Cops and Robbers

Joe

I drove the squad car down Columbus Avenue to a Puerto Rican grocery near 86th Street. I pulled in to the curb there and said to Lou, “Why don’t you get us a coke?”

“Good idea,” he said. He was a young guy, twenty-four years of age, his second year on the force. He wore his hair a little too long, to my way of thinking, and I almost never saw him without razor cuts all over his chin. But he was all right; he was quiet, he minded his own business, and he had no bad habits in the car. At one time or another I’ve had them all, the farters and the nose-pickers and the ear-benders and everything else. Lou wasn’t the good friend that Paul was, but I have done a lot worse.

I’d picked a Puerto Rican store because it would take him longer in there to buy two cokes than in a regular store. The little Puerto Rican groceries all over town are filled with men and women, all of them four feet tall, most of them sitting on the freezer case, all of them yammering away at top speed in that language they claim is Spanish. Before anybody can hit a cash-register key and take your dollar and give you your change, he has to yell louder than everybody else for a minute or two, to make sure he’s got his point across. Then, with your change in his hand, he thinks of the clincher argument and starts to yell again. So I was going to have all the time I needed.

I’d switched off the engine before Lou got out of the car. I watched him crossing the sidewalk in the sunlight, hitching his gunbelt, and once he was inside the store I opened my door, stepped out, went around to the front of the car, lifted the hood, and removed the distributor cap. Then I shut the hood again, and got back behind the wheel.

We had a heat wave starting. It wasn’t eleven in the morning yet, and already the temperature was almost ninety. From the feeling of my shirt-collar on the back of my neck, the humidity was up over the top of the scale. A hell of a day to be at work.

Hell of a day for a parade, too. They wouldn’t call it off, would they?

No. The Wall Street ticker-tape parade is a tradition, and traditions don’t care about the weather. They’d have their parade.

And Tom and me, we’d get our two million.

Lou came out with the two cans of soda. He got into the car, handing me mine, and said, “They sure do like to talk.”

“They got more energy than I do,” I said. “In this heat.”

We popped the tops, and the both of us drank. I was in no hurry for the next step. I scrunched down in the seat a little, putting my face over by the open window, looking for a breeze. There wasn’t any.

“It’s too hot for crime,” Lou said. “A nice lazy day.”

“It’s never too hot for crime,” I asked.

“I’ll bet you,” he said. “I’ll bet you there isn’t one major crime in this city today. Not before, say, four o’clock this afternoon.”

Talk about a sure thing. I almost took him up on it, except I didn’t want him remembering the conversation afterward and starting to wonder why I’d been so eager to take his money. But talk about a lock!

What I did, I said, “What about crimes of passion? A husband and wife get mad at each other, they’re irritated anyway because of the heat, and pop, one of them goes for the butcher knife.”

“All right,” he said, conceding the point. “Except for that kind of thing.”

“Oh,” I said, “now you’re making exceptions. No major crime, except this kind and that kind and the other kind.” I grinned at him, to show him I was kidding and that he shouldn’t get sore.

He grinned back and said, “I notice you don’t want to take the bet.”

“Gambling’s illegal,” I told him. “Except OTB.” I straightened up and took another swig of soda and said, “Time to move on. We got an hour before we’re off duty.”

“At least when we’re moving there’s a breeze,” he said.

“Check.”

I hit the ignition key, and of course nothing happened. “Now what?” I said.

Lou gave the key a disgusted look. “Again?” he said. Because this would be the third time in a month we’d had a car break down on us; which was what had given me the idea.

I fiddled with the key. Nothing. “I told them they didn’t fix it,” I said.

“Well, shit,” Lou said.

“Call in,” I told him. “I’ve had it.”

While he called in to the precinct, I sat there on my side of the car looking long-suffering and drinking my coke. He finished and said, “They’ll send a tow truck.”

“We ought to drive a tow truck,” I said.

He looked at his watch. “You know how long they’ll take to get here.”

“Listen,” I said. “We don’t both have to hang around. Why don’t you shlep on back to the station and sign us both out?”

“What, and leave you here?”

“It doesn’t matter to me,” I said. “No crap. There’s no need us both being stuck here.”

He wanted to take me up on it, but he didn’t want to look too eager about it, so I had to persuade him a little more. Finally he said, “You really don’t mind?”

“I got no place to go anyway.”

“Well... Okay.”

“Fine,” I said. And, as he was getting out of the car, I said, “Be sure to sign me out. I won’t go straight back.”

“Will do,” he said. He climbed out to the sidewalk, bent to look in the car at me, and said, “Thanks, Joe.”

“You’ll do the same for me next time.”

“Yeah, and there will be a next time, won’t there?”

“Count on it,” I said.

He laughed, and shook his head, and shut the car door. I watched him in the rear-view mirror as he walked away; around the corner and out of sight.

I sat there almost half an hour before the tow truck showed up. They use them all the time in midtown these days, towing the tourists’ cars away. But this one finally got there, and the two guys got out of it, and one of them said to me, “What’s the problem?”

“It won’t start, that’s all.”

He gave the car a squint, like he was a doctor and this was the patient. “I wonder why.”

That’s all I needed, an amateur mechanic. All the towman is supposed to do is tow the car off to where it can be fixed. I said, “Who knows? The heat maybe. Let’s take the thing in and get it over with.”

“Keep your shirt on,” he said.

“I don’t want to,” I said. I looked at my watch. “I’m off-duty in fifteen minutes.”

So they put the hook on the front, and I sat behind the wheel of the squad car, and they towed me over to the police garage on the West Side, over near the docks. That block is practically nothing but Police Department, with police warehouses on the north side and the garage in the middle of the block on the south side. The garage is a sprawling red-brick building, three stories high, with ramps inside so you can drive all the way up to the roof. It’s an old building, with black metal window frames, and I’ve heard it was once used to stable police horses. I don’t know if that’s true or not, I was just told it one time.

Extending westward from the garage to the far corner is a fenced-in area full of patrol cars and emergency vehicles and paddywagons and even a bomb-squad truck, looking like a big red wicker basket. Most of those vehicles are junk, and are kept around simply so that the mechanics can cannibalize parts off them to keep clunkers like the car I was sitting in more or less in running order.

Extending eastward from the garage to the corner are three or four more warehouse buildings, partly owned or leased by the Department, and partly civilian. About five or six years ago somebody found a load of slot machines in one of those buildings, down in the basement. Nobody ever figured that one out.

The block is one-way, and runs west to east, and both curbs were lined with police vehicles, most of them not working right now. The entrance to the garage was also clogged with vehicles, and more of them were parked on the sidewalk between the front of the garage and the cars parked at the curb. This is a block that cabdrivers avoid like the Black Death, because you can get stuck in a traffic jam here forever, and which civilian driver is going to honk at a traffic jam caused by the Police Department?

Like the jam we caused right now. The tow truck came down the one open lane in the middle of the street, and stopped in front of the garage. I looked in the rear-view mirror to see if we were blocking anybody behind us, but with the front end of the car up in the air all I could see was a rectangle of blacktop directly behind me. I didn’t much care anyway, one way or the other. If somebody was behind us, tough.

A mechanic came wandering out of the garage with a clipboard in his hand. He was a colored guy, short and heavy-set, wearing police trousers and a sleeveless undershirt. It was a filthy undershirt. He walked around the tow truck and came ambling down to the squad car, and said to me, “Problems, Mac?”

“Won’t start,” I said. “Dropped dead on me.”

“Give it a try,” he said.

Now, that was stupid. Did he think we would have gone through all of this, dragging this car downtown on a hot day like this, without first having given it a try. But that was what they always said, every time, and there was no point arguing with them. I gave it a try, and all it did was click. I spread my hands and said, “See?”

“Can’t do anything with it today,” he said.

“I don’t care,” I said. “I’m off-duty two minutes ago. My partner went on in already.”

He sighed, and got his clipboard and a pencil ready. “Name?”

“Patrolman Joseph Loomis, Fifteenth Precinct.”

He wrote that down, then went around to the back of the car to copy down all the appropriate numbers. I waited, knowing the routine because I’d been through it too many times already, and when he came back I already had my hands ready to take the clipboard before he started extending it to me. “John Hancock,” he said, and I nodded and took the clipboard and signed my name in the line where it said Signature.

I handed him the clipboard back, and he turned and waved it at the driver of the tow truck. “Put it down there somewhere,” he said, and waved toward the far end of the block.

The truck started forward with a jerk, and a second later so did the squad car. It snapped my head back, but not very much. I held onto the steering wheel for balance, and out of habit, and we rolled on down the block. The mechanic stood where he was until we went by, and the look he gave the car was weary and irritated.

The nose of the squad car bobbed a little as we moved, as though I was in a speedboat. The front being angled up so high gave the same idea, and all of a sudden I remembered a summer vacation when I was a kid, maybe ten or eleven, and the whole family went up in the Adirondacks somewhere for a week. We rented a cabin on a lake. I mean, near the lake; you had to walk down this dirt path between two other cabins to get to the water, and I can still remember the way those stones felt under my bare feet. And there was a rich man there that owned a house at the other end of the lake, a white house bigger than the house I lived in back home in Brooklyn, and he had a speedboat. Red and white. He gave me a ride once, two other kids and me. We put on these orange life vests and sat in the back seat, and when the boat started up I was scared out of my mind. We went like a bat out of hell, and the front was up so high I couldn’t see where we were going. But at the same time, it was really great; the wind and the noise and the spray, and the shore being so far away. Afterwards, remembering it while safe on dry land, it was even greater, and I spent the rest of that week wondering why we weren’t rich, too. Rich was obviously a better thing to be, so why weren’t we? That’s the way kids think.

I hadn’t remembered that for maybe twenty years.

There was a free space against the curb down near the corner. They stopped the truck and I got out of the car to watch them jockey it into place. I looked at my watch when they were finishing up, and it was ten after twelve. Plenty of time.

The driver of the tow truck said, “You want a lift back to the station?”

I almost said yes, I almost forgot the situation that much. But I caught myself in time and said, “No, I’ll walk.”

“Up to you.”

I gave them a wave and they drove off, and I watched them go. Sometimes I amaze myself. Could it be this whole business still wasn’t real to me, that I could forget it that easy? I’d damn near gotten into that truck to ride back to the station with them, just as though this was any other day and I didn’t have anything else on my mind at all. Amazing. Shaking my head, I turned and walked over to Eleventh Avenue and headed south.

My role now was just to walk around for about ten minutes. One of the secondary advantages of pulling this caper in uniform is the fact that a cop is the only guy on earth who can stand around a street corner loitering and not attract any attention. It’s his job to loiter. Anybody else, somebody’s likely to say, “Who’s the guy on the corner? What’s he up to?” But not a cop.

I’m surprised criminals don’t pull all their jobs wearing the blue.

After ten minutes, I headed back around to where I’d left the car. Now, who’s going to look twice at a cop doing something to a patrol car? I opened the hood, put the distributor cap back on, got behind the wheel, started the car, and headed down to where I was supposed to meet Tom.