Broken

by Don Winslow

  The clerk saw him turn left—north—when he “exited the premises.”

  Chris doesn’t wait for the interview to end but goes back to his car and rolls north on Twenty-eighth, betting that the robber is headed for the park. He calls it in, knows that other units will be coming, but hopes he finds the guy first.

  After the Champ incident, he could use an armed-robbery arrest.

  Sure enough, he spots a white male, about five-ten, wearing exactly what the clerk described, walking fast on the pavement that edges the east side of the park. Chris slows and follows at a distance, then sees the guy go into the “goose walk,” that stiff-legged gait that perps get when they sense a cop behind them.

  Chris hits the microphone. “Stop right there.”

  The guy takes off running.

  Chris pulls over and goes after him.

  He knows he should stay in the car and call for backup, but if he does that, the guy will disappear into the park and they’ll spend the rest of the shift looking for him and probably not find him.

  Besides, let’s face it, this is fun.

  He sees the guy’s hand go into his pocket and dump something in the bushes. That’s going to be the gun and the mask, Chris knows, but he doesn’t stop for them. He gains on the guy, who’s moving none too fast in work boots, reaches out and gives him a hard shove.

  The guy falls face-first on the ground, and Chris is on top of him.

  “Give me your hands!” Chris yells.

  This isn’t the perp’s first prom. He gives up his hands, Chris cuffs him, and pulls him to his feet. “Why didn’t you stop when I told you to? Why did you run?”

  “I was scared.”

  “Of getting arrested for robbery?” Chris asks. He sees flashers back where he left the car and knows it will be Grosskopf. “You just robbed a liquor store.”

  “No I didn’t!”

  “Yeah, right,” Chris says. “What did you drop back there?”

  “Nothing!”

  “You took something out of your pocket and threw it into the bushes. You really going to make me dig around for that?” Chris pushes him up against a tree. “Anything sharp in your pockets? Anything that’s going to hurt me?”

  “No.”

  Grosskopf walks up. “That looks like our guy.”

  Chris digs into the cargo-pants pocket and comes out with a bunch of bills. “You didn’t rob the store, huh? Where did you get this?”

  “It’s mine.”

  Chris finds the little bottles. “These yours, too? You have ID?”

  “I left my wallet at home.”

  Chris shines his flashlight in the guy’s face. He’s maybe forty, looks like he’s lived a hard life. Probably no stranger to the system, and Chris guesses that if they look at his arms, they’ll find cheap jailhouse tats.

  “You going to tell me your name?” Chris asks.

  “Richard.”

  “You have a last name, Richard?”

  “Holder.”

  “You’re just messing with me now,” Chris says.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Did your parents just, like, hate you or something?” Chris pulls up Holder’s sheet. To his intense lack of surprise, Richard James Holder has a record longer than a Queen song. Burglary, robbery, drugs, he’s done stretches at Victorville and Donovan.

  Chris hasn’t been on the job all that long, just three years, but long enough to know the secret that Richard keeps so deep inside that even he doesn’t know it.

  That what Richard wants most in the world is to go back to the joint.

  It’s his world, the only place he feels at home.

  All Chris has to provide Richard with is an excuse, and he’ll take it.

  Grosskopf comes up to the car. “You going to take him in or you want me to?”

  “I have a better idea,” Chris says.

  If they take the guy straight in and book him, it’s just going to come down to an evidentiary fight. They’ll probably get him on the possession of the stolen goods but could lose him on the armed robbery and the gun.

  “Okay, Richard, we’re going back to the liquor store,” Chris says.

  “I was never there,” Richard says.

  Chris drives back to the liquor store and walks Richard in. Shows him to the clerk and asks, “Is this the guy who robbed you?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  Richard is indignant. “He can’t ID me! I was wearing a mask!”

  You have to love these guys, Chris thinks, you just have to love them. And it explains why so many chairs at prison Mensa meetings go unclaimed. He says, “Bullshit, you were wearing a mask.”

  “I was!” Richard yells.

  Chris looks at the clerk. “Was he wearing a mask?”

  “No, Officer.”

  Richard is filled with righteous indignation. “He’s lying! I was too wearing a mask.”

  “Prove it,” Chris says.

  “I will.”

  They get back in the car, drive to the park, and get out where Richard threw stuff away. He walks to a line of bushes and juts his chin. “There.”

  Chris bends down and picks up the ski mask. “This isn’t yours.”

  “Yes it is!”

  “It won’t even fit you.”

  “Put it on me and you’ll see.”

  Chris slides the ski mask over Richard’s head. They get into the car and go back to the liquor store. Chris walks Richard in and asks, “Okay, is this the guy who robbed you?”

  “Yes, it is,” the clerk says.

  Richard’s chin drops to his chest. “Okay, you got me.”

  Chris drives back to the park again, gets out and walks along the route where he chased Richard. Shining his flashlight into the bushes near where they found the mask, he sees something shiny. He gloves up, reaches down and comes up with a .22 Long AMT Backup, a little semiautomatic job, and drops it into an evidence bag.

  Back in the car, Chris shows Richard the gun. “Is this what you used to rob the store?”

  Richard thinks about this and then asks, “Can I have one of those vodkas?”

  “Yeah, okay.” Chris opens one of the little bottles, Richard opens his mouth, and Chris pours it in like he’s feeding a baby bird.

  Then Richard says, “Yeah, that’s the gun.”

  Chris takes him back to the house and books him. He’s just finishing up this process when he gets the word that Lieutenant Brown wants to see him. Chris goes into his office expecting a “great job” pat on the back. Good job getting a recidivist robber off the street, good job getting a gun off the street . . .

  No.

  Instead—

  Brown asks, “Do you just want to piss everyone off?”

  “What did I do?”

  “It’s what you didn’t do,” Brown says. “You didn’t bring the suspect directly back and turn him over to Robbery. It was their investigation.”

  “But I got a confession, I got the gun—”

  “And I got phone calls from Robbery asking me why one of my uniforms is showing them up,” Brown says. “Robbery will take it from here.”

  “Yeah, sure—”

  “Oh, that’s okay with you?” Brown asks. “I’m so glad. Do your job and not other people’s. And, Shea, if I have to hear your name again tonight, it’s not going to be a good thing. Now, get out of here.”

  He’s not out of there thirty minutes when he gets another call, this time a bar brawl in the Gaslamp that has spread out onto the sidewalk.

  The Gaslamp, aka just “the Lamp,” downtown bordering the harbor, is San Diego’s original sin district, since the founding of the city an area of bars, strip clubs and brothels. The story goes that the town fathers tried to clean it up in 1915 and threw all the prostitutes out but then had to invite them all back in when the navy said it wouldn’t send ships anymore, which would have destroyed the city’s economy.

  It’s pretty cleaned up now, a tourist destination, but it’s still an area where people go to get shitfaced.


  By the time Chris rolls up, the street is already a festival of lights with cop flashers and onlookers holding up cell phones to get video souvenirs of their wild night in the Lamp.

  Dinner, drinks, a floor show . . .

  Which, strictly speaking, is on the sidewalk.

  SDPD already has most of the action under control, with combatants pressed up against the wall and cuffs being applied. Villa has other troops gradually pushing the lookie-loos back, but the main event is still ongoing, two guys rolling around on the concrete.

  Sort of graceless jujitsu, Chris thinks as he nudges through the crowd.

  One of the fighters is obviously the bouncer, with the semiofficial security-guy uniform of a black T-shirt tight around his chest and arm muscles. The other is pure chucklehead, with a shaved head and a Tapout T-shirt indicating that he’s an MMA fan who thinks that because he watches mixed martial arts and hits the gym a couple times a week that he can do mixed martial arts and hit something that hits back. Which the bouncer is doing right now, slamming elbows into his opponent’s face in your basic ground-and-pound.

  “Crowd control,” Villa says to Chris, who therefore turns his back on the fight to face the street.

  A good thing, because right then a humongous drunk comes rolling down the sidewalk throwing air punches and getting ready to jump into the fight.

  Chris puts his palm out. “That’s enough, right there.”

  “Fuck that!” the guy yells. “That’s my friend!”

  The drunk has to be six-four, two and a half bills, and most of it is muscle. He looks like he could actually be a cage fighter, and Chris has no desire whatsoever to find out.

  “Stay out of this,” Chris says.

  “He’s my buddy!” the drunk yells. “I’d take a bullet for him!”

  “That’s a real possibility,” Chris says. “Back off, sir.”

  “Fuck you.”

  The drunk charges, blasting Chris’s left shoulder.

  Chris pivots with the force, sticks out his leg and throws all his weight into the drunk’s back.

  They fall to the sidewalk together, Chris landing on top as he tries to grab the drunk’s right hand to twist it behind him.

  Un-unh, the guy is too strong.

  It’s a rodeo now—all Chris can do is try to hold on until help comes in, and then Perez is down there beside him, pulling the drunk’s left arm back like it’s an oar on a rowing machine, but this guy is strong and anesthetized, gets up on his knees and then to his feet with Chris still hanging on.

  Chris “has his back,” as they might say in MMA. Wrapping his legs around the drunk’s waist, he tries to apply a choke hold, which seems to arouse the outrage of the crowd but does nothing to the drunk, who starts to spin as Perez pulls his Taser and waits for a shot that will hit the drunk and not Chris.

  “Hey, that’s the monkey guy!” Chris hears someone say. “That’s that monkey guy!”

  Perez gets his shot.

  Chris feels the drunk shake.

  Actually more like rattle.

  But he doesn’t go down.

  Villa shoots his Taser.

  So does Herrera.

  The drunk is pincushioned, wires sticking out of him like a bad ham-radio set as his eyes go all wide and he shrieks.

  Then he falls.

  Forward.

  Like a felled tree.

  With Chris still on top of him.

  It’s a hard landing.

  Chris feels the impact jar his chest, his spine. And his head, which explodes in pain from the broken nose and the concussion.

  He goes blind for a second but stays conscious.

  Climbing off the still-quivering drunk, he sees that the main event is over, the bouncer on his feet, his opponent in cuffs, as Herrera and Perez rush in, handcuff the drunk behind his back and pull him to his feet.

  No one’s in any hurry to get the Taser darts out of him.

  “You all right?” Perez asks him.

  “Yeah, I’m good,” Chris says.

  Herrera’s reading the drunk his rights. If there weren’t a crowd around, he and Perez might very well get out their batons and beat the living shit out of him, because they don’t play, and Villa would simply have walked around the block.

  But now Villa is glaring at him and says, “You don’t fight any better than you climb.”

  Chris doesn’t know what to say, so he doesn’t say anything.

  The drunk’s face is scraped and bloody.

  “Perez will do the paper,” Villa says. “You take your guy to the E-Room. What happens on the way, I don’t need to know.”

  Chris, Herrera and Perez walk the guy to Chris’s car and shove him in the back. Herrera is a little surprised when Chris buckles the drunk’s seat belt, because the other option is to leave it off, hit the gas and then hit the brakes, slamming the drunk’s face into the partition.

  And it’s tempting, Chris thinks.

  God, is it tempting.

  He gets behind the wheel, drives to the hospital, and walks the drunk into the E-Room.

  The admitting nurse is the same woman who took care of Chris four nights ago. “Is this just a lame excuse to see me again? Because I don’t date cops.”

  “Neither do I,” Chris says.

  She looks at the drunk’s face, sees that it’s not serious, and then asks Chris, “How about you? You okay?”

  “I’m good.”

  “How’s the zoo lady?” she asks. “You going to get with her?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “You’re even dumber than you look,” the nurse says.

  I don’t know, Chris thinks, I look pretty dumb. First I get clowned by an ape, then I get on the wrong side of Robbery, then I get into a roll-around with a drunk. My sergeant thinks I’m a chronic screwup, and he might not be wrong.

  “Anyway,” the nurse says, “she’s probably better off.”

  Probably, Chris thinks.

  Then he gets a call to go back to the station.

  Lieutenant Brown holds up his phone and shows Chris the vid-clip of him being spun around on the drunk’s back.

  “What did I tell you about hearing your name again tonight?”

  “That you didn’t want to.”

  “You are becoming a YouTube sensation,” Brown says. “Is this your intent, to build your followers?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I do not like to see my officers in the media,” Brown says, “social or otherwise.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  “Do you?” Brown asks. “I wonder if you do. Do you think you can come in tomorrow and do your shift without making a public spectacle of yourself or stepping on anyone else’s shoes?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We’ll see.”

  He starts to drive home to get some sleep. He could use some unconsciousness, because consciousness is painful right now.

  I’ve pissed off my lieutenant, he thinks, I’ve pissed off Robbery—the exact people I least want to piss off—and my fuck-ups have gone viral. I’m going to stay in a radio car for the rest of my career, unless they force me to quit first.

  The E-Room nurse was right.

  I’m a moron.

  He gets on the phone.

  “I know you said lunch,” Chris says, “but how do you feel about breakfast?”

  Okay, it turns out.

  They meet at the aptly named Breakfast Republic on University.

  It’s a bright, cheerful place with big windows facing the street, yellow wooden chairs and funky sculptures of broken eggs.

  Chris is already there when Carolyn arrives, politely waiting outside the front door. Of course he is, she thinks.

  “This is a nice surprise,” she says.

  Yeah, a nice surprise that left her very little time to decide what to wear. She sure as hell didn’t want to show up as “zoo lady” in her safari suit, but she didn’t want to overdress either and tip her hand that she possibly thought of this as mo
re than a gesture of gratitude and something like maybe a date.

  Carolyn isn’t going to lay that card down first.

  So she decided on a nice black silk blouse over a pair of tighter-than-truly-necessary jeans and a pair of sandals. And she wore her hair not in her on-the-job ponytail but loose and long, falling over her shoulders.

  The zoo mandates that all its female employees look “wholesome.”

  She doesn’t want to look wholesome this morning. But she doesn’t want to look slutty either, like this is a post-booty-call breakfast, so she took it easy on the mascara.

  “I’m glad you could make it,” Chris says, holding the door open.

  This is different, Carolyn thinks. Professor Asshole would never hold a door open, considering it a condescending, paternalistic passive-aggressive gesture perpetuating the male power structure. He was complimenting her by not opening a door.

  Chris goes to the hostess and gets a table for two by the window.

  He pulls out her chair.

  Professor Asshole would never pull out a chair, considering it a condescending, paternalistic . . .

  “You’re so polite,” Carolyn says.

  He looks at her curiously.

  The boy literally doesn’t understand, she thinks, why I would find this remarkable.

  Chris sits down across from her. There’s an awkward moment of silence before he says, “You look nice. Pretty.”

  So maybe this is a date, Carolyn thinks.

  Or maybe he’s just being . . . polite.

  “You look less like a raccoon,” she says. Then feels really stupid. You look less like a raccoon?

  “That’s good, I guess,” Chris says.

  “So how are you feeling?” Carolyn asks.

  “Yeah, good.”

  Carolyn already knows him well enough to sense that this means, I don’t want to talk about it. She’s surprised she finds this refreshing. Professor Asshole wanted to talk about everything—his career, his ideas, his choice of clothes, his fears, his anxieties, his sinus infections, his feelings.

  Christ, I was dating a woman.

  This boy fell out of a tree, just finished an all-night shift—and from the looks of him it was a hell of a shift—and all he has to say is, “Yeah, good.” Stoic, which could be a good or a bad thing. It might be hard to have a real conversation with him when he comes home—

  When he comes home?