrong. I’m not saying it’s right, but that’s just the way it is.” Dave appreciated the cop being straight with him, and nodded.

  “All right, let’s go see if we can find some actual police work to do,” Kennedy said. He put the car into gear, pulled away from the curb, then got on the radio and cleared them from the call.

  Ten minutes later they were cruising on Ten Mile when Kennedy got a call on his cell phone. He pulled it from his shirt pocket (there wasn’t an inch to spare on his belt) and swiped his thumb across the screen. “Yeah?”

  Dave wondered how he could even focus on whatever was being said to him, between the police radio chatter, car radio blasting classic rock, and driving.

  “Ten Mile, near Hoover,” Kennedy said. “Okay, see you in two.”

  Dave had learned not to ask questions if he didn’t have to, so he just sat quietly in his seat as Kennedy piloted the cruiser to a large parking lot and parked across the lines far from the building. A minute later Peterson rolled up in his cruiser, and the two cops parked door to door facing each other.

  “Forgot I owed you this, or I would have given it to you at roll,” the other officer said, and handed Kennedy a couple of twenties.

  “No sweat,” Kennedy said, sticking the cash in his shirt pocket. “You got anything happening?”

  Peterson shook his head. He was thinner, with rapidly receding black hair, and showed bright white teeth when he smiled. “Carload of Democrats running north with expired tabs, thought it might be something, but the driver had renewed his registration. He just hadn’t gotten around to putting the new tab on his plate, and he had a car full of women he was taking shopping. Looked miserable, poor bastard. Hey, did you catch the game this morning?”