“I do, I always have. You get the cover you earn.”
I tapped my badge with my index finger, hard and angry. “This means I get the cover whether you think I’ve earned it or not. If one of us needs backup, you give us backup, damn it, regardless of whether or not we pee standing up!”
He moved in closer, the flush in his face still riding high, and I was sure I could feel the heat coming off him. The muscles in my biceps were trembling from the sudden shift to fight-or-flight, and the tension in my voice was matched by the anger in his.
“A lot can happen on a call,” Morrison said to me. “A lot can happen, things can get out of control real quick. You could find yourself on the ground before you know it, wondering where your cover’s at. Any backup is better than no backup at all.”
“You’re threatening me?” I didn’t know whether to be incredulous or outraged. “Honest to God, Morrison, are you threatening me in front of two witnesses?”
Morrison dropped the letter at my feet, not looking away from my eyes. “No, Officer Hoffman, I would never do that. I’m just telling you and your lady friends how it is. How you might want to remember to be careful. A lot can happen. A lot can happen.”
Then he turned and walked off, leaving the three of us standing by our vehicles, none of us too eager to go on patrol.
I GAVE IT a lot of thought, and in the end, it came down to this: one of us would have to go.
It wasn’t going to be me.
“JESUS CHRIST, TRACY, are you out of your mind?” Sophie asked. “You’re talking about committing a crime, here. You’re talking about committing a crime against a fellow officer.”
It was four in the morning, the world dead quiet, with a light fog coming up from the river. We were in the lot outside the 7-Eleven on Greeley, on the edge of Sector 541, two days after Morrison had – as far as I was concerned – threatened all our lives. Jen and I had both called 10-81, then I’d used a landline to call Sophie in her car. She’d been patrolling 542, Grid 87655 on Swan Island, which was the largest patrol grid in the North and covered most of the industrial park and docklands along this part of the Willamette. It was a lonely grid to ride alone, especially late at night, especially when you weren’t sure about your backup.
“He’s no fellow officer of mine,” I said. “He was supposed to be second shift until the next rotation. You know what he did after his little speech to us the night before last? He traded shifts with Jarrel. I’ve called for cover twice tonight, each time he’s been the first one to respond.”
Jen blew on the coffee in the cup in her hands. She’d gone with the jumbo size, and it made her look even smaller by comparison. “He responded to that alarm I had on Buffalo earlier. Never got out of his car. He’s serious, he’s willing to let one of us get hurt, or worse.”
“It was a false alarm,” said Sophie.
“Like he had a way of knowing that.”
“So document it!” Sophie snapped. “Bring it to the commander!”
“And how’s that going to help?” Jen shot back. “It was just him and me, Sophie! It’s going to be my word against his, I’ve got no way of proving it. Even if he admitted to staying in his ride, it wouldn’t amount to anything, he’d excuse his way out of it.”
Sophie appealed to me. “He’s going to screw up. Guy like him, he’s going to make a mistake eventually, we’ll catch him on it then.”
“I’m not willing to wait,” I said. “I won’t speak for you guys, but for me, I can’t let this continue. I go on patrol, I’m more nervous than I was on my first tour as a rookie. My stomach’s killing me, I’m losing sleep, this is eating my life.”
“You too?” Sophie looked surprised. “Seriously?”
“I can’t keep anything down,” I admitted.
“Wish that was my problem.”
Jen snorted.
“God,” Sophie said after almost half a minute of silence. “God, if it goes wrong, Tracy, we could all end up going down for it. I don’t want to go to prison.”
“He’d have to bring charges,” I said. “He’ll never do that. Not in a million years.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m counting on it.”
Jen blew on her coffee again. “That’s not the part that worries me.”
“No?”
She met my eyes. “He does carry a weapon, Tracy.”
“So do we,” I told her.
IT TOOK ANOTHER week before the stars aligned and everything was right. Sophie went off duty for three days, and Jen moved from third shift to second, but Morrison traded again, this time with Bowen, staying on third shift with me. It shouldn’t have surprised me; he’d identified me as the ringleader, it was natural that I’d draw the generous portion of his ire. That week, it seemed like every time I called for cover, he was the first to respond to dispatch, and more often than not, he was the cover that dispatch sent to back me up.
The night I was assigned to Sector 521, Morrison pulled it as well, both of us in Grid 88090. I called Jen from the car on my mobile as soon as I went in service.
“Tonight,” I told her. “Call it in by Germantown after three.”
“I’ll let Sophie know.”
“You good for this?”
“Don’t ask me that,” Jen said, and hung up.
AT SEVENTEEN MINUTES past three in the morning, dispatch came over the radio with a report of a suspicious vehicle off the side of Germantown Road, asking if there was a unit nearby that could check it out. I’d been waiting on the call, and I jumped on it, told dispatch that I was in the area and on the way. Dispatch confirmed.
Germantown Road is a long and winding two-lane that climbs up from the west side of the river into the West Hills, through what remains of the forest that once dominated all of Portland. It was dark and it was quiet, and it was exactly the kind of place where drivers who had had too much to drink either wrapped their cars around trees or managed to find a spark of sense and pulled over to sleep it off. The call, in and of itself, wasn’t anything out of the ordinary.
It took me a little more than four minutes to find where Jen had parked the pickup truck off the shoulder, and that entire time, I didn’t see any other vehicles on the road. The truck was a blue-and-white Ford that belonged to Jen’s brother-in-law, a plumber from Beaverton who’d married her youngest sister. As I came to a stop, Jen and Sophie climbed out of the cab. They were each wearing civvies, jeans and boots, Jen with a heavy black-and-red flannel and a watch cap, Sophie with a navy-blue sweatshirt, the hood up. Sophie had the camera, the little digital recorder she’d bought with the money we’d pooled together.
I switched the spotlight on, angling down toward the road, before getting out of the car. The bounce from the pavement threw illumination out to maybe twenty feet, enough that visibility wouldn’t be a problem. Both women moved to join me in the puddle of light, Sophie handing over the camera. I switched it on, lined up a close-up of Jen.
“Go,” I said.
“My name is Officer Jennifer Schaeffer,” Jen said, and then gave her badge number.
I put the camera on Sophie.
“I’m Officer Sophie Gault,” she said, and gave her badge number as well.
I turned the camera on me, lining up the shot as best I could.
“I’m Officer Tracy Hoffman,” I said, and, like the rest, rattled off my badge number. Then I added, “It’s approximately half past three in the morning, Thursday, September twenty-seventh. We’re standing on Northwest Germantown Road, maybe a mile and a half east of the Last Chance Tavern.”
I stopped recording and handed the camera back to Sophie, who took it without a word.
“I’m going to call it in,” I said. “We’re ready for this?”
Sophie and Jen both nodded.
I went to the car and killed the spot, watching as Sophie climbed back into the truck, this time getting behind the wheel. Jen had already disappeared into the darkness. I used the handset to call dispatch to tell them that I’d found the vehicle, then used the laptop in the car to log the stop and to run the pickup’s plates. When the computer kicked back that the vehicle was clean, I called that in as well, and then added that I could see one occupant in the vehicle, male, apparently asleep. Then I requested a covering officer to join me before making contact.