by Rex Burns
The young man paused, eyeing Wager like a nervous cat. Julio had grown half a foot and now had some weight across the shoulders; a hint of dark hairs promised a mustache, and his arms were gaining the thickness of a man’s though they didn’t yet have the ropy muscles of hard use and repetitive labor.
“You want some coffee, Julio? Your cousin Gabe’s having some coffee.”
He shrugged, which his mother took for a yes and went quickly to the kitchen for another saucer and cup; Wager saw in the gesture a remnant of the younger boy Julio had been after his father died: sulky and stubborn, wanting something but too proud to admit that he needed anything from anyone.
“Hello, Julio.” Wager stood and held out a hand, man-to-man. “Your mother thinks we should talk.”
“Talk about what?”
“She’s afraid you’re in trouble. She’s worried about you.”
“I ain’t in no trouble.”
“I’m not the one saying you are. It’s your mother who is. Remember her? She’s the one brought you into this world. Changed your diapers. Kept a roof over your head after your dad died.”
Aunt Louisa came back with a cup and served her son, tilting a dollop of milk into the coffee the way she knew he liked it. “I got to go next door for a little bit. You two excuse me, OK?”
Wager stood and thanked her again for the coffee; Julio remained sitting and frowned at the steam rising from his cup. When the woman had closed the door behind her, Wager sat and munched another of the carefully arranged almond cookies. “How you doing in school?”
“Fine. I’m doing fine.”
Wager took another bite. “Your mother tells me you’ve been missing a lot lately.”
A shrug.
“Well, you’re right—it’s your life; you’re the one that’s responsible for it—good, bad, or indifferent.”
“What’s the point in school, man? I ain’t going to college—I don’t need all that shit they talk about.”
Wager didn’t have the heart to argue with that. In fact, Julio was repeating the words that he had used, too, before he quit school and joined the Marine Corps with his mother’s half-relieved, half-worried blessing and her signature on the age-waiver form. “Hey, I didn’t finish high school, either, and, look, it didn’t hurt me: Now I’m the family cop.”
For the first time, Julio looked directly at him, defensiveness replaced by the puzzlement of whether Wager was joking or not.
“So what about your job? Your mother told me you have this job with the Youth Opportunity Program. What kind of work they have you doing?”
“Construction.”
He waited for more, but Julio turned back to reading the wallpaper.
“So, they teaching you a trade? Carpentry? Concrete work?”
“No. I quit.”
Wager took another cookie and nudged the plate toward Julio, who studied the blobs of pale pink and white and green for a moment and then picked one up.
“Why?”
“They didn’t have me doing nothing but cleaning up crap—picking up lumber and plastic and crap after the workmen. So I quit.”
“And now you stay around the house all the time and don’t go out at all.”
“Yeah. That’s what I do.”
Wager started to ask him who he was hiding from, but the jangle of the telephone, loud in the still house, interrupted. Julio stiffened, brown eyes wide as he stared toward the small table that held the old-fashioned dial telephone; Wager picked it up. “Hello?”
“Julio? Where you been, man? We want to talk to you.”
“Who’s this?”
The voice, male and young sounding, paused. “This Julio?”
“I asked you first.”
The line clicked dead. Wager put the handset in its cradle. Julio had seemed to shrink, the half-eaten bit of pink cookie held between fingers that were still slender with boyhood. His dark eyes watched Wager intently.
“It’s whoever’s after you.”
He said nothing.
“You in a gang, Julio?”
“No.”
“Sometimes it’s hard not to be, neighborhood like this. Not a real member, maybe. Just a friend of a friend who is. Know a little bit of what’s going down, maybe say the wrong thing by accident, give some people the wrong idea.”
“That’s not it, man—I’m not in a gang!” He stood abruptly, clattering his coffee cup and sloshing liquid into its saucer. “Just leave me alone, you hear? Leave me alone—get out of my goddamn house and leave me the fuck alone!” His feet thudded up the stairs.
Wager had waited until Aunt Louisa came back and then told her what happened and tried to calm her worry with the promise to try again.
“I don’t know who else to talk to, Gabe. His teachers, they don’t tell me nothing except he should come back to school. The priest tells me to pray. His boss at his job, Mr. Tarbell, says he don’t know why Julio quit. He was doing a good job, Mr. Tarbell said, and he can come back but he can’t hold the job open for too much longer. I just don’t know. …”
It had gone on for another half hour—wet, repetitious, and nasal—and Wager had felt the stirrings of anger at Julio not only for what he was putting his mother through but also for what promised to develop into a major drain on Wager’s time. He didn’t need it, he didn’t want it; but it was la familia, and there was no way out when somebody like Aunt Louisa asked for help. That’s what he was telling Elizabeth Voss as they divided up a double order of spaghetti and drained the carafe of red wine into their glasses.
She preferred wine with her food—“Pasta and beer? Gabe, how can your stomach do that?”—and, after a while, Wager had come to like it too. Good thing, because the couple of years they had spent together so far had shown him that Elizabeth wasn’t going to change. Not that she prided herself on being stubborn, but she had lived long enough to make up her mind about a few things, as well as to understand there was a lot she didn’t know. She had, after all, a life of her own that included divorce, a career in commercial real estate, a son now in college, and four years on the Denver City Council. In fact, Wager met her at the scene of a riot in District Two; she had been the only councilperson with the guts to show up and, despite Wager’s warning, had made an effort to calm the situation. The attempt failed, and Elizabeth blamed herself more than the rioters. But out of that guilt began a series of interviews and meetings to learn a lot more about the city she spoke for. One of those meetings had been with Wager, to thank him as well as to pick his brain. When he asked her if she would like to see Denver from a cop’s perspective, she said yes. A patrol car, when the city’s quiet at night, is a good place to talk; it was also one of the few times in his life that Wager had felt comfortable enough to talk. At first he thought it was because they were in a police car, but then he realized it was the woman. Elizabeth asked questions, she listened, she wanted to know. And not just about the city and its people. After a while, he realized he even enjoyed talking with her.
“Do you believe he’s not in a gang?” Elizabeth, along with the rest of the city council members, had been faced with the rapidly growing gang problems in Denver and its neighboring cities. The Hocks murder was only more evidence of the pervasive violence and the younger age of victims. For the past few years, summer nights had been marked with drive-by shootings, and every Saturday night registered half a dozen reports of gunfire. Children and teenagers, mostly from the Hispanic and black neighborhoods of Districts One and Two, were routinely checked into Denver General’s emergency room—the Knife and Gun Club, medics called it—with a variety of wounds. Schools had been trying desperately to be neutral territories by banning gang-style clothing, holding shakedowns for weapons, using dogs to sniff for drugs, expelling armed kids, and establishing uniformed patrols in the halls and on the grounds. Wager figured that pretty soon the teachers would be striking for flak jackets and combat pay. It was, Elizabeth believed, the legacy of Reagan and that era’s selfish callousness; Wager thought ther
e was more to it than that, and they’d had some pretty sharp disputes over it. “His mother said he doesn’t wear colors; I didn’t see any tattoos. But that doesn’t mean some gang members aren’t after him.” Wager shook his head when the waitress asked if they would like more wine.
“Why would they be?” The little spark came into Elizabeth’s hazel eyes, a signal to Wager that the issue of gangs was pushing that quick temper.
“It’s one of the things I have to find out.” He didn’t feel like an argument so he didn’t tell her about that voice on the telephone asking for Julio. But he wasn’t going to have someone else, even Elizabeth, tell him how to do his job. “And I’m not going to say he is in one if I don’t know that for a fact.”
She apparently heard something in his voice. “Well, you’re right, of course. You shouldn’t jump to conclusions, nor should I. But,” she added, unwilling to roll over and die, “I wouldn’t be surprised if a gang wasn’t at the bottom of it.”
Neither would Wager, and, mouth too full of spaghetti to speak, he nodded. After all, it wasn’t just Wager’s belief about the causes of the gang problem that had Elizabeth on edge: it was the upcoming campaign for reelection and the constant harping on crime that filled the almost nightly citizen’s meetings. The elderly were terrified for themselves, the parents worried about their children, neighborhoods that had not yet been invaded were afraid of getting hit by the violence they read about in the newspapers, and even some gang members—for whatever reasons, and Wager had his beliefs about that too—spoke against the rising rate of death and mayhem. He had asked Elizabeth why she wanted to run for city council again, and her answer had been one he understood: You don’t quit just because things get tough.
She was a good woman.
3
WAGER’S PROBLEM WITH Julio was quickly pushed aside by the death of a patrolman in the neighboring city of Aurora. The story went around that he was shot while making a routine traffic stop. Like everybody else in the department, Wager had heard the latest FBI statistics: one officer killed in the line of duty every three or four days, 50,000 officers assaulted every year, 19,000 injured severely enough to file a report, and who knew how many who didn’t want to bother with the paperwork. In fact, academy trainees were told in the Safety Procedures and Techniques class that they should expect to be assaulted or should get out of the business. Federal agencies provided other statistics, too: 91 percent of all officer deaths resulted from shootings, 70 percent occurred during “routine patrol,” only 27 percent of the officers killed had a chance to shoot back, the average length of service of officers killed was eleven years. The number of civilians carrying concealed firearms was estimated at between one and four million, and now some damned fool of a state legislator had introduced a bill allowing Colorado citizens to carry concealed handguns legally and without a license.
But none of those facts and none of those words could say what it felt like to call the wife and children of a friend and fellow worker to tell them that Daddy wouldn’t be coming home tonight—that they were now widow and orphan and eligible for all the benefits thereof, as well as the flag off the coffin.
Though neither Wager nor many of the members of the Denver Police Department knew the Aurora cop, it was still like a death in the family. One of those third or fourth cousins whose name you might have heard, or maybe you’d met someone who drank coffee with him and had talked fishing or schools for the kids. It was also a reminder to everyone of things that were usually shoved to the back of your mind. So a sadness hung in the air of the Police Administration Building, and everybody seemed to be doing their work with their minds somewhere else, as if they had lost something and were trying to remember where it was. There was a hint of unusual gentleness when people talked to each other, an implied sharing of family hurt, and—beneath it all—the question: What mistake did he make? What mistake could I make?
It would be nothing like the hurt and anger felt in the Aurora PD, of course. But the Denver patrols—especially in the bordering Districts Two and Three, as well as the new District Five that took in the site of the Denver International Airport—would be extra alert as the officers studied every vehicle that remotely matched the description of the killer’s car.
Wager, aware of the emotion around him, tried to keep his mind focused on the morning’s work: another pass through the facts and guesses concerning John Erle. He had interviewed the boy’s two sisters, and they had given him a couple of names but little more; at a shy eight and nine, they were distant from the life of their thirteen-year-old brother, picking up only that part of his world that came home with him. Mrs. Hocks still swore that her son was not involved with a gang, that he was a good boy and too smart; but Wager’s interviews with kids in Hocks’s neighborhood had turned up a variety of rumors, a few of which might be true. According to them, Hocks was being recruited by the AK Bloods or maybe the Deuce Nine Crips or perhaps the CC Riders, he was either a full-fledged member or only a wanna-be who needed to prove he had heart, he was maybe peddling crack, he might have sold bonk to some Inca Boys who thought they were getting real crack, some said he had “disrespected” the Deuce Nine Crips or the CMG Bloods by marking over their territorial graffiti. To find out what was true, what was the boy’s own imaginative bragging, what were only the guesses of the other kids, would take more interviews, some luck, and somebody who knew something and was willing to talk to a cop. That last, the most important, was the most difficult. In Hocks’s neighborhood, cops were generally hated, and damn few were trusted. Certainly in the black neighborhoods, Wager and every other policeman was seen as an enemy, not just for their uniforms but because of their skin colors, too. But of course the word “racism” couldn’t be used to describe that attitude. Nonetheless, he thought wryly, it wasn’t much different from the way his own Hispanic hermanos thought of him.
Overcoming that kind of attitude would be helped by having a black homicide detective. But one hadn’t yet moved up to take the place of Armstrong, who had left almost a year ago to join the Portland, Oregon, PD. That left Wager and others relying on people like Sergeant Blainey, himself an African-American and resident of District Two. So Wager telephoned the dispatcher and set up a meet with the patrolman. Then he pushed his name across the location board to the On Patrol column and took the elevator down to the chill, stale air of the basement garage.
If Blainey had changed at all in the years Wager had known the man, it was only to get a larger neck size. His face, round as a pumpkin, glistened with perspiration as it did summer and winter, and the same frown of concentration wrinkled the dark flesh between his eyebrows. “We use to have our gangs, too, Gabe. I recollect a few good fights with some of you west side Chicanos—hell, high school football games, that was the time for mixing things up a little back of the stands, you know?”
Wager nodded as if he remembered jolly high school fights, and picked at the nutty bumps under the opaque glaze of his donut. He wasn’t quite sure what they were, and he hadn’t really wanted to order anything, but Blainey—who seemed to eat whenever he got out of his cruiser—had urged it on Wager. It was, he said, a gift of the diner’s owner, who liked to have uniformed cops stop by; he was about the only one along this stretch of East 26th who hadn’t been robbed, and he figured it was because the hoods weren’t sure when a cop would be sitting here. “I ain’t about to tell him it’s because he don’t have nothing worth robbing.” Blainey grinned, the silver of a repaired molar glinting far back in his mouth. “He wouldn’t believe me. But then the robbers wouldn’t neither, so maybe he’s right.”
“Have you heard anything more about Hocks?”
“Heard he been seen hanging around Big Ron. Which I guess makes him dumber than Ron is.”
“A wannabe Blood? That’s definite?”
Blainey nodded. “Little girl my youngest daughter goes to Sunday school with told her. I talked to her and she swears it’s true. Saw Hocks and Big Ron sitting over in Morrison Park. Says the
y looked like they be talking a little business. She described both of them good—knows them both too. And got no reason to lie.” Blainey added, “That little girl’s only ten years old, Gabe. Already knows a dope deal when she sees one going down. Swear to God, you’d think we lived in Washington, DC, or Detroit or one of them hellholes.”
Big Ron Tipton was one of those names that had been around the District Two station so long that it seemed like it was on the duty roster. He was still in his twenties, but, including his juvenile record, he had at least two decades of contact cards in his file. The last Wager had heard was that the man was a Blood associate as well as a small-time crack peddler. Big and dumb—mentally handicapped in some way—he was supposed to be working his way toward the inner ring of longtime members who made up the core of most established gangs. Norm Fullerton, who gave briefings to the police divisions on the latest gang profile, had said that the black gangs usually weren’t as organized as the white ones. Those tended to have presidents and vice-presidents, treasurers and enforcers, as well as the emblems and paraphernalia of rank and formal structure. The black gangs, though they were more fluid, often had core OG’s—“Old Gangsters”—with ties to the original LA organizations and who gave continuity and whatever direction the local bunch might want. The OG’s tended to be in their thirties, some pushing forty, and, having proved all they needed to prove, kept a low profile because another fall could send them up for life. “Big Ron’s into crack, isn’t he?”
“He deals some, yeah, but what I heard, he likes to work alone. Don’t like sharing, you know? Every payday weekend’s Christmas for him.” The officer drained his coffee cup. “Shows to go, you don’t got to be smart to get rich with that crap.”
