Shards (3 page)

Wanting to prove myself, I raised my hand.

He looked surprised but said, “Okay. What's your name?”

“
ALLI?
” I said. There were a couple of snickers. Even I could hear my cartoonish little voice.

“Okay, Alli, I want you to lie down on the ground.”

I lay on the floor and he said, “Now, you have to do whatever you have to do to get me off of you.” As he lowered his full weight onto my torso, everyone laughed. I honestly thought he would kill me. He was an enormous Hawaiian guy, two and a half times my weight. I couldn't breathe.

I didn't know what to do, so I bit him.

“Jesus Christ!” he said. He definitely got off me right away. Holding his arm in pain, he looked around quickly, trying not to look like a pussy. “You're a real alligator,” he said. “Alli the Alligator.”
The nickname stuck, and the bite was hard enough to leave a permanent scar.

A few days later, a girl came up to me in the grocery store. I had no idea who she was, but she pointed at me and said, “You bit my boyfriend.” At first she looked like she was going to bite
me
, but then she burst out laughing. So did I.

Usually ADT is the training that fails people in the academy. A lot of recruits can't hack it. The instructors exhaust you physically and mentally first, and then they make you fight for your life, just like you'll have to on the job. Some people have that crazy survival warrior instinct in them and some don't. It turned out that I did. Your body will either react or freeze, and the people who react become great cops. It isn't
thinking
that's going to save your life at moments like those.

Everyone teased me about taking the department so seriously, but I was passionate about being a cop. I was even elected president of the class. If a recruit did something wrong, I had to write a letter to the chief, explaining the situation and how I was going to stop it from occurring again. Julia would sandbag when we did physical training, and we would have to run farther as punishment. My friend Jonathan forgot his bulletproof vest one day, so I had to write a letter. I took on a lot of work, but I thrived on it. We had to be there by seven thirty in the morning, but I would get there at six to work out with Kevin before class started. When we finished at four thirty in the afternoon, I would stay until six to get the paperwork done. I never wanted to leave. For maybe the first time in my life, I felt like I was in the right place. By the time Dalton left for Miami I barely noticed his absence. I just stayed longer at work, energizing and exhausting myself.

At the end of my first full week without Dalton, Julia slammed her locker door and said, “How about a drink, Alligator?”

“I'd love to, but I'm tired. I need to go home and sleep.”

“Oh come on, Alli. You never come out with us.”

“I know,” I said. “I'm sorry.” But I wasn't really. I had avoided social situations, preferring work and Dalton instead. Plus, Loza was already making the mistakes most girls make coming into a department—sleeping with the patrol guys before recruit school even ended. I didn't want to associate myself with her. Cops want what they want, and they want women. It's easy for female cops to lose the respect of their beat partners and get labeled as sluts. I didn't want to do anything that would associate me with her.

•  •  •

“I just can't keep up,” I complained to Loza on Monday morning. My shoulders ached, my legs ached, and even after spending the weekend recharging in bed, I had to drag myself in on Monday. We were doing high-speed car chases, training all day and into the night, and I was constantly tired. Loza was bouncing around like Tigger, swinging her long brown ponytail.

“I've got something that can help you,” she said. She fished around in her bag and pulled out a little box. Popping open the top, she handed me a small red pill. “It's caffeine,” she said. “Super-mega caffeine pill.”

I looked at the pill suspiciously. “I'm not really much of a caffeine person,” I said. “I don't even drink coffee. Just soda occasionally.”

“Exactly why you need this,” Loza said.

I swallowed the pill with my vitamin juice and we headed out to the course. All of a sudden I was wide awake. I could do K-turns and J-turns; I could run faster, run longer. The next morning I asked her if she had another one, and she gave me a small bottle with a few pills.

“Thanks,” I said. “I'll pay you back. Where do you get them? GNC? The Vitamin Shoppe?”

“You can order them online,” she said, and spelled out the name for me. “Phentermine.”

A couple of days later, I went online to look for the stuff. Turns out it was actually an amphetamine, totally illegal to purchase in the US. You had to buy it from those sketchy Canadian websites where you purchase knockoff Viagra.

“You bitch,” I said, shutting my laptop hard enough that it almost flew off the table.

I didn't know what to do. I was pissed at myself for being so naïve, and pissed at Loza, too. I stopped taking the pills immediately. Within hours, I started to feel lethargic. Tired. Hungry. Turns out I was having withdrawal symptoms. Phentermine is addictive.

“What the hell were you trying to do to?” I said to Loza in the locker room the next morning.

“What do you mean?”

“The phentermine,” I said. “Amphetamines. Jesus Christ.”

“What?” She acted surprised. “I didn't know.”

“Bullshit. Why are you becoming a cop if you're not going to uphold the law? Is it because you like all the attention from the guys?”

“You're saying I joined the force for the guys?”

I turned away, disgusted. Everybody had labeled us best friends because we were the two pretty girls in recruit class, but I had never felt Julia was serious about being a cop. She was nonchalant about the rules. I was a by-the-book recruit, and she thought marijuana should be legalized. Plus, she was so damned flirty and used to be a model. Once she brought her modeling book to recruit class, which was weird to begin with, and then just happened to leave it in someone's patrol car so the whole department would see. I thought she was kind of shady, and I
stopped returning her calls. Eventually, she dropped out of our recruit class, though she returned a year later and ultimately became a cop.

I started to worry that I wouldn't pass my drug test because of the phentermine. I had no idea how long it would stay in my system, and I spent a couple of really tense weeks that way.

My craving for the phentermine should have put me on alert. My family has a long history of addiction, mostly to alcohol. My mother, two uncles, and both maternal grandparents were alcoholics. High-functioning alcoholics, they liked to call themselves. Mimi, my grandmother, quit cold turkey when I was a child, and two years later my family did an intervention on my granddad. By now, they had both been sober more than twenty years. But my uncles were at the height of their alcoholism, my cousin was a heroin addict, and my mom, after enjoying fifteen years of sobriety during my childhood, had relapsed into alcoholism during her divorce. I know now that I had a predisposition toward addiction, but no one in my family ever talked about it that way. The rampant alcoholism was hardly a big secret; it was just something everyone laughed and joked about. No one in my family treated it seriously. No one thought it was a big deal.

I had smoked a lot of pot in high school with Josh but never tried anything else. I didn't even drink very much because I hated feeling out of control. I suppose you could say that phentermine was my first true addiction.

So when the drug test arrived, I was terrified. I knew if I tested positive, that would be it. I would be off the force. And I would murder Loza.

The day of the drug test, we lined up in the hallway while they inspected the bathrooms. It was easier and faster for the girls since there were only three of us. A female officer took us into the bathroom
one by one. There was a special bluing chemical in the toilet to prevent me from diluting my urine with toilet water. The officer listened to me go, and I wasn't allowed to flush the toilet afterward. I handed her the cup and she tested the temperature right away and put a tape over the cup. Petrified, I initialed the cup, and thankfully, nothing showed up. I swore I wouldn't be so stupid in the future.

•  •  •

On graduation day, I received my badge. I wore, for the first time, my tailored uniform with my name embroidered on it, and white gloves. My Glock was signed over to me, along with three boxes of ammunition and a heavy, bulky radio. My mom came to graduation, of course, and so did my sister and brother-in-law and their baby girl, Maya. Predictably, there was no word from my father. My mom had emailed him in Florida to tell him I had started recruit school and again to tell him I was graduating. She asked him to at least send a card letting me know how proud he was of me. But there was no card. No call. He had wiped me clean from his life when I was nineteen.

Because I was the president of the class I got to make a big speech, and I won the notebook award, an academic award that made my mom proud.

As all of my teachers and instructors congratulated me, Sergeant Mankell handed me an envelope. “Here's the five bucks I owe you,” he said. “I didn't forget.”

I had no idea what he was talking about—probably some silly bet we had made—but when I opened the envelope later, I saw that in addition to a crisp five-dollar bill he had written a letter congratulating me. I will never forget what he wrote:

You have the heart of a lion, and you never quit.

You acknowledged your pain, but did not indulge it.

You are gentle and humble, yet sharp as a sword.

You remained generous in all that I have seen you do.

You are a warrior.

Only eleven of us had made it through to graduation. A bunch left after PT or ADT. Loza just didn't show up one day. One guy quit because of his wife, who couldn't tolerate the hours of recruit school. He was told that if his wife couldn't handle recruit school, she sure as hell couldn't handle him being on the job. Amazingly, Fatso graduated. The instructors beat him down constantly, but I guess because of his father he was passed.

As for me, I now belonged to the brotherhood. And I was finally doing something with my life.

There are different kinds of
cops—investigators, who find facts, analyze, and problem-solve; detectives, who put together puzzles and solve mysteries; and basic cops, the guys who only wear the badge in order to kick people's asses. I was definitely an investigator. Fresh out of recruit school, I was itching to get into the community and find out what was going on.

I was also terrified. I was a
cop
. My responsibilities loomed large.

Luckily, I was going to spend four months riding around with field training officers before I had to go it alone. My first FTO, Agent Kane, reined me in. Kane was a tiny Asian man, soft-spoken, and a very talented officer. He taught me how to do everything by the book and how to be disciplined in learning about the law and managing my time.

“Alli,” Kane said, “we're shorthanded on cops in Maui, so your time management is number one. You're not going to get home
until midnight unless you learn to take care of your paperwork and evidence between traffic stops and calls.”

Kane wasn't very confrontational, and I found myself getting into fights with beat partners while he wasn't watching over me. He did teach me how to sit and observe instead of getting myself into trouble every time I went on a case.

My second FTO, Al Torres, couldn't have been more different from Kane. He had a reputation for not exactly doing things by the book.

The first night I was out with Al, we spotted a teenaged kid riding his bike. We could tell by looking at him that he was a stoner, and we slowed down and drove beside him, watching him weave from side to side while he looked up at the sky. Al laughed and lit the kid up. The poor kid stopped, dropping his bike.

“What, man?” he asked. “I'm just trying to get home on my bike.”

“Been smoking weed?” Al asked. “Been dealing?”

We could smell the weed on him, but the kid said, “Come on, man, don't take me in. I got nothing.”

The kid had a pipe sticking out of the pocket of his pants, so Al said, “I'm seizing your pants!”

“You can't do that!” the kid said. He turned to me. “Can he do that?”

I nodded. “He can do that,” I said, though I was pretty sure he couldn't.

“Pants!” Al said, holding out his hand, and the kid struggled to get his pants off without falling down. He handed them to Al and had to ride the bike home in his underwear. Later that night, his parents came to the station and filed a complaint.

A week later, Kevin and I were both riding with Al when we got a call from a store in the mall that a lady had stolen some jewelry. When we got there, the store detective was talking to her, and we
could tell she was methed out. She was so thin she looked anorexic. She was barely wearing any clothes, just this little flowered dress and no underwear. When Kevin and I cuffed her, she went crazy, flopping around on the floor like a dying fish and trying to get out of her cuffs. Her little dress was riding up and you could see everything—it was a real mess. She fought us like crazy. Meth makes you strong, or at least makes you think you're strong. Al watched with amusement as we struggled with her. Finally, he took his giant boot and stepped on the woman's head.

He turned to me and let out a big laugh. “See, Moore,” he said, “when you step on the freak's head, the freak stops moving.”

For four months, I rode along with my field training officers, learning how to be a cop. After that, my sergeant put me in the Fishbowl while I awaited my first assignment. The Fishbowl, the receiving desk for Wailuku patrol, is where prisoners are booked and processed; most rookies spend a lot of time there. Instead of killing time watching TV with the receiving desk sergeant, I was studying the offender-based transactions, or OBTs—cop-talk for the arrest record. I wanted to find out who the major players and arrestees were on Maui during that time.