The Ridealong

by Michaelbrent Collings

  I hope.

  8

  I'VE BEEN SCARED DURING some of the ridealongs – those hundred-mile-per-hour-no-hands-on-the-wheel-knees-are-in-charge rides through dark nights on the way to apprehend some dingbat kid who's been popping Mollies like they were Tic-Tacs. One time it wasn't even that we were driving fast, it was a simple matter of some guy in a poop-colored pickup who pulled out right in front of my dad's cruiser. We came so close to crashing I could see the individual cracks on his "I BRAKE FOR TACOS" bumper sticker. There were a few other close calls, too, where I could practically smell the breath of another driver we almost mowed down and/or were almost mowed down by.

  This has them all beat, hands-down. The speed is there. It's night.

  But the thing that makes it worst: I don't know what is waiting for us. Whoever Jack is, he is trying to tell us something, and I have a feeling that, win or lose, this game isn't going to end well. It is his game, and Jack is the only one who knows the rules.

  I've always known what we were racing to before. This time I don't even know what we are racing against.

  Dad hisses, whips the wheel to the left and right one-handed. The other is on the handle that operates the spotlight on his side of the car, thrashing it back and forth so that cars as far away as a quarter-mile should be able to see us coming. He uses the light like a giant finger, bouncing it off side- and rearview mirrors, poking the drivers in the eyes, pushing them to the side. Usually it worked pretty well. But tonight seems to be the exception.

  Of course.

  We have a time limit, a literal deadline. So every blue-haired granny, every pimply-faced new driver, every dumbass who thinks it's his God-given duty to obey the police with as much reluctance as possible... they are all out in force tonight. Dad keeps braking, steering around a car or truck only to find the other lane blocked, then whipping around into oncoming traffic.

  Forget the game. We're going to die before we even get there. Before we make our first move.

  Maybe that's for the best.

  Scary thought. Scary, but there is truth there. We arre rushing into night, into darkness.

  Into some awful pain.

  The clock keeps counting forward, while our time counts backward. The seconds seem like they last forever, but the minutes slam by far too fast.

  Three.

  Two.

  One.

  We're not going to make it.

  Dad's radio chirps. A single word, hoarse and whispered through a thousand-mile tunnel containing only fear and pain. "No."

  Dad's foot is already on the floorboards. He somehow coaxes the speedometer needle a bit higher.

  Thirty seconds.

  Twenty.

  The radio again. This time it's Jack. "Tick, tock, tick, tock...." Taunting, laughter and mad smiles behind every syllable. "Tick, tock. Hickory-dickory dock and aren't we just the three blind mice, Latham?"

  Dad grunts.

  Ten seconds.

  "Please. No." And I suddenly recognize the voice. Another one that I recognize from cop barbecues, from Fourth of July get togethers with the big blue family that is the department.

  From my dream.

  It's Jedediah Voss. Shot during the event a month ago, worse than Dad. Still recovering, barely able to walk. And innocent. Not a cop anymore, not coming back – just a guy now, just one of the people the men and women in blue are supposed to protect.

  I look at Dad. "I know," he whispers. His face is white. So white. He looks like a ghost.

  Five seconds.

  Three.

  Dad slams the brakes.

  We're here. And I honestly don't know if that's a good thing or not.

  19

  I RECOGNIZE THE PLACE, as much from my dreams – those vivid, unescapable dreams – as from driving by it tons of times. A beat cop's daughter doesn't shop on Rodeo Drive, doesn't even shop at Nordstrom. She shops where the deals are. And that's the garment district. I've been to the garment district for cheap jeans, for homecoming dresses. I was going to get my prom dress here, until things got weird with Liam and I didn't end up going.

  The storefronts here are shuttered. During the day they have a garish energy, like they're shouting at you. "COME IN AND BUY!" they scream. And of course you do, because you don't come to the garment district to window shop.

  But now, with brown roll-down shutters covering the storefronts, graffiti scrawls across most of them, the energy is gone. Now it feels like I'm looking at a cancer patient, a slow death come to call.

  Or maybe that's just what I'm worried will happen to Dad and me.

  Dad punches his radio. "We're here. We're here, dammit!"

  Silence. Radios don't have static anymore, but my brain fills some in. The white noise that shoves its way into my brain and makes me stupid and slow. I shake my head. I have to keep clear. Have to help. Have to survive this night.

  "Where's Voss?" he says.

  Jack's voice, still smiling, still stifling laughter that is both manic and deadly serious, says, "So you've realized who the next one is."

  I shiver at his wording. "The next one."

  I look at Dad. He holds me with a gaze that I know he means to be reassuring, but he looks too scared for it to work.

  "Let him go."

  "Maybe." Jack laughs out loud. "Put Mel on."

  "Why?"

  "Because I like her. Because she's prettier than you. Because I'm going to gut Jedediah like a fish if you don't. Pick one."

  Dad looks at the radio like it's a snake.

  "Dad give it to me." He shakes his head. I can see him, know he's thinking that maybe if he can keep me from talking to this guy he can keep me out of this. But that's impossible. I'm in it. We both are. I gently take the mic from his fingers.

  The main part of the radio is still attached to his belt so we're connected. I'm weirdly glad of that. Like I can't be hurt as long as I'm stuck to him.

  "I'm here. Please let Mr. Voss go."

  Another chuckle. "I can't do that, Mel. You know that's not how this goes down. Nothing good happens without work. No pain no gain." Those words punch me. Dad said them to me this morning. But we were in the house. I was in my room.

  Dad and I share frightened glances, both of us saying the same things with our eyes.

  How much does he know.

  How does he know so much?

  "Did you tell anyone what we -?" Dad begins.

  "No," I say. "I haven't talked to anyone but you."

  Jack says, "Now, now, no private chats. It's rude."

  I gulp. Speak into the mic. "What do we do?"

  "What should have been done the first time around."

  "I don't...." My mouth runs dry for a second. I swallow and it feels like I have steel wool running down my throat. "I don't understand."

  "Do what you do. What cops are supposed to do."

  "I still don't –"

  "LOOK FOR THE TRUTH, DAMMIT!"

  Jack's voice is so loud the radio pops like the speaker is going to blow. I pull it away from my face, the sound leaves my ears ringing.

  I look at Dad, terrified. What if I just killed Voss?

  Jack speaks again. "I've got everything you care for, Latham. Right in the palm of my hand. And all I ask for is one thing. A little thing, really. Just this one thing and I'll go away. Just do your job. Just find out what happened."

  Dad takes the mic back. His hand shakes. "It happened a month ago. How am I supposed to find anything?"

  "You're a smart guy, Latham. Smarter than you're acting right now. Calm down and focus and figure it out."

  "What if I can't?" Dad half-shouts into the mic. A car passes by. Slows when it sees us standing by the cruiser, like Dad's going to jump in and follow whoever it is for speeding.

  The car's headlights pass over Dad's face and light his cheeks while darkening his eye sockets to black pits. I'm looking at a skull.

  "What if I can't?" he shouts again. No answer.

  "What now?" I say.
/>   He starts walking into an alley between two shops.

  This is where it happened. A dark slit of a street. A black river through a darker ocean.

  I follow him in.

  We're here. And I honestly don't know if that's a good thing or not.

  PART THREE:

  DARKNESS CLOSING

  April 30, 2015

  PD Property Receipt – Evidence

  Case # IA15-4-3086

  Rec'd: 4/29/15

  Investigating Unit: IA/Homicide

  Journal

  Day Ten

  DAD CAUGHT ME WRITING in my journal. He smiled that smile he has. Sometimes I love it, sometimes it drives me beyond nutty. I'm not sure how I felt about it this time. I think he's seen me writing before. I can feel his eyes on me when I write. Maybe that's just because he was the one who told me to do it. Dunno.

  Liam keeps on acting weird. He's always calling, always asking to talk to me. But I don't want to talk to him. Ever since the day Dad told me about what happened, things are just... done. He isn't in the same place I am anymore. I always thought we'd grow up and grow old together. Not anymore. I still love him, but it's a different kind of love. I feel older than him. And loving someone who's still a child is wrong.

  I feel like screaming when he calls. I feel like crying. I feel a hundred billion things, but none of them are what it was before.

  So I hang up and that's that.

  1

  THE ALLEY IS JUST WIDE enough to let a truck drive in. Dumpsters are on either side, smelling like nothing or like rotten food depending on what kind of business they sit behind. They look like bugs in the night, huge insects that might swallow me as I pass.

  Dad picks up some broken bits of board. I ask him what they're for.

  "Marking places."

  I get it. He's going to recreate the scene.

  He drops a board. This is where the man with the automatic rifle died.

  Another one. This is the kid. The innocent collateral damage. Weaponless, just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Dad keeps walking.

  Drops another piece of wood. It falls in a puddle of water – I hope it's water – with a wet sound. "This is where we dropped the other guy." He keeps going. "And this is where his car was." A last board, almost at the opposite end of the street.

  "Where were you?" I say. Even though I know. I know from Dad, and I know from my dreams.

  "Over there," he says. Points back to the mouth of the alley. "Me and...." He swallows. "Me and Linde were parked nose-to-nose with Knight and Zevahk's car." He looks that way for a long time. I know he's reviewing the event. Reliving it. Blaming himself all over again. Not just for his partner's death, but for the kid's, even for the two men who opened fire in the first place.

  "What do we look for?" I say. As much to snap him out of his self-abuse as to start whatever it is we're supposed to do.

  "I don't know." He looks around, his eyes faraway, dreamlike. "It's been a month, and the forensics guys already went through this as part of the internal investigation."

  Any time there's an officer-involved shooting, the cops who pulled triggers get put on leave until they're cleared; until other cops and a review board decide they did it righteously. My dad was cleared, along with all the others. Linde got a posthumous medal. They put it on his casket.

  All righteous kills. All good cops.

  I turn around in a slow circle. What I'm looking for is a mystery. What I'm doing here is a bigger one.

  Why me?

  What did I do to deserve this?

  I'm my father's daughter.

  Simple as that.

  "Tell me about it," I say. Still spinning, and as I turn the world becomes clearer. Like I'm syncing up with a merry-go-round, making it easier to see the horses and dragons as they turn with me.

  "We were down there," says Dad. "Two shooters down here." He points at the board marking the car. "Both with full-auto AKs. They had a hostage."

  "What then?"

  "We engaged them, tried to talk them down."

  "And?"

  "The hostage ran." He gulps, a loud swallow. "They shot... they shot...." He stops. Draws a shaky breath. "The perps shot the hostage in the back. I saw...." He passes a hand over his eyes, like he's trying to wipe the memory away. Then he straightens and his eyes are hard. No sadness, no remorse. He's just a recording machine now, playback engaged. "We opened fire. One of the perps had run after the hostage. We shot him in the opening engagement. The other was behind a dumpster. He shot Linde. Headshot, dead instantly." He says it with zero emotion. Like it's a phone number, a line item on a grocery list. "We returned fire. The second perp stuck his head out from behind the dumpster."

  He returns to the present. Some emotion comes back to his face. "I hit him. I saw his head explode."

  A shudder wracks my body. It shakes something loose. "Okay," I say. "Let's look."

  "For what?" Dad says. Then shakes his head. His whole body, actually, like his head isn't enough to deny what he knows has to happen. "No. No way. You can't... what are you going to... this isn't happening...."

  "Dad, I'm in this. What am I going to do, stand here?"

  I start walking farther into the alley. "We're here. Let's look."

  "It's what he wants us to do."

  That's true. But it's also all we can do.

  Dad retraces his steps. Walking back to the car at the mouth of the alley, kicking bits of trash and broken pallets out of the way. He's muttering under his breath.

  I walk to where the bad guys were. Looking down at the spot he marked where the first one died after running for the hostage.

  It's just blacktop. Unmarked asphalt, not even a single drop of blood left. A month gone by and the city has already eaten everything that remained.

  How can we do this?

  I move on. I ignore the spot where the hostage died. I'm not ready to look at that. Not yet. Maybe not ever. It's one thing to think about bad guys dying, or about cops. Bad guys do things that bring them into death's house all the time. And cops... I hate to think of them dying. Hate to think of that possibility. But the possibility is there. It's part of the job, part of the promise of what they do. They protect, they serve. And if that service includes sacrifice, then that's part of the job description.

  But a random person? A passerby with nothing to do with any of it? That's not just wrong, it's... perverse. It's something that shouldn't be.

  I realize I've stopped moving. Standing in front of the dumpster where the second shooter died. Or maybe it's another dumpster – maybe it got carted away for evidence and replaced by a new one.

  Why would it get replaced? Why would they need it for evidence?

  My brain starts pinging. Something scratching at it, a splinter working its way into the recesses of my mind.

  "Dad!" I call.

  I barely finish the word before he's there. Concern bordering on panic scrawls lines across his forehead; draws his lips tight. "What is it?" he nearly shouts.

  "I don't know." It sounds ridiculous. More so when I add, "But something."

  He exhales, a huge sigh that sounds like he's been holding his breath for a year. "Baby, don't scare me like –"

  Then he cuts off. Leans forward. "What?" I say.

  He doesn't answer. He touches the dumpster. The thing is a big box, solid iron or maybe steel. It's painted green, the paint flaking off and showing gray in ugly patches so it all looks like a boxy bunch of leprosy.

  Dad runs his fingers over a spot on the outside wall of the dumpster. I can't see what he's doing at first, then I do. Another second to realize what it is I'm looking at.

  A round spot.

  A round hole.

  A bullet hole.

  The thing looks like it creased the wall of the dumpster going in, like it entered at a steep angle, punched through the trash bin and then... where?

  "Is that from the fight?" I ask. Which is a dumb question. Because what else could it be from
?

  But Dad surprises me. He doesn't tell me I've asked a stupid question. And he doesn’t tell me I'm wrong.

  He flips the lid to the dumpster back. It's thick plastic, and it takes him two tries before it stays back, leaning against the brick wall behind the dumpster. Even then it kind of hangs there, like it's going to pitch forward and clobber us at any moment.

  Dad leans into the dumpster. I can hear him flinging garbage around and I wonder what he's doing.

  "Huh." The grunt doesn't tell me anything, so I lean in as well.

  "What?" I say. "What's going on?"

  Dad points. The side wall of the dumpster – the wall closest to where the cops were. There's a dent in it. A weird bulge.

  "Is that...?"

  Dad nods. "Looks like that's where a bullet ended up. Went through the hole, hit inside the dumpster here, but didn't punch all the way out." He moves trash around.

  "You looking for the bullet?"

  "No. It would have been emptied out in a trash pickup. If it was even here after the fight ended."

  I wonder what he meant by that.

  "I just want to know where it went. The path," he adds. And now I understand what he's doing: he's trying to create a line-of-sight between the pockmark on the inner wall of the dumpster and the bullet hole on the other wall. I help him, piling trash up at the back of the dumpster and trying not to think of what it might be that I'm flinging around. It smells like the place that fills this trash bin must deal do something along the lines of disposing of skunks. Who died of dysentery.

  Dad's satisfied.

  "Why does this one matter?" I ask. "Everyone was shooting that day. There've got to be a lot of bullet holes."

  "The angle for this one's wrong," he says. He takes out a pen. Looks through the hole in the side of the dumpster, then inserts the pen. He looks over the edge, trying to line up the pen with the bullet's path. About a quarter of the pen sticks into the dumpster. The other three quarters jut out at an angle so slight the pen almost lays across the steel wall.