At some point, the adrenaline drained away, the shock dissipated, the exhaustion caught up to me, and I think I drifted off. Actually, I know I did, because I started having one of my classic anxiety dreams, one where it’s ten minutes to deadline and I realize I’ve forgotten to do any reporting on a story I have to write.
It must not have been a very deep sleep, though, because I was stuck in the usual spot in the dream—the part where I’m trying to figure out
why
I haven’t done any reporting—when I heard those big double doors opening. I jolted wide-awake and scrambled to my feet, my knee swollen but holding my weight. I wanted to be alert and prepared for whatever came at us, ready to exploit any small opening, for however unlikely it was there would be one.
My eyes were aimed somewhere high above the six-foot mark, expecting to see Hightower. Instead, it was Captain Boswell. An angel couldn’t have looked any better than that short black woman with her shelflike butt. Sure, she had probably been told I was in here for dealing crack cocaine, but she had to know that was a sham.
“Captain Boswell, oh thank God,” I said. “I know this is going to sound like crazy talk, but—”
“Shh … keep it down,” she said. “I’m not supposed to be here.”
“What do you—”
“Shh!” she hissed more fiercely. “Listen to me and listen carefully, because there’s not much time. LeRioux and Jones are coming back. They’re going to move you to an interrogation room, and they’re probably going to kill you.”
“So, wait, you know about the red dot guns?”
“Yes,” she said quickly.
“So … I’m sorry, you’re the captain here. Why don’t you just blow it out of the water? Report it to the higher-ups downtown? Throw LeRioux and Jones in—”
“It’s not that simple,” she said, her face pressed close to the bars so she could keep her volume down and still be heard. “I have a son.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“I’ve only been here six months, remember? This had been going on for years under the nose of my predecessor. I don’t know if he was blind or stupid, but I don’t think he ever knew about it. I’m pretty sure no one downtown knows about it, either. These red dot guys have been very careful. I only learned about it myself recently, but I was sort of clumsy in how I went about things in the early stages. They figured out that I was onto them and they … they…”
She turned away for a moment, and I could see only half of her face as she scrunched it in an effort to stay composed. “They threatened to hurt my son,” she said when she turned back. “Not just hurt him. Mutilate him.”
“I still don’t understand. You could have him put in protective custody, and—”
“And what?” she demanded with quiet ferocity. “Wait for three years until the thing goes to trial and just hope that no one protecting him slips up between now and then? No way. Look, I’ve always loved being a cop, and I hate what these guys are doing to the department’s reputation. Ever since I heard about this thing I’ve been trying to figure out how to defuse it and keep it quiet. But at the end of the day, this is just my job, okay? My son is my life. I’ve got three years left until I’ve put in my twenty, and then we can move to Oklahoma or Kansas or someplace where I can raise him in one piece, and Newark and everything that happened here can become a distant memory.”
“Okay, okay, I get it,” I said. “Look, I appreciate your situation, but that doesn’t have any bearing on us. Why don’t you just march us out of here and we’ll—”
“I can’t,” she interrupted.
“Why the hell not?”
“Because I still don’t know who’s involved and who isn’t,” she said. “I know several of them must have killed Mike Fusco. I never believed that phone call he made to me, even if I had to go along with it for that stupid press conference. I know several of them killed Darius Kipps, too. But I don’t know who. And I don’t know how many of them there are. If one of them sees me taking you out of here, it’s all over.”
“So where does that leave us?” I asked.
“Like I said, they’re moving you to the interrogation room,” she said. “I overheard some talk that made it sound like they’re going to stage a scene that makes it look like you smuggled weapons in here. They’re going to kill you and call it self-defense.”
“Oh, lovely.”
“Okay, so I’m trying to help you. Turn around and stick your arms through the bars so I can do something about those handcuffs,” she ordered. Ruthie and I complied. As Captain Boswell started going to work with a key, she said, “I’m not taking these off. I’m just unlocking them. LeRioux and Jones have to think they’re still on, okay?”
“Got it.”
“There’s a door at the end of the corridor near the interrogation rooms,” she continued. “It’s an emergency exit. LeRioux and Jones aren’t going to be worried about it because it’s always locked. But I’ve disabled the lock. When you get to the interrogation room, either LeRioux or Jones is going to have to take out his keys and open the door. The lock is always fussy and takes a second to jimmy open. That’s your chance. You make a break for it and run like hell for that emergency door.”
“And then what?”
“Keep running,” she said, having finished unlocking both sets of handcuffs.
“And what if they catch us?” I asked as she turned to leave.
Her last instruction going back through the double doors was unequivocal: “Make sure they don’t.”
* * *
Ruthie and I began discussing the merits of this new plan and quickly agreed it was the worst we had ever heard. We also agreed the only thing it was better than was nothing at all, which had been our plan before.
“When we get out the door, I’ll run left, you run right,” I said. “Hopefully, they’ll only catch one of us.”
Ruthie nodded. Any further discussion was squelched when the double doors swung open and Officers LeRioux and Jones—Hightower and Baldy—came stalking through them.
“Hey, guys,” I started, “why don’t we—”
“How many times I got to tell you to shut the hell up?” Hightower growled. “You say one more word I’m busting up that other knee. And this time I’ll go for the front of the knee, not the back.”
Baldy Jones slid open the door to the cells. Ruthie and I stood there, frozen, uncertain, a couple of scrawny newspaper reporters well out of their weight class.
“All right, come on out, ladies,” Hightower said. “We’re going to take a little walk up to the interrogation room, ask you a few questions about all that dope we took off you. Let’s go, let’s go.”
At least he didn’t noticed that our cuffs were unlocked. Ruthie eased out of the cell first, and I limped out after him. As we walked toward the interrogation room, I kept telling myself there was no way they would get away with this. No one would believe that Ruthie and I had smuggled weapons into a police station or would know how to use them even if we had. What were they going to do, put metal shivs in our dead hands and claim we tried to stab them? Give themselves superficial wounds to make it look more convincing? It was absurd.
But to a certain extent, it didn’t matter. Sure, there would be an investigation into our deaths—the paper would put up a hell of a stink—but as long as the cops stuck to their stories, what would there be to contradict them? Ruthie and I would go down in history as a bizarre cautionary tale: a pair of dope-dealing newspaper reporters who got killed by the cops.
“Keep walking,” Baldy said, as we passed through the double door and were led upstairs and down a hallway. We took a left turn down another hallway. I could see the emergency exit at the end of it. My heart started pounding and, strangely, I felt the urge to urinate. I guess there’s something to the old saying, after all, about being nervous enough to pee your pants.
I limped a few more steps down the hallway until Hightower said, “Stop here.”
We had reached the interrogation room. I casually positioned myself so that neither cop was between me and the emergency exit and saw Ruthie do the same. The exit was perhaps thirty feet away, a distance I could cover in, what, a few seconds? Would that be fast enough?
Baldy Jones started going for his keys. Hightower was resting his hand on his gun, an ominous development. Was that just a reflex for him, or was he expecting trouble? Was the gun strapped in or was it loose? Could he draw it during those two seconds I was running down the hall?
Ruthie and I agreed that the moment the key touched the door, we would both make a break for it. I bent my legs to prepare for our mad dash down the hallway and glanced over at Ruthie, who returned my gaze with eyes that had doubled in size.
Then the lights went out.
This being an interior hallway—in a building where the windows had been bricked over decades ago—we were plunged into immediate and total darkness. There was not a shred of ambient light. Not even the pinprick of a single LED. It was like being in a mineshaft.
Hightower swore and Baldy uttered a panicked, “What the…?”
I heard the creaking of leather, like a gun being removed from a holster, and I dropped to the floor. If Hightower started firing in the dark, I wanted to be as small a target as possible. I began desperately crawling in the direction of the emergency exit—how long would it take to get there on my hands and knees?—when I heard a lot of shouting and slamming coming from the front of the building. No, maybe it was the back. Or maybe it was just all over. It was hard to tell.
I had traveled perhaps eight feet when I bumped into the far wall, which I used as a guide to keep going. Then the emergency door light kicked on, casting an orange-yellow hue on the hallway. I could see over my shoulder that Baldy Jones had grabbed Ruthie. The shouting and slamming was getting closer.
Hightower had been groping in the dark for me, never realizing I had gone low. But even with the dimness of the emergency lights, he couldn’t miss me crawling along the floor. And sure enough, from the way his body turned, I could tell he had locked onto me. As he swept his gun in a smooth arc in my direction, I tried to get my legs back underneath me to scramble away—at least it would give him a more difficult shot—though I was having trouble getting my bad leg to respond with the necessary urgency.
Then a flash blinded me and smoke filled my lungs. The world went yellow and gray and burnt-smelling. I closed my eyes and my mouth and tried to stop inhaling, too. But I had been breathing too hard. I couldn’t help but take gulps of air, even though I knew it was bad.
I was immediately consumed by what had to be the worst allergy attack in human history. Some combination of tears, sweat, and snot began pouring out of every opening on my face. Then, as if there wasn’t enough moisture in the mix, the building’s sprinkler system went off. I kept gasping for air that just wasn’t there. All the oxygen had left the planet, replaced by poison gas and spraying water.
It was pure misery, but even in all the confusion, I knew it was still preferable to being shot. At some point, my brain finally grasped the idea that someone had tossed tear gas, a flash-bang grenade, or something similarly loud, bright, and smoky into the hallway. I didn’t know whether this was a mission of mercy or just a different kind of offensive from a yet-unknown enemy, but I was struggling too hard to survive to make that much sense out of it.
I kept trying to get my eyes to unscrew, but every time I did there was just more stinging and, besides, even when I could force them to open more than a slit, I couldn’t see much. Between the tears and the sprinkler, it was like being underwater.
I felt someone—no, make that
two
someones—grab me by the armpits and the crotch. Out of instinct, I thrashed against it, but the action was fairly futile. The pepper spray or mustard gas or whatever the hell it was had taken the fight out of me. As I allowed myself to be carried along, I could only hope that one, it wasn’t Hightower and Baldy Jones doing the dragging, and two, the officers had been just as incapacitated by the smoke as I was.
Soon I was outside the building, not that I was sure how it happened. Through my watery eyes I could finally see that I had been seized by a pair of guys in gas masks that made them look like some kind of bug-eyed aliens. They carried me in the direction of two more bug-eyed guys, who each grabbed a side of my upper half and then dragged me to a spot of empty sidewalk, where they laid me facedown.
I was beyond resistance at this point—that gas packed an indescribable punch—and I actually relaxed as I felt my hands and legs being fastened by strips of plastic. After a lifetime of never once being handcuffed, it had now happened to me twice in one day. Suddenly I knew what it was like to be a character in
Fifty Shades of Grey
.
Then I was left alone. I tilted my head to the right and finally began to gain focus on the surreal scene unfolding around me. There were several handfuls of other people—some of them cops, others dressed as civilians—arrayed on the street and sidewalk around me, also facedown. I spied Ruthie, lying a few bodies away from me. Otherwise, none of them looked especially familiar.
Beyond all the prone figures was a small army of men in gas masks and dark commando gear. Their job was to accept victims from the smoky building. The commandos seemed to be intent on getting everyone out. They would leave the sorting of who was who—and who was on what team—to some later time.
I was starting to feel like I had been saved but still couldn’t figure out who my savior had been, how they knew where I was, or what had tipped them off to the idea that there was someone in need of saving.
Then, in the distance, I saw a man in a dark blue windbreaker with ATF in yellow letters. Then another. Then a guy with an ATF hat. Okay, so they were employees of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. I could imagine they were folks who wouldn’t take kindly to a group of cops selling guns to thugs. That might just be their kind of case.
Did they already know about red dot? Had they been keeping an eye on the precinct and then moved in when they realized something was amiss about Ruthie and me being dragged into the building?
At that point, I couldn’t guess how it had all come down. I just knew I was safe.