2500 Block, Fairmount Street. Criminal trespass and vandalism. Spivak’s House of Wicker. Wicker chewed and chopped chain-saw-style. Officers move silently into gray wicker haze, powdered with wicker dust, in awe of the sheer totality of wicker havoc.
1900 Block, Cypress Avenue. Illegal assembly. Demonstrators blocking access to public health clinic, refuse order to disperse. All available units dispatched for crowd control. Officers gathered at staging area, briefed on use-of-force policy, on arrest and intake procedures, then sicced on crowd. Officers stoked, fired up, ready to rhumba. Hand-to-hand maneuvers seemingly long forgotten — armlocks and choke holds, the supple choreography of baton work — all return facilely to muscle memory. Crowd control progresses smoothly. Officer [Shield #325] musses hair clobbering balky demonstrator. A scrawny little hank slips loose, nestles against her right cheek, framing the side of her face like an open parenthesis. A semaphore of possibility, officer [Shield #647] muses, spotting her while clobbering his balky demonstrator. Amid the tussle and heat of arrest and intake, she looks up, seeks him out, finds him. She smiles, waves shyly. From across the tactical field, he smiles, waves back, sticks out tongue. She is suddenly overcome, startled at how the sight of him affects her. It is not just love, or desire, but something profoundly less complex, as unadorned and simple as the Vehicle Code. Officer laughs, cries. Tearful and giddy, she whales on her demonstrator with what she realizes is joy in her heart. Demonstrators cuffed, processed, loaded onto County Transport Units. Assembly dispersed. Scene secured. Officers spent, pink and damp in the afterglow of crowd control. Cop Camaraderie ensues. Shirttails tucked, batons wiped down, cigarettes shared. Backs and butts slapped all around.
6700 Block, Coast Highway. Officers go to beach, park at overlook. Officers pooped, reposed. They do not speak. They sip double lattes, ponder view. A gash in the bruise-colored sky bleeds yellow. Sunshine leaks into the ocean, stains its surface with shimmering light. He looks over at her, notices a discoloration, a swelling on her left cheekbone. His hand reaches out, his fingers touch the wound, touch her. “You’re hurt,” he says. She smiles, whispers: “You should see the other guy.” They park their double lattes on dash, slip off their sunglasses, avert their eyes. They screw their faces against the jagged harshness of an unpolarized world, slip sunglasses back on. His hands reach for hers, their fingers clasp and enmesh, roil and swarm at the fourth finger of her left hand. Officers tug and pull, remove and park ring on dash. He reaches for her. She leans toward him; it is like falling. Officers fall. Afterward, they linger over their coffee. Wedding ring on dash glints in the shifting light, harmless as a bottle cap or a shiny old button, something a bird might snatch up. Officers watch a ball of sunlight flare up at earth’s edge like a direct hit. Officers assess scene, ascertain world to be beautiful.
2200 Block, Felicity Court. Domestic disturbance. Officers pull up, kill engine. They dawdle in Patrol Unit, fiddling with the mirrors and the radio, double-checking the parking brake. Officers sigh heavily, climb out, and assess scene. Garage door closed. Curtains in windows of home drawn. Officers walk up driveway, pick their way through the detritus of television set and washing machine. They knock on door, ring bell. No answer. Neighborhood quiet. Dogs next door quiet. Birds quiet. Everything, in fact, is quiet. The quiet of earplugs, of morgue duty, and of corridors at 3:00 a.m. The quiet before an alarm clock goes off. Officers backtrack down driveway, approach west side of house, move toward a gate in the fence that leads to backyard. They move gingerly across a saturated lawn, squishy beneath their feet. Soapy water oozes into the tracks they leave. Up ahead, against an exterior wall of house, a pile of freshly cut wood comes into view — one-by-four posts and whitewashed flatboards painted with black block letters. “LIFE” one of them reads. “MURDUR” reads another. Chain-sawed picket signs. Officers’ napes prickle, butts clench in autonomic response. They thumb the release tabs on their holsters, move toward gate. They lift latch, ease gate open. Above them, the sky clears and the sun breaks. The shadow of a distant airplane skims over them, glides across the lawn, disappears. Officers enter backyard. The back fence sags forward. Trellises and plant stakes list at crazy angles. A brick barbecue sits crumpled atop its sunken hearth slab. The deck along the west side of the house is a corrugation of collapsed planking. It is as if the earth here simply gave up, shrugged, and dropped six feet. Officers move along periphery of sinkhole toward the sliding patio doors that open onto deck. Their panes are shattered. The ground glitters with pebbles of safety glass. From within, cool air drifts out. And then they are hit, bowled over by a surge of vapors foul and thick — the redolence of mimosa clawing at their eyes and throats like some monstrous blossoming from somewhere inside the house. And then the noises. First, a loud muffled report — the only way to describe it. Then, rising from the basement — or from someplace deeper still — the robust glissandos of a chain saw, its motor throttling up and down, laboring mightily. And within this an indeterminate overtone — the cadence of voices, urgent and shrill. Shouting, or laughing. Or screaming. Officers unholster service revolvers, position themselves at either side of patio entry. They slip off their sunglasses, take this moment to let their eyes adjust to the dark inside. They look at each other. His eyes are dark brown, like coffee or good soil. Hers are gray, flat as lead except for the glint of a pearly chip in one iris. They do not speak. They love that they don’t have to say anything. Instead they reach down, check ammo pouches for extra clips, wipe palms on duty trousers. Eyes adjusted, they draw and shoulder their weapons. They brace their wrists, release their safeties, silently count three, and take a breath. Whereupon officers cross threshold, enter home.
Only Connect
Two men followed a third man up the street one night. His name was Bennett, and he had just left a party where the woman who’d invited him used him to flirt with somebody else. She worked with Bennett in the labs at the medical center. They were both researchers on the same projects, doing cutting-edge work in psychopharmacology, where the big bucks were. They made very good money, but her apartment was much nicer than his, and he wondered if she made more than he did. She lived on the northwest slope of Capitol Hill, in a secure building that was a hundred years old and meticulously restored. It had a lobby with thick, bloodred carpet and stamped copper panels on the ceiling, and a cage elevator that rattled and clanked pleasingly as it took you up. Her apartment had many windows, and they all looked out over Lake Union and the boats huddled in their slips, and at the Olympic range beyond. As the party progressed, dusk settled and you could watch the snow-drape on the mountains sparkle in the last light before sinking into shadows. You could watch the Space Needle brighten, shimmering and upright in the clear night. It was his first time in her apartment, and he liked it, the spectacular view and the tasteful and elegant minimalism of the decor, uncluttered and clean. He had hoped something would come of this invitation, that being invited by her might mean something. But she had a lot of friends, and the place was teeming with strangers. Bennett was born here, and although she had been hired less than a year ago, she knew more people than he ever did.
He had somehow ended up with her in a corner of her crowded kitchen. They were seated across from each other at a tiny breakfast table, and she was telling him about a trip she was planning over Christmas, a trek along the Inca Trail in Peru. He was asking her questions to keep the talk going, and she was answering them, when a man detached himself from a nearby clique, smiled briskly at Bennett, and leaned against the wall behind her, holding a beer bottle in his hands. Bennett recognized him. He was a popular barista at an espresso bar at the medical center. He was young, narrow and pale, with lank black hair that flopped into his eyes. He wore one of those expensive secondhand bowling shirts that you find in expensive secondhand clothing shops.