Paul Bacon (13 page)

“Trouble?” I said. “Aren’t we already
in
trouble?”

“You get into one kind of trouble to avoid another. This is the job.”

The driver of the Lexus put on his blinker and started to slow down.

“Well, you see. He’s pulling over. We gotta finish it,” the sergeant said, then looked back at Randall. “You put us over,
guy?”

“All set, boss,” said Randall. “Eighty-third and First.”

The sergeant pointed his finger between my eyes and said very soberly, “Remember that address in case you have to call for
backup.” I repeated the address aloud a few times, like a mantra for safety as I rolled into a very foreign situation.

When the Lexus came to a stop, the sergeant grabbed the hand microphone for the PA system built into the dash. “
Driver
,” he said, his amplified voice echoing off the other side of the street, “
Put down
all your windows, remove your ignition key with your left hand, and show
it to us out the window
.”

Witherspoon said, “Why you making this a felony stop, sarge? You expecting gangbangers on the Upper East Side?”

“I thought you said you didn’t like tints,” Sergeant Watts snapped back with a cheeky look, then turned to me and asked, “You
ready to go, bro?”

“Yeah, okay, um . . . You wanna talk to the driver then?” I said, nervous about approaching a possibly armed driver on my
first car stop.

“Bad move,” said the sergeant. “That’ll make us cross in front of the van. The driver could put his car in reverse and cut
us in half.”

“Can’t we cross
behind
the van?” I offered.

“I’m not walkin’ all the way around this thing,” said the sergeant. “Relax. I’ll be going up with you on the other side. Just
keep an eye on the guy’s hands, and you’ll be fine.”

* * *

As the sergeant and I walked up to the Lexus, I tried to recall what I’d learned at the academy about doing car stops. Much
more was involved than watching the driver’s hands, I just couldn’t remember what. I only had a few seconds to invoke a week’s
worth of lectures and role-playing scenarios, and every mock roadside scenario we performed had ended in a mock disaster for
the recruit.

It was around six thirty on a weeknight, so the sidewalks were still crowded with pedestrians, and even though we were in
a well-to-do neighborhood, I was expecting an ambush. I peered inside the car from ten feet away, but the windows were so
dark. I couldn’t make out any details until I’d reached the car’s rear bumper. That’s when I saw what looked like two very
large men in the backseat. The outlines of their heads were gigantic, sumo-wrestler size. I could only assume the rest of
their bodies were just as huge. I swung wide around the bumper in case they suddenly burst out of the car.

Coming around the side of the Lexus, I noticed that all the windows were open, and the driver was holding out his keys, as
the sergeant had instructed. I peeked into the backseat and found it unoccupied. The giant heads I’d envisioned were regular-sized
headrests.

I laughed at myself while I approached the driver, but he was not as amused. He was a fifty-year-old man in a dark-blue suit
with a gold Rolex and a head of perfectly combed silver hair. A copy of the
New England Journal of Medicine
was lying on his passenger seat; I thought he was probably a doctor.

“Are you confiscating my car?” the man said, still dangling his keys out the window.

“No, sir,” I said. “It’s just for my safety.”

He pulled his arm inside and said, “
Your
safety? How am I threatening you?”

As cars whizzed behind me only a few feet away, I dispensed with the usual apologies to keep the conversation short. “Your
tinted windows make it hard to see inside, which is why they’re illegal.”

The man looked stunned. “I don’t know much about vehicle law, but these came with the car.”

This struck me as a good excuse to let the driver go with just a warning. I glanced over at the sergeant to see his reaction.
He was leaning casually into the passenger side with his arms crossed on the door, like he was ordering food at a pickup window.
He told the driver, “Just cuz you pay money for somethin’ don’t make it legal.”

It wasn’t the response I was hoping for: the sad truth, mixed with bad grammar.

The driver snarked back at him, “It don’t?”

The sergeant’s eyelids popped open as he leaned a few inches into the car. He looked ready to drag the man out and hog-tie
him on the sidewalk.

“Sir,” I said softly, “if I could just get your driver’s license and registration.”

The driver, visibly shaken by the sergeant, turned back to me with a look of humility and said, “Uh, yes. Of course.”

When the driver handed me his paperwork, I started copying his information onto a moving-violation summons.

“What are you doing?” the sergeant asked me.

“Writing him a ticket,” I said.

The sergeant shook his head and said, “Back in the van.”

It hadn’t occurred to me that I could sit in the van and write a ticket. Back in the Three-two, I’d written all my summonses
in the blistering cold while standing face-to-face with someone who was either pleading for mercy, threatening to kill me,
or both. The idea of having a warm, safe place to do my job seemed almost decadent.

I said as much when I got back in the van, but the sergeant ignored me. “Yeah, yeah. Come on,” he said, holding out his hand
for the driver’s license. “Let me run this guy.”

A minute later, the sergeant relayed the driver’s license number to our radio dispatcher, then gave me the card while he waited
for the results to come back. Within seconds, his eyes wandered toward my black summons binder, which was lying closed on
my lap. “You, uh . . . need the VTL code for tinted windows?” said the sergeant, trying not to sound pushy.

“No. I got it,” I said, getting the hint. I rolled back the soft leather cover and continued the ticket I had started writing
in the street. I still needed the driver’s date of birth, so I looked at his license and found my eyes wandering to his photo.
It was an unusually flattering picture for an ID. His smile looked genuine, and his eyes were perfectly symmetrical. He looked
trustworthy and smart, the way I thought a doctor should look. It felt wrong putting the screws to a member of the medical
profession. They saved people’s lives, and I had a dangerous job. What if I got shot some night, and he was the only physician
on call?

“I can’t write a summons to a doctor,” I decided. I peeled apart the carbon copies to see if maybe I hadn’t pressed down hard
enough.

“I don’t think that guy’s a doctor,” said the sergeant. “He’s got no MD on his plate.”

“Maybe it’s his wife’s car.”

“Could be, but I got a weird feeling about him.”

“So do I. And I don’t want to risk it.”

“Risk what?”

“It’s just, I don’t know, bad karma,” I said, wishing I had chosen to say “bad luck” instead.

“Karma?” laughed the sergeant. “What are you, a hippie?”

“Yeah, watch out, boss,” Randall said from the back of the van. “I think Bacon’s a liberal.”

My reputation as a liberal dogged my every move in the NYPD. I never talked about politics around my coworkers; I think they
just put the pieces together. Unlike most white males on the job, I lived in Manhattan and was occasionally spotted reading
the
New York Times
.

“Sorry to hear that,” said Sergeant Watts, “but you already started the summons. If you want to void it out, you’ll have to
type a form and give it to the CO, because that kind of shit looks like corruption. So don’t worry about who’s driving. Just
keep writing, and I’ll keep listening for Central.”

After I finished the ticket, I stared at it for a few minutes, wondering what terrible energy it would unleash upon me. I
thought it was the worst of my problems, but then we heard back from Central.

“
Your ID comes back to a Mattingly, first name Arden
,” the dispatcher said. “
Class D suspended.
”

I slumped forward in defeat. In the back, my coworkers celebrated.

“Collar!” Witherspoon shouted with glee.

“Paging Doctor Douchebag,” said Randall.

“Not bad, Bacon,” the sergeant said, looking at his watch. “Two hours in. This has to be the first pinch in MSU.”

I walked up to the Lexus slowly, trying to postpone the coming scene. I was sure the man was going to tell me he was due in
surgery first thing in the morning, and I’d have to say he wasn’t going to make it because of one unpaid traffic ticket. I’d
feel like a sleaze the whole time I was putting him through the system, and it wouldn’t end there. Having spent the last ten
months with wisecracking cops, I knew they’d never let me live this down.

When I reached the driver, I leaned down to his eye level and tried to show the full extent of my remorse. “Sir, I’m afraid
to tell you that your license is suspended, which means I’m afraid you’re going to have to come with us, I’m afraid.”

He looked surprised. “I’m under arrest?”

“Technically, not yet, sir,” I said. “But soon.”

“Oh, I can’t go through the system tonight,” he said, and I was on hooks. “I have to be in court first thing in the morning.”

“Court?”

The driver reached into his inside lapel pocket and produced a business card. “I’m an attorney,” he said with a confident
voice.

“You’re not a doctor?” I said.

“No,” he said. “I work in malpractice claims.”

Amazed and delighted, I took his business card and cradled it in both hands. ARDEN J. MATTINGLY, ESQ., it said. Personally,
I had nothing against lawyers. Without them, there’d be no civil rights. I knew most of my colleagues did not share in my
admiration, however. To cops, attorneys were rich, greasy know-it-alls who let our perps out of jail. My own feelings aside,
there would be no shame in locking one up.

I handed back the man’s card and said, “Thank you. Now, if you wouldn’t mind stepping outside the car.”

“I’m not budging until you show me where it says tinted windows are illegal,” he insisted.

“No problem,” I said, and yelled back to the van. “Hey, sarge!”

“Never mind,” said the man, unfastening his seat belt and opening the door.

Mr. Mattingly clammed up after I got the cuffs on him. To show my appreciation, I continued to let my coworkers think he was
a doctor. We drove him back to the Nineteenth, where I left him in a cell while I processed his arrest. It took me about thirty
minutes to finish the whole job. With a suspended-license offense, also known as a five-eleven for its traffic-law code, the
only evidence to voucher was the license itself. I had to send it to the DMV, but it went out via department mail, so I didn’t
even have to find a stamp.

My MSU mates had already gone back out on patrol, so when I was done, I approached the Nineteenth desk sergeant for his approval
on my paperwork. “I just finished my guy,” I said. “Can I get your signature?”

“The five-eleven guy? Yeah, sure,” said the sergeant, reaching out for my handwritten complaint report.

He flipped the report to the back side without reading it. “When I was a cop, I used to bring in five-elevens all the time,”
he said while signing his name. “So easy.”

Handing me back the report, he said, “Your boss said the guy’s a doctor, though. That’s brutal, kid.”

I shrugged.

“Yeah, a collar’s a collar,” he said.

CHAPTER 18

W
ITH ONLY THREE COPS in our squad and an unofficial mandate to concentrate on arrests, we turned our van into a collaring
machine. In the weeks to come, we surpassed the arrest activity of all the other MSU teams combined, becoming known as the
A-squad of the unit. I got most of the credit for this for some reason; maybe it’s because I brought in the first collar of
MSU. I didn’t think I deserved all the congratulations and handshakes I got from the other guys in the detail. While Randall
and Witherspoon raked in serious offenders, doing their part to clean up the streets, I continued to make five-eleven arrests.
They’d lock up a gang member and I’d lock up a high school teacher. They’d collar a heroin dealer and I’d collar a telemarketer.
Finding physical evidence on suspects was a competition and a con game, and I’d never been good at either. When it came to
building a case, I preferred the cold facts of the public record. If someone popped, they popped—nothing personal about it.

Pretty soon, my affinity for five-elevens became an addiction. Because of our squad’s phenomenal activity, Sergeant Watts
procured a mobile digital terminal, or MDT, a wireless laptop with access to certain state-and federal-government crime databases.
Encased in a shiny magnesium shell and rubber-padded against shock, the computer looked as if it could withstand a bomb blast,
so we started calling it the “Israeli laptop.” Having it in the van not only weaned us off of our dependence on Central, who
did not appreciate us putting over a car stop every ten minutes: It also turned every license plate on the road into a potential
arrest.

On our way up to Washington Heights one evening, we stopped behind a Mercedes-Benz sedan at a red light, and I couldn’t help
myself. I shifted the transmission into park and began typing the vehicle’s plate number into the Israeli laptop.

“What are you doing?” said the sergeant. “We’re still in the Nineteenth.”

“Just practicing. I want to know this system backwards and forwards,” I assured him. This was a lie. I was secretly praying
the guy would pop.

A moment later, the laptop emitted a gentle chime, indicating that the results of my search had been transmitted. Hitting
the F11 key, I called up the own er’s pedigree information, and a few extra details as well:

SEX OFFENDER: CT, NJ, NY, PA

“Hey, look at this,” I said.

“Whoa,” said the sergeant. “The guy gets around.”

“Should I pull him over?”

“For what?”

“He’s a sex offender.”

“That’s a record, Bacon, not a warrant. You can’t lock someone up for having a record. He’s already
been
locked up,” said the sergeant. “Come on, the light’s green.”

I shifted into drive and pulled forward through the intersection, then hit the F11 key again out of curiosity. The next search
result said:

CLASS D LICENSE—SUSPENDED (23 ON 20)

This meant the driver had twenty-three unpaid traffic tickets on twenty dates, constituting a felony. “This guy’s got more
than a record,” I told the sergeant.

“So he’s a collar after all,” said the boss.

I reached over to turn on the roof lights, but the sergeant batted down my hand and laughed, “You can’t be serious.”

“You just said . . .”

“But we got no predicate for a stop. We can’t just go fishing.”

“He has to turn sometime, doesn’t he?” I pointed out. “What if he just happened to forget his blinker? It’s his word against
mine, isn’t it?”

“Jesus Christ!” Randall shouted from the back seat. “Can we get something to eat first?”

“Yeah, you’re starting to scare me, kid,” said the sergeant. “What would your friends at the ACLU think about this kind of
behavior?” The liberal jabs were starting to annoy me. I said, “I don’t
have
any friends at the ACLU.”

Randall said, “That’s pretty obvious.”

The sergeant said, “Let’s just grab some food, bang out our three summonses for the night, and then start making collars,
legally.”

I nodded and continued driving up First Avenue behind the Mercedes. Four blocks later, the driver turned right without putting
on his signal, just as I’d hoped.

“Wuh!” I said, pointing at the car as it disappeared around the corner.

“Don’t even think about it,” said Sergeant Watts.

After their scolding, I started narrowing my MDT searches to actual moving violations. But this had the effect of widening
my net, because it forced me to find my old Vehicle Traffic Law book and crack it open. The VTL listed thousands of violations,
so many that the police academy didn’t bother testing us on it for lack of time. A hefty paperback set in blindingly small
type, the VTL made for very dull reading, save for the occasional law that jumped right off the page. One obscure old code
I found particularly helpful: It was illegal to have colored lights on a personal vehicle for any use other than brakes and
turn signals. The law was written to prevent civilians from soup-ing up their cars like emergency vehicles, which was not
a huge problem as far as I could tell. More frequently, it was broken by people who decorated the hoods of their cars with
little blue running lights. They tended to be loud and flashy young men, which eliminated the guilt I would normally feel
about enforcing such a silly law. When people were so desperate for attention, I was glad to give it to them.

The more VTL codes I learned, the more licenses I could run, and the more collars I could make without a hint of doubt or
remorse. Eventually, the entire driving population became my enemy. My early focus on SUV drivers widened to everyone on the
road—that is, except professional drivers. I gave cabbies and movers and anyone else who worked behind the wheel a blanket
amnesty for the little things. People in their own vehicles were another story. I hadn’t owned a car in thirteen years, so
my pedestrian bias ran deep. The way I saw it, anyone who chose to drive in New York City was only capable of learning things
the hard way. Plus, they were polluting my air and clogging my streets when they could have taken the train, so why shouldn’t
they suffer in return?

I could do twenty car stops a night with my voluminous knowledge of the VTL. In my experience, one out of three drivers was
uninsured, which would give me a summons at least. About one in five had a suspended driver’s license, which made them collars,
and one in ten had an outstanding warrant, which made them even better collars. Thanks to scofflaws, I became so familiar
with the initial arrest process that some of my MSU coworkers started calling me Collarsaurus.

One night at roll call, I was standing in formation with the rest of the MSU night tour, about fifty cops in all. We were
listening to one of the squad sergeants reading off our posts when Lieutenant Carothers walked into the muster room. The lieutenant
interrupted the sergeant for a brief conversation, then walked out again. The sergeant called out my name, and I put up my
hand.

“Fall out,” the sergeant said. “You got a special assignment.”

This was the first mention of a special assignment since the beginning of our detail. A number of cops in front of me turned
around and glared. I could understand if they were jealous; while we were driving around in a van all night making collars,
most of them spent their nights on foot writing parking tickets. I looked back at their crusty faces and rolled my eyes like
this was no big deal, trying to at least seem humble. I didn’t want their envy, but I couldn’t help feeling a little victorious.
The last time I’d stood out at a roll call had been in the Three-two, when I’d raised my hand to show I hadn’t made a single
arrest. I liked the view much better from here.

A rookie on the MSU day tour named Mulligan was having a hard time processing an arrest in the nearby Twenty-fourth Precinct,
and he needed help. This was all I was told before I was given keys to a patrol car and ordered to report to the Two-four
as soon as possible.

During my drive across Central Park, I rolled down my windows to let in the warm spring air. The trees were leafing up, the
flowers were blooming, and I was on my way to a dazzling career in law enforcement. Swept up in it all, I started singing
my own theme song: “
Super cop! Coming to help you
.
Super cop!
”

When I arrived at the Twenty-fourth Precinct on the Upper West Side, I walked into the station house on a cloud and approached
the desk sergeant. “PO Bacon reporting as ordered, sir,” I said, throwing up a crisp salute.

Typical of a desk sergeant, the man stared back at my fresh face as if it was a loaf of moldy bread. He returned my salute
by tapping his brow with a pen and said, “And you would be?”

“
Super cop!
” I thought, but was able to restrain myself to, “I’m from MSU. I think one of my coworkers is having a little trouble with
a collar.”

“Oh, he’s trouble all right,” said the sergeant. “I’m short-handed, and he’s got two of my cops sitting on his perp while
he screws around with the online. Do everyone a favor and give this kid a clue, will you? He doesn’t know his ass from a hole.”

“No problem,” I said. “Where can I find him?”

“In the computer room,” the sergeant grumbled, pointing me down a nearby hall before he called me back. “Wait, he’s gonna
need something for later.” The sergeant reached into a drawer and pulled out what looked like the world’s largest pair of
handcuffs.

The manacles were twice as big as the ones I had hanging on my belt, and the chain between them was about a foot long. When
the sergeant handed them to me, I wondered who or what they were designed for. I didn’t want to look stupid, so I said nothing
and set off down the hall.

I found Mulligan in the computer room standing beside a laser printer that was churning out pages. The tail of his uniform
shirt was untucked, but he looked like he had everything under control.

“How’s the collar going?” I asked him.

When he turned to look at me, the cracks started to appear: His eyes were bloodshot, his complexion was a bit on the gray
side, and the knuckles on his right hand were bandaged. He looked as though he’d been in a fight that he hadn’t won. “This
one’s a real cunt,” he said.

Mulligan had moved to New York from Ireland four years earlier, and he still had a noticeable brogue. Unlike many in the NYPD
who prided themselves on some distant blood connection to the old country, Mulligan was an authentic Irishman, and he sounded
like one. His accent might have earned him a bit of respect if it hadn’t turned him into a walking punch line. The Irish were
synonymous with the old days of the NYPD, so cops would beg Mulligan to say something in uniform, then break into laughter
before he finished a sentence. I’d worked with him in the Three-two, and I’d noticed that civilians found him amusing as well,
especially the drunk and disorderly. He spoke better English than most police officers, but intoxicated people acted as though
he was the one talking gibberish. While Mulligan tolerated his coworkers’ constant teasing, he was less than forbearing with
strangers on the street. His pride got him into a lot of unnecessary conflicts, which I figured had something to do with the
enormous handcuffs I was delivering him.

I lifted up the cuffs and said, “The sergeant said you might need these.”

“Brilliant,” Mulligan said while pulling a stack of pages off the laser printer. “Take them back to my perp’s cell, will you?
And relieve those cops from the Two-four until I finish up in here.”

I thought I’d come to help Mulligan with paperwork, not guard his prisoner. I glanced down at the manacles, which looked large
enough to restrain a horse. “How big is this guy?” I said.

“Not very . . . Oh, you thought—” Mulligan laughed. “No, those aren’t handcuffs. They’re leg shackles.”

“That doesn’t make me feel any better,” I said. “Why does he need leg shackles? And why does he need two cops to watch him?”

“Don’t worry,” said Mulligan. “Just don’t stand in front of his cell. He’s a spitter.”

Mulligan’s prisoner was being lodged in a special row of cells away from the main arrest area, called the tombs. Though the
tombs were just off the lobby on the first floor, they felt at least six feet underground. A long gray cement hallway stretched
down a series of windowless jail cells that smelled like latrines. I looked into one of the empty six-by-eight-foot cells
and stared around in disbelief. The walls were painted black, a gloomy accent to an already oppressively small space. Brightening
things up a bit were hundreds of graffiti tags of every conceivable color, artistic style, and possible meaning.

At the end of the hallway, I saw two female police officers sitting in fold-up metal chairs, both reading magazines. When
I walked toward them, one of the women bugged out her eyes and put up her hand to stop me.

“I’m sorry, I’m just . . .” I began to say.

“Shhh,” she said while pointing at the nearest cell.

When her partner saw me, she closed her magazine, grabbed her baton and memo book off the floor, and started folding up her
chair. They tiptoed past the prisoner’s cell and walked around me, grinning. “What’s going on?” I whispered.

“You’re lucky he’s sleeping,” one of them said before they both walked out of the tombs and closed the door.

I stood off to one side of the prisoner’s cell while I waited for Mulligan. I wanted to see this menace with my own eyes,
but I remembered he was a “spitter,” and I wasn’t entirely sure he was asleep. Every time I got the courage to peer inside,
the prisoner would start mumbling, and I would flatten myself against the bars of the next cell. Eventually my curiosity got
the better of me, and I poked my head around for a look. If he wasn’t the monster I was expecting, the sight of him was unsettling.
A skinny man in a dirty overcoat, he was curled up on a wooden bench with his face just inches from an extraordinarily foul
steel commode. He looked perfectly at peace breathing in the fetid air, but I could only look in the cell for a few seconds
before I started to gag.