Apprehensions & Convictions

by Mark Johnson

He stops and faces me. He’s tall—easily 6 foot 3 or more—and thin and bedraggled. Week’s stubble on his face, shoulder-length dirty blond hair coming out from under a black knit cap. Torn, dirty, ill-fitting navy peacoat, blue jean cargo pants. Gloves with the fingers cut off. He’s holding his coat closed, hugging himself in the cold, shivering.

  “Merry Christmas. ’S goin’ on, Bub?” I lower the spotlight a little below his nose so he’s not totally blinded by it.

  “Locked myself out of my car,” he says.

  “Bummer. You got spare keys at home? Or you want me to call Pop-A-Lock?”

  “I got spares at home. I was just gonna go get ’em,” he says, and starts to step away.

  “Hang on. Where ya live? I could give you a ride. Too damn cold to be walking.”

  He pauses, looking from side to side. He eyes my backseat cage, shakes his head. “Thanks, man,” he says, a friendly, grateful smile, “but I’m just over at the Howard Johnson’s. It’s not too far to walk,” he says, though it’s a good mile, at least. He takes a couple of steps in the opposite direction of the Howard Johnson’s Motel, which is a nest of prostitutes, drug peddlers, and lowlifes on the I-65 beltline.

  I roll up alongside him. “Hang on a minute. That’s not the way to the HoJoMo. And anyway, if you’re staying there, what’s your car doing all the way over here, parked by a boarded-up laundromat on Christmas morning?”

  He grins. Shrugs. Stops hugging his peacoat to raise his palms up in a “beats me” gesture. As he does so, a metal bar about two feet long clanks to the ground from inside his jacket.

  “Hold it right there,” I say, fixing the spotlight back in his eyes. He complies, standing still except to shade his eyes from my light. I key the mike. “Three-twelve to radio, I’m out with a 63 subject, by the old laundromat next to P & H Market, P’Valley and Halls Mill.” She dispatches Claggett to back me. Claggett’s fortying with Anderson, way down the parkway. They’re probably both asleep.

  I sigh. “What’s that?” I say, spotlighting the pry bar by his feet. He looks down, mute in discovery, acting surprised, bewildered. And then embarrassed.

  I climb out of the cruiser. The kid’s definitely got a few inches on me, but he’s a string bean, maybe 160, 170 tops. “Step over here to my car. Put your hands on the hood, spread your feet apart. You know the drill.” He assumes the position. I’m thinking, dammit! This could tie me up past the end of shift. “What’s your name, date of birth?”

  “Carl Weatherby. February 11, 1980.”

  “Got warrants, Carl? Anything else in this coat? In your pockets? Anything that could stick me? Any contraband?” I step in behind him, my foot between his legs, and pat him down, checking both inside and outside coat pockets, shirt, waistband front and back. Nothing so far, except that familiar sour smell of decay. “That’s not really your car, is it, Carl?”

  “No, sir,” Weatherby mumbles. “I-I’m sorry. I was just cold.”

  Yeah. Right, Carl. I start down his right pant leg, with special attention to the cargo pocket on his lower thigh, which does not appear empty. “Was your plan to steal the car, or just whatever’s in it, Carl?” He doesn’t answer. “What’s the bulge in this pocket, Carl?” Still no answer. I bend down to tug on the cargo pocket’s Velcro flap.

  Bam! Flashes swirl, I’m tasting pennies.

  Carl has bashed me hard in the face with the full force of his elbow. Blood gushes from my nose, and I stagger backward, stunned, sharp pain stabbing me between the eyes, knees wobbly. And he’s on me, fists pounding my face, my neck snapping side to side, my boxed ears reverbing like feedback at a Santana concert. I raise my right forearm to fend him off, my left hand struggling to key the radio mike clipped to my jacket collar. “Got. One. Resisting! Stepitup!” I grunt, not sure if I’m even getting out over the air. Heck with the radio, I’ve gotta use both hands just to block the flurry of blows pummeling me.

  Carl is still advancing, I’m still backing up, reeling off balance but keeping on my feet. I attempt to return a punch or two. He’s a skinny dope boy, but Carl’s reach exceeds mine. I’m swinging wildly, but nothing’s connecting. My fists are just bouncing off his arms and shoulders while his are splitting my eyebrow, my lip, each concussion a blinding flash of hurt, and the edges of my vision are darkening. I seem to have lost my peripheral vision, can’t catch my breath, my balance, and can’t get inside, to his face or belly. I think: just minimize the damage he’s doing till you can get steady, get squared off. He’s gonna get tired, turn and run. He just wants to get away. I raise my forearms to protect my face and feel him striking at my belly. The body armor diffuses the impact of his gut punches. As he’s going low, I get lucky and pop him a good one to the face. It rocks him a bit, stopping his advance but not his punches. My own clearheadedness surprises me. I’m actually thinking! I’m considering the tools on my belt: which would be best to deploy? The pepper spray? The nightstick? The Taser? And where the hell is my backup?

  I can count on one hand the number of actual fights I’ve been in. My first one, on the fifth-grade playground, I won. But my opponent, who had started it, was just an obnoxious, nerdy weakling, and when I had him down, choking him as he turned purple, I felt sorry for him and stopped without really beating him much. The next one, just a year later, still shames me after forty years. It had been in my own front yard, my father watching from the house, with an older kid who was nevertheless no bigger then I was. Just tougher, and not the least bit intimidated by my home yard advantage and parental observer. It had started with a dispute over a pickup ball game, then name calling and taunts, culminating in kicks and punches. It had not lasted long. David Hammond landed a roundhouse to my mouth, breaking off a front tooth and cutting the hell out of my lip. Shocked, I spit a bloody chunk of incisor into my cupped hands and cried out, “My tooth!” From the front porch, my dad yelled, “Hit ’im back!” But instead I ran, horrified, into the house to look in the mirror. The injury to my vanity was far worse than whatever pain the blow had inflicted. Worse still was the look in my father’s eyes as I ran past him.

  The next three battles had been in college, each of them pathetic defeats (despite being highly intoxicated and feeling no pain) due to (1) being grossly outmatched (against a starting defensive linebacker), (2) being outnumbered by two Air Force Academy “zoomies” who thought I was making moves on one of their girls; they ambushed me in the men’s room of a Denver disco, and (3) being both outmatched and outnumbered by three of Boulder’s finest who had teargassed me before throwing me to the ground during a Vietnam War protest (at which I was really an observer, not a participant, but they just wouldn’t listen). One could rationalize that I lost so many fights because of unfair disadvantages. But I knew the truth.

  Since then there had been several confrontations that, if I’d had more confidence, or courage, or character, or Coors, could have easily escalated to fisticuffs. But I had backed down before the first punch had been thrown, scared and humiliated. One time in particular still haunts me. I was riding on a Mexican bus from Nogales to Puerto Vallarta with my then-girlfriend, on spring break. The rest of the passengers were Mexicans, except for three other Americans, obviously on spring break, too. One was particularly drunk, loud, and obnoxious, and he began an obscene flirtation with a couple of Mexican girls in the back of the bus. Their discomfort grew to fear, but he would not be discouraged, neither by the girls nor by his own traveling companions who urged him to “cool out” and leave the girls alone. I studied him dispassionately: not any bigger than me but definitely better built. However, I reasoned, his judgment—and likely his reflexes, as well—were clearly impaired by tequila, which could work to my advantage. The deciding factor, that which propelled me to action, was the certainty that I had right, if not might, on my side (and could therefore probably count on backup from other male passengers, possibly even from the bully’s own buddies, who clearly wanted to avoid a scene). I walked down the aisle of the bus, his back to me as he leaned down le
ering into the girls’ faces. I put a hand on his shoulder. Before I could even announce my defense of the young damsels in distress, he turned on me, grabbed me in a choke hold, and pulled my face within an inch of his own. “Back off or I’ll hurt you, bad,” he had said in a low snarl. The look in his eyes made me feel the urge to urinate. He released me and I slunk back to my seat. I’m not a natural warrior.

  But I’m now remembering what they drilled into us at the academy: cops can’t lose fights. It’s not just a matter of pride, or of enforcement. It simply must not happen. My arms are still up, defending my face from Carl’s rain of fists, and I’m wondering why he hasn’t figured “This old cop will be easy to outrun” and simply turned and fled. Then I feel a tug on the right side of my duty belt. With a jolt I realize: my gun! This fucker’s trying to get my gun! He doesn’t just want to stun me and flee, he wants to shoot me! This is why cops can’t lose fights. There’s always a firearm on the scene of a fight with a cop. For a cop, losing a fight is not just humiliating. It’s death.

  Something inside me uncoils. To my surprise (and Carl’s), I land a solid one to Carl’s eye. It rocks him back. I step in and land another, and he’s staggering, falling, down on the blacktop. I step in, and he kicks me hard on the side of my knee. My leg buckles and I tumble on top of him. I feel him tugging again at my Glock, and I twist my right side back and away, putting my left forearm across his throat. But he pushes up with his legs and grabs a handful of my shirt with his right hand and rides my twisting momentum over and now I’m on my back, on the bottom, on the pavement. He’s straddling me, still tugging at the Glock with his left hand, clawing at my eyes with his right. Thank God for double-retention holsters! Carl doesn’t know the snap-and-rock motion required to draw the Glock, and he’s at the wrong angle to do it even if he knows. He raises his left leg to get better leverage on the Glock, and I knee him hard in the groin and he crumples. I thrust a thumb into his eye socket and we roll again on the asphalt and now I’m on top and I drive a knee into his solar plexus, raise up, and draw and fire my Taser, hoping deployment at such close range won’t diminish its effect. It doesn’t. Carl screams, immobilized as one prong strikes him in the throat, the other just under his left rib cage. I let him take the full five-second, 50,000-volt ride, then hear myself bark “Stop resisting!” without irony. Carl wants no more of it. I snap a cuff on his right wrist, jerk him over onto his face, and put my full weight on a knee between his shoulder blades. Carl is fully compliant. I holster my Taser, cartridge still attached, and drop my other knee onto his neck, grinding his face into the asphalt as I jerk his left arm back and complete the cuffing.

  I rise to my feet and put a boot to Carl’s neck just as Claggett and Anderson screech into the parking lot of the P & H, lights flashing, sirens whoop-whooping. Harry Claggett is out of his car and dropping a knee into Carl’s back with all of his 220 pounds. “Three-nineteen, start medical to our location. One tased, with abrasions and lacerations about the face and head. Subject is conscious and alert.” Tyrone Anderson puts his arm around my shoulders and walks me over to lean against the push bumper on the front of my cruiser. “You a’ight, Johnson?” he inquires, steadying me, studying me. “Ya look like shit, man!”

  I’m suddenly weak, trembly, short of breath. But giddily grateful to be sitting on the bumper, grateful for Anderson’s steadying hand, grateful for the relentless whoop-whooping and the sparkly blue strobes of their Crown Vics. “I’m fine, ’Rone. What the hell took you guys, anyway? Did I not get out on the radio?”

  Tyrone pulls out his flashlight and points it at me, eyeing my bloody face more closely. “Pull out that do-rag a yours. You need to wipe off your face before the medics get here, or they’ll be sayin’ you need to be, like, examined or whatever.” Sleepy, laid-back, slow-talking ’Rone: just twenty-three years old, already unflappable. I pull the bandana from my back pocket and dab gingerly where it hurts.

  “Alls we could hear was a lotta gruntin’ and yellin’,” Tyrone continues. “It was real, like, garbledy.” He pauses, considers. Grins. “But we could tell was it you gruntin’ and yellin’ and garblin’. We just didn’t know was it you puttin’ the beatdown on somebody, or you gettin’ a whuppin’.” He glances over at Carl, immobilized by Harry’s mass. “Guess we shoulda known.”

  Sarge arrives at the same time as the paramedics, who busy themselves with Carl Weatherby, removing the Taser prongs, swabbing his asphalt-torn cheeks. Sarge surveys Weatherby and the collection of pharmaceuticals, weed, and meth or crack rocks Harry has removed from Weatherby’s right cargo pocket. Harry has also run Weatherby’s ID, and Dispatch advises he’s got an active bench warrant for Failure to Appear on a (surprise!) Possession, Controlled Substance case. Sarge approaches me and Tyrone.

  He’s a big man, Sarge is: barrel chested, thick everywhere, 6 foot 4, 265. The stereotypical Irish cop, in his mid-forties, policing since his mid-twenties, when he got out of the service. He lips out a Camel Light and offers it to me. I tear the filter off and light it from Sarge’s Bic.

  “Merry Christmas, Mark,” Sarge says, grinning, thoughtful. He shakes his head once. “We may be a coupla old farts to these young’uns, but ain’t it great to know ya still got it?” I take a deep draw on the Camel. I can’t help but smile broadly (though painfully) to Sarge and Tyrone.

  “Yes,” I say, nodding. “Yes it is,” thinking: especially when you never knew ya had it.

  It’s chilly and mists rise from the earth as the sun starts to shed light on Christmas morning. As I do after every night shift, I stop by the police barn on Virginia Street to feed Nancy’s horse, Prince. In her typical, in-your-face, tough-broad manner, she had joined the volunteer auxiliary of the department’s Mounted Unit shortly after I joined the department, without so much as telling me until after it was done. As a member of the Mounted Unit Auxiliary, she wears a uniform similar to mine but carries no weapon or power of arrest. In other words, sitting in the saddle above a churning, chaotic crowd, she makes a very nice target for a cop hater, who’d fail to notice the subtle distinctions in her uniform, or her lack of authority; who’d fail to realize she’s a wife and mother and a journalist by trade, not a cop. At least the department issues her a bulletproof vest.

  I take great comfort in the fact that her horse, Prince, is a veteran with the department. A sixteen-hand, twenty-year-old Tennessee walker, he’s been doing parade duty, crowd control, and project patrol for more than a decade. I rely on Prince to keep Nancy as safe as she can be, given the circumstances she rides in. We acquired Prince from a retiring auxiliary member and board him at the police barn. The stall space is free, but auxiliary volunteers are responsible for the care and feeding of their own mounts.

  One night of Nancy’s mounted duty during my third Mardi Gras, I got a little taste of the kind of worry she had to endure every time I went out the door. A post-parade, open-air rap concert had been scheduled, but for reasons unknown, the rapper was a no-show. The restive crowd was refusing to disperse. I had just gotten off my parade assignment and was headed home when I heard radio chatter dispatching all crowd-control, Ranger, SWAT, and Mounted units to the concert location. I made a U-turn and called Nancy to find out where, exactly, she was headed. The background noise drowned out her voice, and then the phone went dead. I hit my lights and headed for the park, frantically redialing her number, getting her voice mail. I worked my siren’s yelp button and swept the crowd with my spotlight to ford the torrents of revelers in the streets. The radio traffic was nonstop with reports of fights, shots fired, and calls for backup, but that’s not unusual for post-parade mayhem. Without knowing Nancy’s exact location relative to the radio reports, though, my concern escalated to alarm as I imagined Nancy and Prince in the center of a maelstrom. When finally she answered, she yelled out her location, said her sergeant was ordering her off the phone, and abruptly clicked off.

  Within minutes I was close enough to pick her out of a line of mounts holding the west perimeter of th
e sea of angry rap fans in the park. I pulled up and parked behind a traffic unit posted there. Jack was sitting calmly on the push bumper of his squad car, watching the spectacle. He wasn’t even wearing his riot helmet. I approached him wearing mine, carrying my shotgun, prepared to wade in and pluck Nancy off Prince, and lead them both to safety.

  “Whoa, cowboy. You can put that away,” Jack said, nodding at my 12 gauge. “Unless you know something I don’t know. It’s not as bad as it sounds on the radio.”

  “My wife’s out there,” I said. “She’s Mounted Auxiliary, on that tall one, about the fourth from the left.”

  “Ain’t no big thang,” Jack said. “Chill.”

  Just then a Hungry Howie’s Pizza delivery car arrived. Jack got up from his push bumper, reaching for his wallet. As he paid the delivery guy, he said to me, “Hungry? I got a whole pie here. It’s way more than I can eat.”

  Dumbfounded, mouth agape, I slung the 12 gauge over my shoulder and shook my head, looking from Nancy, a stone’s throw away on Prince, above the noisy, menacing crowd, back to Jack opening up the pizza box on the hood of his squad car. He pulled out a large steamy slice and offered it to me.

  The aroma awakened my appetite. Keeping an eye on my wife and Prince, and the shotgun at the ready, I gratefully accepted and noshed contentedly with Jack as Nancy and Prince maintained law and order. Eventually, the crowd dispersed and the Mounts headed off to horse trailers at their staging area several blocks away.

  Later, at home, I let Nancy tell me about the crazy danger of her post-parade riot duty at the canceled concert before I confessed to her that I’d had her back from a distance of fifteen yards the whole time. And later still, I even admitted that I had done so while splitting a pizza with Jack.

  Though usually dog tired and eager to collapse into bed after twelve hours of night shift, I look forward to a visit with Prince at the police barn on my way home. I work my way down the row of stalls, feeding every horse a slice of the apples I’ve brought. I save a whole apple just for Prince. I love to feed him slice after slice, as much as he loves to eat them. His big rubbery lips are so supple they seem almost prehensile in their ability to get every last morsel of the grain that I scoop into his box, even from the corners.