This time I was leaving for good. No more classifying people by race and gender. No more watching people smile as they told me lies. No more being the bad guy. I’d rehearsed my B-movie exit speech at least a dozen times in the past eight years, but this time I planned to let my boss hear it. I began packing up the evidence of my life in this foreign land, hoping I had something to show for the journey.
On my desk was the IBM Selectric I used to type up more “motherfucker”s in a week than I’d heard in the whole year before coming to this place. It was the same typewriter that typed up the Q and A of the man who said four cops “beat the shit” out of him, though all he had to show for it was a scratch above his mouth.
I remembered a summer day eight years earlier. Eugene Craig, my training partner, had just returned with me from a long afternoon hunting down witnesses. A package was waiting for him on his desk. “My guy can get you a helluva deal,” he said as he checked out his crisp new business cards. He would no longer have to write his name and phone number on the generic OPS cards provided by the department. I’d filled in at least 20 that day, and his cards looked pretty good.
This was the case that put me in the news and cemented my status with many cops and coworkers as an outsider. The way I saw it–and still see it–I was doing my job. Yet as I packed up my desk I realized I was tired of thinking about the case. It was other events and other investigations–the smaller ones that never saw a headline–that replayed in my mind.
The siren continued to shriek. I wanted to say something, but nothing came out. When I glanced down I saw a smear of red where my fingernails were gouging my thigh. The officer calling the shots darted a look at me in the rearview. His eyes weren’t hidden by shades, but they still didn’t reveal anything. I stared back, hoping to offer nothing in return.
For this first ride-along, on a balmy Thursday evening, I’d been assigned to two patrol officers from the Third District, an area that covers some gritty terrain on the city’s south side. Thirty minutes earlier I’d reported to the watch commander, the top white shirt, who asked me to wait while he summoned his men. Two big cops, one white and one black, walked slowly in my direction. They were well-groomed, neat. Almost too neat, I thought. They reminded me of adolescent boys who’d been told to spruce up for a visit from an elderly aunt.
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I lost track of time, but it must have been around 8 PM when Dombrowski announced the need to eat. We settled on one of a handful of look-alike chicken joints sprinkled along 71st Street, and ordered a substantial amount of food and jumbo drinks to go. My last restaurant meal had been the asparagus-and-sun-dried-tomato souffle I’d eaten at the end of my shift at the cafe. Or was it a baby-artichoke tart? I stuffed a handful of greasy fries in my mouth as Dombrowski drove us away from the neon.
