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“Fuck, he’s got body armor!”
He fired a burst from the machine gun, and she went down, groaning, squeezing off more rounds herself. I fired in his direction but couldn’t get a good aim because of the sun. I felt terrified and useless. I fired again, and he fell to the ground.
Then part of the cruiser’s light bar disintegrated as he fired the Magnum at me. A ka-boom and the echo, more like artillery than a pistol. The lead cruiser’s back window blew out and the bullet kept going, smashing into a sign across the street. I scuttled and crawled counterclockwise toward the back of the cars.
I backed up to Jackson, the Python at the ready. I still didn’t know if he’d run or try to finish us off. She was back against the rear bumper, sliding a new magazine in her semiautomatic pistol.
“I’m okay,” she mouthed. But she was bleeding. “Go!” she whispered, nodding toward Copeland.
I fought off my fear and came out low and fast on the other side of the cruiser. But he was gone. I ran east on Indian School Road. One block, two. I ran and crouched, ran again and crouched. The heat burning in my lungs, I scanned the low-rise office buildings and condos for a sign of him. Nothing. I could hear sirens coming up the street behind me.
My first memory of a police officer being killed in the line of duty was when I was ten years old. A motorcycle cop was shot at a traffic stop near downtown Phoenix, and another motorcycle officer respondin
g to the call for assistance was killed when a car ran through an intersection and hit him. It happened at Seventh Avenue and Roosevelt, not all that far from our home, in a city that seemed miles removed from the riots and mayhem of the 1960s. The photos of the two dead cops were on the evening news for days afterward, and it seemed unalterably grave and sad. I remember Grandfather, who had many old-fashioned notions, saying that killing a police officer in the line of duty was the worst crime because it was an attack on society itself.
Ten years later, when I joined the strange, closed world of the police, it was not so rare for cops to be murdered. We started wearing flak vests and carrying backup firearms. I remember one winter night when a two-man unit stopped a car at a citrus grove south of Guadalupe, not knowing it held two prison escapees from Oklahoma. The convicts had automatic weapons and the.38-caliber revolvers of the deputies were no match. Both deputies were two years away from retirement. We pulled up with the gun smoke still in the air, and Peralta jumped out of the car with a pump-action shotgun before I could even open my door. It was the first time I really saw his fury. He killed both cons where they stood, a surreal scene, like something out of a Western. And he said just what Grandfather had: To kill a cop in the line of duty was to attack society itself.
My mind returned to the young officer obliterated by the man in the Mustang. In the line of duty. Duty was an increasingly quaint idea to most Americans. My colleagues in academia scoffed at such a notion. But it must have at least partly inspired this young man to take a job paying $27,000 a year, where the most he could hope for was to be spat upon and called a pig as his marriage crumbled and his debts grew. His name was Glenn Adams, he was twenty-four, and he had a new wife. All his hopes and dreams ended on Indian School Road on an ordinary summer afternoon.
In a few days, I would put on my uniform for the first time in a decade and a half. I would drape my gold star with a bar of black tape and join my comrades at Glenn Adams’s funeral. We would honor his sacrifice and vow to keep him in our memory always. It is what we would hope for ourselves.
Chapter Twenty-four
A half hour before midnight, I finally headed home from Madison Street. Was it still Tuesday night? I couldn’t even remember. The term bone-tired, I understood.
I’d been through several hours of interviews with the Internal Affairs team from Phoenix PD, then the IAD investigators from the Sheriff’s Office (who were wondering who the hell I was). Then the Public Affairs officers from both departments: The TV stations were all leading their newscasts with “Cop killing on city street in broad daylight.” Then came several layers of brass, asking the same questions over and over. The Sheriff himself came to ask some questions, patted me on the shoulder, and then left to brief the reporters waiting in his pressroom.
Then an extended private ass-kicking from Peralta: Why had I been following Brent McConnico? How could I be sure Dennis Copeland was the same man I’d seen at Metrocenter? Why hadn’t I waited until more backup was available? How could I have let such inexperienced officers try to stop Copeland? Why was I such a bad shot? How could I have let Copeland escape-twice? And-the heart of the matter-why did I “screw the pooch,” as he called it, with his bete noire, the Phoenix Police Department?
It was a bad scene, as we used to say in the sixties. Peralta had moved past his demonstrative anger-the shouting and thundering and pounding on his desk-into a barely controlled rage of pedantic lectures and nasty questions, over and over. It was Mike Peralta at his worst. The Brent McConnico factor left an especially bad taste in my mouth. Peralta claimed to disbelieve that McConnico had even been at the strip mall on Shea Boulevard, meeting Dennis Copeland. I wasn’t my best, either. I accused Peralta of soft-pedaling McConnico’s role to preserve his own political skin. That started him all over again. The only thing that saved me was Peralta being summoned to a disturbance at the jail. I’d had enough for one day.
I walked down the dimly lighted corridor totally spent. I was exhausted and sore. The palms of my hands hurt from the 130-degree temperature of the asphalt I’d hit earlier that day. Even my ankles hurt.
In a little alcove by the elevator, Lindsey was sitting with her feet propped up on another chair, dozing. In sleep, there was something darkly reassuring about her beauty, gold stud in her nose and all. I sat down beside her and gently brushed her hair away from her face. The indirect light caught the rich browns and auburns in what had first appeared to be nearly black, fine, straight hair. My raven. She smiled and sighed and stretched.
“Hey, Dave,” she said. “I figured you could use a friend.”
“You figured right,” I said.
“I told you to be careful.”
“I tried.”
She reached out her hand and I pulled her up. We took the elevator and escaped into the night.
We went to her apartment in Sunnyslope, where we sat on an old couch covered with a comforter, drinking Chardonnay, listening to angry young music, and talking for hours.
She had a cat, a big languid gray tabby named Pasternak, reflecting a late-teen obsession with Russian literature and history. We talked about Dr. Zhivago and Lindsey said she had always been touched by the character of Lara, wrenched from love and doomed by revolution. In the movie, there was the streetcar scene, of course, where Yuri and Lara see each other years later but are hopelessly separated by time and motion.
I always remembered Zhivago’s brother, the Soviet officer, who talked about how Yuri and Lara were among the millions murdered to realize the Communist ideal, which of course was a sham. Tens upon tens of millions killed in this bloodiest of centuries, all in the service of murderous ideologies that sought to kill even history-especially history! — a trail of inhumanity and rage and social disintegration, a steady return to barbarism that led even to Maricopa County, Arizona, and young women left dead in the desert.
This was the point at which my dating life usually self-destructed, but Lindsey stayed with me, for some odd reason genuinely interested. “I wish I could have studied history with you,” she said.
The cat purred at my feet. I let it sniff my finger and then chucked it under the chin. “Pasternak likes you,” she said. She took my hand and stroked it lightly, skin on skin, touch on touch. She had long, elegant fingers. “I do, too.”
She held my hand against her warm lips and kissed it.
“I don’t have any answers,” I said.
