The Zone Read online

  He was too professional to say it, but I knew that losing an entire team would certainly not be giving his career any extra momentum. We made polite chit-chat, and he left to perform desperate damage control.

  The shooting team guys and the Rangers walked me through it; from them I learned my P230 had not jammed: I had emptied it. Goes to show how disorienting a firefight can be.

  Cooper, Stephen, and Sheila had not gotten a shot off, although Sheila had gotten her sidearm out of its holster. Pat had, like me, been alerted, and in fact had saved my life by blowing away Five, who had narrowly missed talking my head off with a shotgun; I had caught a couple pellets of the shot, but apparently Pat had shot him just as he was pulling the trigger, throwing him off just enough. Otherwise my brains, such as they are, would have been on the floor.

  Turns out Two wasn’t shooting at me, he was shooting at Pat; I was hit in the arm and knee by Four, who had a MAC-10. He had gotten Sheila, and likely clipped me on the side, and hit Pat twice, and definitely got me in the arm before he emptied the mag. Pat had put a couple in Four’s vest, but Two hit Pat twice until I got him. Four got another mag off, hitting me in the leg and Pat twice more.

  Meanwhile, the back up team had seen two armed guys closing in and had moved before I had hit the buzzer; they had their own firefight, with a guy from Patrol catching two in the vest and one in the jaw.

  I had distracted Four from finishing Pat by going for my P230; his burst missed, but splinters from the floor and fragments of shell jacket was what hit me in the face. I never came close to him with the .380s, but it held his attention long enough for Pat to reload and hit him four times in the legs as the back up team came through the door.

  Four made a furtive gesture, and was shot eleven times by two A-Crime guys, and bled out before the EMTs could get a good look at him. Ditto for Three, who found out Kevlar won’t stop an ice pick.

  It was no surprise to me that to learn that there was no meth, and never had been.

  My knee was in bad shape; the surgeon told me they had done spectacularly well, that I would walk again, and so forth, but I had visions of bedsores, addiction to pain pills, and medical retirement haunting me, and paid little attention. Turned out bed sores were not an issue, they had me in physical therapy before I was fully over the knockout gas, and that hurt so damned much I never even noticed the pain pills.

  Of course, I had my family to take my mind off my problems. Turns out that instead of visiting dear old Dad after said Dad took a variety of wounds in the pursuit of the common good, my son decided to buy some crack, and despite being raised around police officers, purchased it virtually at the elbow of a narc. Then pulled a box cutter on said narc.

  So my loving wife came storming down to the recovery room demanding that I pull some strings and get the charges drastically reduced, as the moron was sitting in Central Booking with a six-figure bond. I made a couple calls, and told her the Chief’s kid would have trouble beating an Aggravated Assault on a Public Servant, much less that of a Sergeant who had just been part of an operation which embarrassed the Narcotics Division. I had just enough juice to keep it out of the press, and to get him into a minor offender’s pod in the jail.

  Then I flatly refused to sign mortgage papers to raise the bond, figuring that a taste of the baby tank might convince the idiot that prison would not be fun, and got served with divorce papers. Four days after getting shot.

  She wanted it final fast so she could get the spawn out of lockup, and I was too pissed off to delay things, and for once my ‘hero’ status helped a bit; I was living in a therapy facility when the judge signed on the line. My shyster was instructed to defend my pension to the death, so she got the house (paid for), her car, my truck, the daughter’s Kia, half of the savings, all the furniture, her travel agency, the whole nine yards. I got my pension untouched, no child support, my clothes, guns, and half our meager savings, a chunk of which ended up being used to pay my attorney.

  Two guys I was in Patrol with went to my ex-home and got my effects, which one kindly stored for me. My son got bailed out, no thanks to dear old Dad. I got to try to rebuild my leg without a home to go to when the PT place cut me loose. Not that I really wanted to go home, but it pissed me off not having a choice.

  As expected, the Grand Jury cleared us of any wrongdoing; Sly’s family got a quiet settlement from the City and a citizen’s award in public. They propped me and Cooper up in a conference room with the back-up officers, one of whom still had his jaw wired up, and hung medals on all of us, plus Pat’s, Stephen’s, and Sheila’s next of kin. I was promoted to Lieutenant (made easier by Cooper’s name quietly dropping from the list, and the unplanned retirement of a Narcotics Lieutenant and Captain), and speeches were made. Cooper was medically retired the next day.

  My uncle, my only blood relative, dropped dead a week before I left PT; he left me everything, which wasn’t a lot and saw me completely devoid of any blood ties. Pretty much any family ties, for that matter, as my daughter wasn’t speaking to me and my son was pretty much missing in action since birth.

  I took a room in a rent-by-the-week hotel because I couldn’t deal with finding an apartment at the moment; it was two block’s limp from Admin 2, where I was spending my days, and I needed the exercise. I was assigned a light duty job, and probated my uncle’s will in my spare time. He left me a pawn shop he used to run, and a double-wide on a rented plot; it cost me the cash portion of my inheritance to bury him and have the trailer emptied out & hauled to the dump.

  Up to my sixteenth anniversary I got up every weekday and gimped to work, where I monitored communications division paperwork and instant messaging, which was actually a viable job, albeit dull and isolated. On my sixteenth anniversary date I got a party, a watch, plaque, retired officer shield & ID, and a hearty farewell. They cut me loose; my knee was recovering, but I would never be fit for street work.

  The Sergeant’s and Lieutenant’s Association had a beer bash weekend, and about twenty off-duty cops spent a weekend gutting and re-doing the apartment over my uncle’s pawn shop; the City even hooked up the utilities for free. The Patrolmen’s Association had a group do the store level.

  I moved in the day after the department tossed me out. It was supposed to be a fresh start, but it felt more like crawling into a hole to die after being gut-shot.

  I try not to think about things, because none of it makes any sense, but the little girl at the next picnic table had a brand new box of Crayolas and a roll of butcher paper and was having a fine old time. Her mother was sipping a soda and periodically admiring the artwork; she had glanced at me several times, but did not seem to be overly concerned. It was a pleasant day and the park wasn’t known for trouble. I was unshaven but clean, and my jeans, photo-hog’s vest and tee shirt were unwrinkled and laundered. If she knew I had four guns on me it would have been different, but people rarely really pay attention.

  The damn crayons set me off; usually I can avoid thinking about things for hours, but it can sneak up on me, especially at night when I can’t sleep. The doctors prescribed sleeping pills which I didn’t fill, and suggested shrinks which I declined. I’m toughing it out-I am alive, the only one from the House (which is how I think of that fiasco: the House) that is still drawing breath since Cooper shot himself. I try to rationalize the chain of events, and part of me knows that my marriage was just waiting for one more piece of melodrama before it imploded, and that I was hardly the first officer let go for physical disability. After all, they waited until I was healed up before they cut me, and it wasn’t like I was thrown out onto the street: I got the full honors send-off, and a medical retirement worth fifty per cent of Lieutenant’s pay for the rest of my life, full medical and dental, and I can draw my regular pension at age sixty. I draw SSI, and the State will let me have four years at any State university, books included, for free.

  But I can’t make it stick. I can’t get the logic to win. I can’t deal with starting completely over at for
ty-two. I can’t help feeling betrayed by family and profession, can’t help feeling utterly diminished by the loss of my position. I went from Police Sergeant to…nothing. I still can carry, and the retired badge is heavy and looks real. But its not, and I’m not. I’m surplus to requirements, unnecessary, useless, empty, invisible.

  I know what I’m feeling is illogical, but there it is. Sitting in the park eating a burger and watching the kids, wandering around at all hours is what I do now. Pushups and situps and movies. No phone, the TV only connected to a DVD player and an old VHS unit. Ignore everything beyond line of vision. Take it one breath at a time. Never go near the PD buildings, do not think of the framed photos of my friends and team-mates hanging in the lobby alongside all the other officers who caught a violent end-of-shift.

  My son is doing ten years in Huntsville, after a lengthy and ultimately futile legal battle; I made a few calls and insured that he was in a minimum security facility with first-timers rather than general population, as the son of a decorated police officer would have been in trouble in the yard. My ex lost her business to the expense and distraction of his legal defense, and is working for someone now. My daughter is pregnant and the father is not going to step up in terms of support. Can’t, really, being a teenager who majored in text-messaging.

  That really doesn’t touch me much; his going to prison was a reality I had accepted long ago, just as my daughter’s chances of being a welfare mother were likewise pretty solid. That my ex would allow the two to destroy everything she had worked so hard to build wasn’t a terrible shock, either. My failings as a parent, and my children’s shortcomings were things that I had accepted a long time ago.

  Maybe if I had been more optimistic about my kids’ chances in life it might have made a difference in how they turned out, but I doubted it. The girl wasn’t dumb, but she had the same depth of personality as a mirror. Pretty and in-style was the limits of her ambition, and the insular world of school pecking orders were her horizons. Too careless to use birth control, too enamored of herself to weigh the sincerity of praise from others, too focused on the moment to think about tomorrow.

  A fresh start- that was how someone suggested I look at it. It was true enough: I was stripped of home, career, family, wife; my team was dead, my body was impaired, and I was burdened with guilt about not dying with my officers, about not John-Wayne-ing our way out of the trap. About not simply telling Narcotics to piss off and going home.

  It was surreal; I could go by my ex-home and there it was, nothing really changed except the fact that I no longer had a key or the right to go inside. The PD was the same way: retired badge or not, I had to go in the lobby like everyone else, wait for an escort, intrude into the busy work day of others when once my arrival meant they had to pay attention. I could go in, but I never did. My team was gone, buried under a flag and volleys and the wail of bagpipes, with politicians solemnly praising attributes which didn’t really matter in those busy seconds in the House. Everything was changed, and all because we had done the job they hired us to do.

  Cooper saved my life in the wrecked aftermath: the news of his suicide reached through the other crap and back-handed me hard. We had exchanged a few mumbled awkward phrases before the Grand Jury and at the award ceremony, but had not really spoken at all. I knew he was hurting bad: the deal was his brainchild, and he had the added burden of having gone down without getting a shot off. Police officers often envision death, but it is the heroic sort, going out blazing away. To be maimed without even firing back is an unspoken disgrace, even though it is usually unavoidable. Cooper was taken out fast based purely on where he had been standing-his role had put him in the epicenter of the kill zone.

  His death had struck a spark of pride within me: it made me realize how close I was slipping off the cold gray edge. The shambles of my life was bad, terrible, but to let it drive me to suicide was too much. It would mean that the House killed me, and I was the last of the team still standing; if I went down, then we lost. That didn’t make sense even to me, but it was still true, down in the bone. Some things don’t have to make sense to have weight: I had to survive, because to do otherwise would let the others down. Cooper had had the advantage: he wasn’t the only survivor, but I was, and that closed the suicide option.

  So I wander around, watch documentaries, read my history books, glower at the world, and speak to no one. It is a sham of an existence, but it deprives the House of a win, and that is reason enough.

  Chapter Two

  The strangeness started for me on a Thursday; ‘strangeness’ is an unwieldy term, but it was the best choice because I wasn’t completely sure if the world was getting strange, or I was. That’s a real danger after the emotional roller-coaster I had been through and the long gray glide through life that followed: too much time alone can take small problems and make them large.

  That fact in mind had moved me to develop habits in this broken-mirror retirement of mine, and lacking any outside structure for my days I created my own, a mix of self-discipline and inclination. Although by nature a night owl I was careful to remain mostly oriented to a daytime schedule, as I suspected that operating at night might be similar to drinking heavily: a comfort at first, but doom in the long run. Habits to control my day, lists to direct them, and a journal to serve as a point of perspective were the tools I employed in my sanity program. Some days they helped.

  Being a night-owl was out, but I still didn’t get up until around eleven because I hated mornings, and slept best when in sunlight when I managed to sleep at all. One of my self-imposed rules was to use my entire place rather than just live on the surprisingly comfortable sofa in front of the TV, and so I woke up in my bedroom. My place, once my uncle’s pawn shop, was a cement-framed brick building built in 1920. According to the cornerstone with the date it had initially been a fine jewelers, and they built it like a safe, a two-story rectangle with a slightly pitched roof hidden behind brick ramparts (I’m not kidding, they even had the little notches, stylized archer fighting positions). The second story was an apartment, just a small bedroom, full bath, and kitchenette; my uncle had used it for storage, but the beer bash weekend had resulted in new insulation, new drywall, and a base coat of paint in ivory, ready to accept paneling, wallpaper, or paint. Still ready, because I had never bothered to decorate at any level; even in my bachelor days I hadn’t been one for nesting.

  My bedroom had an Army cot with a pillow and poncho liner, a beige plastic clothes hamper, a particleboard dresser from Target and a beat-up student’s desk I had brought from home and which I used to set stuff on, mostly guns. There was a window centered in the long wall; I normally liked sunlight while I slept, but I had tacked a sheet over it because the bars made it feel like jail. The window had iron bars dating from the days as a fine jewelers, good solid metal set into brickwork. The bedroom and bath were separated by a short hallway which ended in a iron ladder bolted to the bare brick wall leading to a steel hatch in the ceiling that opened to the roof; I kept a gas grill up there along with a lawn chair, the sort that is aluminum tubes and green woven nylon. Next to the ladder was an alcove with a stacked washer/dryer, the kind they put in apartment closets.

  Morning routine called for some basic exercises, shower, and clean clothes (tee shirt, running shorts); I shaved about every third day unless there was some reason to look clean-cut. For the first time in my adult life I had no regulations controlling my appearance, but I was too old a dog to learn new tricks-my hair was in the same buzz cut it had been since Basic Training.

  My kitchen was small, tan wood-pattern counters and white cupboards, a stainless-steel fridge, and a built-in booth ‘breakfast nook’ with a processed wood table and maroon vinyl on the booths. I had a stove (my microwave and the grill on the roof did the real cooking), a double sink, and not much cupboard space, but that was all right because I ate off plastic and paper on the occasions I made meals that did not cook in their own container. A pop tart and a juice box made up breakfas
t, eaten leaning against the fridge, and I headed downstairs to start my day.

  The ground level was wide open, divided into two parts by a load-bearing interior wall that split the floor space into two-thirds and one-third. The big area was now my living area with my sofa, milk-crate coffee table, big-screen TV, entertainment center, a small fridge, a multi-use gym, a treadmill, and a couple free-standing bookcases from Target that held my books, video collection, and a boom-box from my uncle’s leftover stock. The floor was bare concrete, the walls primed and undecorated.

  The only window on the ground floor had been a big display window next to the front door, but it had been closed off with cinderblocks with internal rebar and concrete fill when my uncle opened his pawn shop. The front door was ballistic plastic between black sheets of expanded metal mesh in a strap-iron frame and hung on peg-and-loop hinges set deep enough into the concrete door frame to foil even the best man-portable ram-Uncle had not been interested in burglary. I had taped butcher paper to the inside for privacy, although the two sheets of mesh didn’t line up so there really wasn’t much visibility anyway.