A Bad Night's Sleep (2 page)

TWO

A TREMBLING COP HANDCUFFED
me, took my gun and ID, and shoved me to the ground. I stayed where I landed, my cheek to the cold dirt, like a hunter’s kill trussed and ready to be strapped to the hood. If I stood and ran, if I moved, if I even twitched, the cop would shoot me. He told me he would. I said nothing. I didn’t move. I kept my cheek to the dirt.

For a long time they left me there. Like a dead animal. Cops ran across the lot, yelled at each other, peered into empty buildings with flashlights. Someone was sobbing. Sirens howled on all sides, far and near. Five men had taken bullets. Six ambulances pulled into the street. You get little extras like that if you wear a uniform, even if you’re a thief. Police helicopters scoured the ground with searchlights. News helicopters flew above them.

Two men and a woman approached. They were cops too. The men wore jeans and heavy jackets. The woman wore gray slacks and a leather coat. The men grabbed my arms and hoisted me to my feet. The woman gritted her teeth and looked me in the eyes. She brushed the dirt off my face with the back of her hand. Not gently. Like the dirt annoyed her and she thought it ran deep into my skin. She nodded toward an unmarked sedan, and the men steered me to it.

The men got into the backseat with me, one on each side. The woman got into the front. Like the cop who handcuffed me, she trembled, but with anger. “Okay, Mr. Kozmarski,” she said, “what happened here?” Her eyes had fire in them. I figured mine did too. I looked out the window into the floodlit cold. An hour had passed since the shooting stopped, maybe more, but cops darted from building to building, car to car, like they were running for cover. The night had gone bad and looked like it was getting worse. “Mr. Kozmarski?” the woman said.

My lawyer, Larry Weiss, who usually got me out of jams, would’ve told me to keep my mouth shut. I didn’t care. I gave it all to her. Jen Horlarche hiring me to secure the Southshore Village property. Me drifting to sleep in the garage. Two cops breaking into the construction trailers. Six men arriving in vans and stealing spools of copper wire. The chaos that followed. Me drawing a bead on the thief-cop, hesitating until he pointed his gun at other cops, then pulling the trigger. “Is he dead?” I asked when I finished.

“He died on the way to the hospital.”

“Damn,” I said. I figured that the partner of the man I shot—the one who’d tried to surrender when the squad cars arrived—was dead too. You don’t take a bullet in the forehead and survive. “The others?” I said.

“One critical, two stable.” She turned away as though looking at me disgusted her. She lit a cigarette, threw the lighted match out of the window.

The first light of morning was graying the night sky. Soon the sun would rise and dry the pools of blood. Or else a cold rain would wash the blood into the dirt. Then kids would play baseball on the dead-end street and a middle-aged couple would sit on a porch swing at the house where I’d hidden in the garage and watched as the shooting started.

In the front seat of the sedan, the woman cop pulled my wallet from her coat pocket. She leafed through the cash and pulled the credit cards and ID from their slots. She read them like she was going to tell my fortune. She looked at my detective’s license. “Says you’re a PI since 1998. What did you do before then?”

I swallowed. “I was a cop.”

She laughed. It wasn’t a nice laugh. “Let me guess. They fired you.”

I shrugged. “Something like that.”

The man on my right said, “Let’s hear it.”

I said nothing.

The other man said, “It’s on file. You can tell it or we can read it.”

I shrugged again. “I was drunk and high and crashed my cruiser into a newsstand.”

I wished they would laugh. The woman cop nodded like she’d expected as much. The man on my right said, “Were you high tonight, Mr. Kozmarski?”

If the handcuffs hadn’t been chafing my wrists, I would have hit him. I said, “I’ve been clean for seven years.”

“I want a toxicology test,” the woman said to him. She threw my wallet at my chest. It bounced to the floor.

“Do I get my gun?” I said.

“Yeah, I’ll throw that at you too.” She looked me in the eyes. “No, you don’t get your gun. It’s impounded. Maybe in a year, if you’re lucky, you’ll see it. If ballistics shows that you shot more than the one round that you admit to, or if that round turns up in an unexpected body, you’ll never see it again. Won’t matter, though—you’ll be in jail or strapped to a gurney waiting for an injection.”

“You’re arresting me?”

She shook her head. “I’m taking you in as a material witness.”

“You’ll need a judge to keep me.”

“Five officers have bullets in them. You think the judge will refuse me?”

“More would’ve been shot if I hadn’t done what I did.”

“A couple of them might be driving to the department right now instead of lying in the back of an ambulance if you’d done something sooner.”

I had nothing to say to that.

They took me to the 1st District Police Station on South State Street. It was a two-story gray concrete fortress with little windows—bigger than gun turrets but nothing to squeeze through if you weighed more than eighty pounds. Television news vans lined the curb in front, and a crowd of thirty or forty reporters with cameras and microphones surrounded a man whose head rose above them. The man was in a dress uniform.

“Shit,” said the woman cop in the front seat.

At the corner a concession truck advertised donuts, bagels, and hot coffee. No one was buying. Even the guy in the truck was leaning toward the crowd listening for details about blood and death. I could have told him the details were nothing he wanted to hear but he wouldn’t have paid attention to me. The unmarked car we were in swung past him onto 17th Street. A block to the west a hundred police cruisers stood in a parking lot, empty, engines cold, like the city knew nothing but peace. Before we reached them the unmarked car turned into a driveway that led to a side door into the station.

*   *   *

INSIDE, A ROW OF
chairs was bolted to the floor and wall. The woman cop told me to sit and one of the men unlocked my handcuffs, then relocked my left wrist to a metal bar. The woman cop said, “Make yourself comfortable,” and the three of them went through a glass office door. The hallway smelled like sweat and ammonia. Guys who’d sat in the chairs before me had scratched gang graffiti into the plastic. I wanted to scratch
Help!
but figured anyone who ended up on these chairs couldn’t do me much good.

I fished my phone from my pocket and dialed Larry Weiss’s home number. He worked late and then played cards most nights, usually arriving at his law office between ten and eleven
A.M.
He would schedule meetings at midnight and had bailed me out more than once at two in the morning without complaining, but he considered calls at dawn an insult.

His wife answered the phone and handed it to Larry.

“What?” he said.

“Hey,” I said, “it’s Joe.”

“I’m not a fucking banker,” he said. “Call me later.” He hung up.

I dialed again.

The phone rang twice and he picked up. “What?” He stretched the word, made it sound like the phone was hurting him.

I gave him a short version of the night.

When I finished, he said, “Holy shit, Joe.” The words of a professional.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Don’t say anything to anyone,” he said. “Not till I’m sitting by your side.” He paused. “But you know that already.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“They can hold you for twenty-four hours. Forty-eight, tops.”

“They should be shaking my hand and pinning ribbons on my shirt. I ended the situation before anyone else got hurt.”

“Yeah, but you shot a cop.”

“A thief.”

“A thief in a uniform.”

“Yeah,” I admitted. “How soon can you be here?”

“I’m stepping into the shower right now. Give me an hour.”

“Thanks, Larry. I’m counting on you.”

He let that sit for a moment, said, “Joe?”

“Yeah?”

“You might want a real lawyer on this.”

“You’re real enough for me.”

“I mean someone good.”

“You’ve always done the job right,” I said.

“I’m just saying. Dead cops and all. Someone’s gotta fall. I don’t want it to be you.”

“I appreciate that, Larry.”

“Keep your head together.”

“It’s never been together,” I said. “Why should it be now?”

We hung up.

Voices came from behind the door where the woman cop and her partners had disappeared.

I cupped the phone in my palm.

The voices faded.

I dialed my ex-wife Corrine at the landscaping business she ran from a storefront on the Northside. She was there most mornings before the sun rose.

She had caller ID and she answered, frightened, “What the hell is happening?”

Two years after the divorce we were working at getting back together. But every time we got close I screwed up and blew us apart. Still, I loved her and she said she loved me. I figured there was love in her fright.

“You watching the morning news?” I said.

“They’ve got pictures of you. They’re saying you shot a policeman.”

“No—well, yeah, but not really.”

“Where are you?”

“They’ve got me at the First District Station. Not in lockup. Yet.”

“Joe, what’s going on?”

“I’ll need to explain later. It’s a mess. But I need a favor.”

She’d regretted most of the favors she’d done for me in the past but she said, “Anything.”

My eleven-year-old nephew had been living with me for the last three months. He would be rolling out of bed about now, wondering why the house was quiet and where I was. “Jason needs breakfast and a ride to school,” I said.

She hesitated. “They’ll let you go in time to pick him up after school?”

A good point. “Will you call my mom and ask her to take care of him for a couple days?”

She seemed relieved that I hadn’t asked her to do it herself. “Sure.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I owe you.”

“You’ve always owed me and you always will,” she said. Then, gently, “Are you all right?”

I lied. “Yeah, I’m fine. Any moment now, they’re going to bring me coffee and donuts.”

“Joe?” Her tone told me not to screw with her.

“Look, I’ve just got to go through the process. I’ll call as soon as they let me go.”

“Do,” she said. I imagined her standing over a worktable in the back room of her landscaping business. The bright light and heat of sunlamps would surround her. She would be wearing jeans and short sleeves and her arms would be dusted with potting soil. She would have a dozen green plastic pots on the worktable and she would be transplanting the first growths of flowers and ferns, which she would transplant again into the gardens of her wealthy customers in the spring. I’d seen her like that dozens of times. I wished I was standing with her. I started to tell her that but she’d hung up.

At the other end of the hall a door swung open and a cop guided a short black man my way. The man wore a blue surgical gown but he looked like the closest he’d ever gotten to being a surgeon was when he broke into a doctor’s medicine pantry for a fresh supply of OxyContin. He stumbled twice, and, when the cop handcuffed him to a chair down the line from mine and disappeared through the glass door, he kept his eyes on the floor.

I dialed Lucinda Juarez. We’d worked together for the past month, and we’d spent a night together once before that—the worst of the screw-ups that had kept Corrine and me apart. Lucinda was another ex-cop, smarter and quicker than anyone I knew on the force and way smarter and quicker than me. If Larry Weiss screwed up and left me sitting in jail, I figured I could count on her to do what it took to spring me. I needed her to get started now.

As Lucinda’s phone rang the glass door swung open and the woman cop and three uniformed cops came out. She extended her hand for my phone. I gave it to her.

“Time to check into the First District Hotel,” she said.

THREE

FOR THREE DAYS I
sat in an isolation cell behind the 1st District Station, which had the biggest stationhouse lockup in the city. If a political convention came to town and a demonstration got out of hand, the cops put the protesters there. The rest of the time, the jail housed hookers, pimps, dealers, and addicts. Far as I could tell, the cell block I was in held no one but me.

A little time to myself. Time to think. Time to reflect on my life and the choices I’d made. Not a bad thing, I told myself. Everyone should do it.

That worked for about an hour.

For three days I had no newspaper. No TV. No phone calls. Larry Weiss never managed to get inside to see me. Maybe he was right—maybe I needed a better lawyer. Corrine didn’t get in either. Lucinda must’ve figured out where I was but she never showed. Guards delivered three meals a day, enough to survive on. They shrugged when I asked to see my lawyer. They laughed when I demanded to talk to the district commander. I didn’t bother to ask for Corrine or Lucinda. The stainless steel toilet and sink were clean when I arrived but started to stink on the second day. The world outside the stationhouse could’ve burned and I wouldn’t have known.

In the evenings before Jen Horlarche had hired me to watch the Southshore construction site, I’d been reading about a fishing village just over the Florida border from Georgia. Boats went out at night from the mouth of the St. Johns River and came back at dawn, their nets dripping salt back into the ocean, their holds full of shrimp or redfish or both. Winter, spring, summer, and fall, the waves danced in the sunlight where the river met the Atlantic. At the river mouth the undertow got crazy and every year riptides swept two or three people out to sea, waving good-bye to their family and friends on the beach. But the village looked like a place I wanted to be.

If I sold my house, I could afford to rent a moving truck and buy a place big enough for me and Jason—and Corrine, if she would come. I might have enough left over to buy a little boat and some nets. I’d finally decided the fishing village was more than a dream. Then Jen Horlarche had called and invited me to spend my nights in a wasteland where men stole copper. Instead of breathing deep in the warm salt spray, I’d sat in my car and watched dirty plastic sheets blowing across the dirt in the November wind and thieves and cops, who looked identical, shooting each other and my own hand coming away from my holster with my Glock in it. And pulling the trigger.