The Sticking Place Page 21

  Luke dropped the phone into his lap.

  Biletnikoff and help; those two words didn’t go together.

  44

  LUKE FOUND FRANCIE HOLDING COURT in a circle of tables in the One-Five-Three Club and sitting next to Andee Bradford, his former trainee. Luke knew Francie wasn’t part of her problem, but discomfort still wrinkled her forehead and showed the effort it took to try to fit in.

  A chorus of greetings interrupted Francie’s raucous story as Luke sat next to Hartson, who dispatched his current trainee to fetch Luke a beer.

  The trainee handed Luke a Coors and sat a little outside the circle. “Go ahead on,” Devree prodded Francie as Luke settled into his chair.

  Francie shifted nervously. “Anyways,” he went on, “I’m assigned to work the Heights this night because somebody’s called in sick. I get this radio call and, I’m not shitting you now, dispatch says, ‘Contact the woman about a stolen pork chop.’ So the lady tells me she went shopping earlier in the day and then got her hair done. She comes back later and finds somebody’s stolen her pork chop from her refrigerator.”

  Francie sipped his beer and bummed a cigarette from Devree.

  “So the lady goes sniffing around the hallway and smells a pork chop cooking. A woman in a nearby apartment’s stolen from her before, so she calls the police.

  “I knock on the other lady’s door and ask to be let inside. I go in the kitchen and sure enough, there’s a pork chop in the frying pan. I go back across the hall, bring the victim in, and hold what you might call a stove-top lineup, because I don’t have time to take pictures of other pork chops for a proper photo array.”

  Most everybody at the tables burst into laughter.

  “‘Can you ID this pork chop as the one you bought earlier today?’ I say to the lady, and she tells me ‘Sure, that’s the one, all right.’ Only I don’t feel too good about making a pinch, so I get them to agree to split the pork chop after its done cooking. I’m a regular fucking Solomon.”

  Francie puffed his cigarette and sat back in his chair, relishing the laughter around him.

  Luke took it all in, listening in his unique style of imparting motive and thought to others the way he used to listen to his father’s sermons as a kid.

  Francie reveled in the outward acceptance of his peers. His love for attention made him swallow what he really wanted to admit, that his wife had been right to leave him, that he’d been stupid when he got seduced by the adrenaline rush of police work. He’d discovered his cowardice too late, wanted to publicly apologize for abandoning Hartson with the PCP suspect and was shocked Hartson hadn’t spilled the beans, especially since he’d moved out of their apartment two days later.

  Francie wanted to declare himself an outcast in this company of brave people who did a job taking courage and patience and integrity; all qualities he’d discovered he lacked. He ruled the room with his laughter and his stories instead.

  “Anybody want to hear a good Biletnikoff story?” Devree asked.

  “Who’s Biletnikoff?” the trainee outside the circle wanted to know.

  “A Philistine,” Luke said.

  “What’s a Philistine?”

  “A Philistine is one of the unwashed masses you don’t know and therefore don’t like, or somebody you know well enough to hate his guts,” Luke said.

  “You mean an asshole,” Hartson said.

  The laughter was spontaneous and universal and Hartson downed the dregs of a scotch and soda as everyone took another sip of beer.

  “I’m minding my own business at the Plaza one day,” Devree began. “Biletnikoff pulls up and tells me to get in, hands me a stopwatch and tells me to time him. Without saying another word, he drives to Queen’s Circle, puts the car into park and tells me to stop the watch. ‘How much time did that take?’ he wants to know. ‘twelve minutes,’ I tell him. Then he says, ‘You remember the other day when I called you to bring me a ticket book up here?’ ‘Yes,’ I tell him. ‘I remember.’ ‘that took you fifteen minutes,’ he says. ‘three minutes longer than it took me just now. I want to know what happened to those three missing minutes!’

  “Can you fucking believe that? He actually says to me, ‘I want to know what happened to those three missing minutes,’ like the whole fucking universe revolves around his sorry ass. I should have told him I stopped to take a dump because it was more important than his stupid ticket book.”

  Luke sipped his beer and surveyed the laughing audience, settling his gaze on Hartson who fought the urge to admit drinking had cost him his family. He should set his drink down right now and go home to fight for his wife and kid.

  Luke knew Hartson didn’t denounce Francie as a coward because exposing him could be his salvation. The only way to redemption for your sins was for someone else to offer absolution. Hartson wanted to stand up and admit he was having an affair with Shimmer’s wife and the thought of it disgusted him. He asked Luke if he wouldn’t mind picking up another round of beers instead.

  Luke was happy to oblige.

  Shimmer intercepted him half-way across the room and told him he’d buy the next round. Everybody in the room stared in disbelief as he came back with a full tray of beers and sat in the middle of the circle.

  He wanted to say he’d emotionally abandoned his wife after their son drowned. That he couldn’t live with the knowledge a woman had died because he couldn’t kill her husband fast enough to save her. He needed to make things up to his wife and he needed to atone for his incompetence as a cop. It didn’t matter that nobody else blamed him for the woman’s death.

  He wanted to shout out he couldn’t bring himself to shoot Henreid because he wanted to die himself that night. He wanted to say it all, but he said none of it. “Say, did I ever tell you guys about the night I arrested Mr. Clean?”

  No. He hadn’t told them, and it was a damn good story, too. He relished the laughter that surrounded him and, for the first time in months, started enjoying the company of his compatriots. Luke Jones had saved his sorry life and it was about time he started doing something with it.

  It was Hartson’s turn to tell a story. He handed his trainee a twenty and dispatched him to fetch another round of beers.

  Hartson leaned forward and motioned for everyone to lean into the center of the circle. “This one’s about that one over at the bar,” he said and he whispered his story of how he’d taken his unsuspecting trainee to a silent burglary alarm and made him climb a ladder to check out the roof. “I took the ladder away and left the poor kid with no way down,” Hartson said.

  Everybody in the huddle started to laugh, except for Luke.

  “Wait, it gets better,” Hartson said. “He switches over to the tactical frequency and asks a unit with a trainee to come and help him. So I wait and order the trainee not to interfere. I want to see how resourceful my guy is. You know what I mean?”

  Everybody but Luke and Bradford nodded in appreciation. Luke wasn’t a fan of hazing of any kind and knew it still might make Bradford quit her career.

  “So what happened?” Devree asked.

  “As I’m about to put the ladder back up, I notice he’s standing on the edge of the roof. Before I can holler to stop, he jumps over to the telephone pole that must be six-feet away.”

  A peal of laughter filled the room.

  “It’s not funny,” Hartson said. “I thought the dummy’d break his neck.”

  Howls of laughter started again.

  Luke stood, went to the bar, bought a beer and handed it to the trainee as Shimmer hoisted a beer into the air.

  “Hey, Luke,” Shimmer said. “Quote us a little something from Shakespeare.”

  The request landed in the room like a concussion grenade.

  Luke stood dazed.

  “Go ahead and quote us some Shakespeare,” Shimmer repeated.

  Never one to miss out on an invitation like that, Luke bounded on to the bar and surveyed his audience, giving himself time to recover from Shimmer’s request. He wished
Denny were there and wanted to declare his regret over the part he’d played in Denny’s termination. He wanted to say Denny might still be around if only he’d learned to keep his mouth shut and play by the unofficial rule that senior officers and supervisors had the right to screw with rookies.

  He glared down at Francie, wanting to shout out his cowardice, but he knew stewing in the lingering acids of Francie’s regret was far worse. Shakespeare had gotten it right in Julius Caesar when he wrote, “Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.” Cowardice kept you in a perpetual state of hiding, in a secret place where self-hatred killed your soul over and over again. It was what Francie deserved.

  Luke looked down at Bradford, his academy classmate, wanting to denounce the rude behavior and sexual innuendos of some of the guys in the circle that had nearly made her resign. She was a good cop who should be left alone to do her job, but Luke had learned his lesson about meddling in the affairs of others.

  He wanted to trumpet his despair over killing Charles Henreid, but he knew he wasn’t going to say any of it. He decided on the perfect quotation for the absurdity of the occasion instead, a bit of gibberish from Polonius in Hamlet:

  To expostulate

  What majesty should be, what duty is,

  Why day is day, night night, and time is time,

  Were nothing but to waste night, day, and time.

  Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,

  And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,

  I will be brief...

  “Whoa, wait a minute,” Shimmer demanded.

  “What the fuck is that?” Francie asked.

  “You’re not making any sense,” Devree said. “Can’t you give us something that makes a little sense?”

  Hartson laughed an uproarious laugh. “You go get ‘em, Luke,” he said.

  “That’s just pure nonsense,” Shimmer chimed in again.

  “It’s a sui generis bit of nonsense,” Luke said, deliberately choosing a phrase they wouldn’t understand to underscore the absurdity of their situation.

  “Bullshit!” Shimmer shouted. “Can’t you say something that makes a little sense?”

  “All right,” Luke conceded, “but, I think I’ll go to London for that one.”

  Luke relished the confused expression on the faces looking up at him. “I mean Jack London,” Luke said before he spoke.

  If you suppress truth, if you hide truth, if you do not rise up and speak out in meeting, if you speak out in meeting without speaking the whole truth, then you are less true than truth.

  “Oh, for cripes sake,” Shimmer said. “What the fuck is that nonsense? Would you please get down from there?”

  Luke was speaking at their invitation and wasn’t ready to quit yet. Jack London had a little more left to say.

  Let me glimpse the face of truth. Tell me what the face of truth looks like.

  His audience pelted him with bottle caps, wadded up napkins and straws as Luke towered above them with a wry smile playing across his lips. “You guys asked for it,” he said.

  45

  THE DA’S OFFICE FINALLY SENT A LETTER to Chief Coleman declaring Luke’s shooting of Charles Henreid a “Justifiable Homicide.” The accompanying report exonerated Luke’s actions, but offered the opinion that Luke should have considered “other non-lethal options” before pulling the trigger.

  Luke never saw the letter or the report, but he did read about them in the San Diego Union newspaper he found on his doorstep. He knew they were the final impediments to full duty and wondered exactly which options that punk of an assistant DA had in mind.

  Just exactly who was right, he wondered. Was it Lieutenant Berend who’d implied that Luke should have shot sooner? Was it Shimmer and some of the others who hailed him as a hero? Or was it the assistant district attorney who’d probably never confronted real physical danger in his life?

  Luke picked up another account of the DA’s findings in the afternoon Tribune that sat on the table in the lineup room when he reported for work. “San Diego Police Officer Luke Jones,” it read, “has been cleared in the fatal shooting of Charles Henreid. The District Attorney’s office returned a finding of justifiable homicide. Jones shot and killed Henreid during a burglary in the Golden West Laundromat. Henreid, who was unarmed, died of multiple gunshot wounds.”

  There was a simple period at the end of the final sentence, but Luke could see the implied question mark hovering over the paper. It trumpeted doubt about whether Luke should have pulled the trigger and an accusation about a police officer’s needless shooting of an unarmed man.

  Luke tossed the paper onto the table.

  A familiar fist of pain squeezed the base of his head, exacerbating the ruthless headache that hadn’t relinquished its grip since the shooting. The same fist had squeezed his head in the Headless Horseman’s den and seized him as he spread the Professor’s ashes over San Diego Bay. It nearly blinded him when he told Denny it was best to resign.

  Luke knew he could wrestle the fist into submission. That he’d never give in to it. It would figure that out sooner or later and leave him alone.

  He sat through lineup, picked the local section up, rolled it into a cylinder, stuck it under his arm, walked into Biletnikoff’s office, and announced he needed a sick day.

  He’d submit to the pain this one and only time, and never again. “I have a headache,” he told Biletnikoff. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  Luke bought a fifth of Jack Daniels and a package of Garcia Y Vega cigars at the Gaslamp Liquor at Ninth and Market Streets, picked up a book of matches from the counter and headed for the G Street Pier where he sucked in a lungful of the stench of dead fish.

  He sat on the hood of his car, gazing at the super structure of an aircraft carrier with the number 64 emblazoned in enormous white lights at the North Island Naval Air Station. He gulped another breath of the putrescent air and walked to the brim of the pier, the toes of his boots teetering over the edge as he stared into the water’s blackness.

  Luke tore the plastic wrapping off his box of cigars, wadded it into a tight ball and pulled out a smoke. Holding it tight between his lips, he rolled the Tribune into a tighter cylinder and lit the match he used to set the newspaper alight before flaming the tip of his cigar. He held the Jack Daniels into the wind and spoke into the night. “If you can hear me, Professor,” he said, “say this one along with me. ‘I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world.’”

  The quotation came from Richard II and was the same one Luke and the Professor had shared the night Luke threw the Professor in jail. It wasn’t exactly a salute to a departed friend. It was an act of defiance. The Professor had deliberately thrown down a gauntlet the night of their ride-along. He’d made Luke’s life and job harder to endure. He’d sucked Luke into a meaningful friendship and demanded that he reach out to help others. Then he slapped away every effort Luke made to help him. Then he drank himself to death before he could help Luke figure out how to live with killing Henreid to save Shimmer.

  How could he “Protect and Serve” to please the Professor and live to tell about it? He had a job to do and he intended to do it.

  It was the best he could do right now, and the Professor could be damned.

  He took a puff from the cigar and gulped his Jack Daniels.

  A cold breeze whipped his face. He pulled his jacket collar around his throat, knocked the cigar’s ashes into the ocean and watched the newspaper burn.

  About the Author

  T.B. Smith served as a police officer for twenty-seven years with the City of San Diego and San Diego Unified School District Police Departments, retiring as a lieutenant in 2003, after being injured in an on-duty traffic accident. He’s a graduate of San Diego State University, where he studied English Literature and creative writing. He currently lives in Ashland, Oregon, where he enjoys attending the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

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  T. B. Smith, The Sticking Place