The Blue Religion

Contact and Cover by Greg Rucka

When it was my turn, it was a son of a bitch coming at my head with a bottle of Widmer Brothers Drop Top Amber Ale while two of his drunken friends cheered him on.

The drunk swung from the outside, sidearm style, like he was throwing a slider at the plate. If he’d been swinging it like a bat, I’d have been able to step back and out of the way. But the guy went with the changeup and at the last second released the bottle from his hand. It hit me just below the left eye, high on the cheek, shooting pain through the bone and bursting light through my head.

I didn’t drop. I staggered, but I did not drop, no matter what Morrison told his buddies later. I fell back against the car, sure, and I could hear the drunk calling me a bitch, and it sounded like he was at the bottom of a nearby well when he did it. My vision was spinning out of control, beer somehow up my nose and down my shirt all at once. I needed a hand on the spotlight to keep from going down, but in the end, I kept my feet.

Which turned out to be a very good thing, because when I finally found my vision again, what I was seeing was the drunk with a fresh bottle, this one unopened, winding up for another pitch. I lurched out of the way, shouting for Morrison to back me up. Even though I was slow and sluggish, the drunk was worse because he was a drunk. The shot missed, the bottle exploding against the side of my cruiser.

The drunk’s friends had stopped cheering, maybe realizing that they’d graduated from drunk and disorderly to assaulting a police officer. I was swearing at both Morrison and the drunk, but the drunk was the only one answering me. Apparently, I reminded him of his ex-wife. He didn’t like her very much either.

My stick was still on my belt, along with all my other non-lethals, but I just reached out and met the back of his neck with one hand, and the back of his right knee with my foot. He didn’t know I was coming, and the takedown worked just the way it was supposed to. He hit the parking lot hard, and it didn’t do his face any good, I guess, but then he hadn’t done mine any either.

Then I had my cuffs on him, shouting at Morrison to please, in the name of God and all that was holy, give me some fucking cover.

THE EMTS MADE me go to the hospital. By the time I’d been x-rayed and told that, yes, I probably had the concussion I thought I had, and made it back to the North Precinct, the third shift was just short of changing. I got out of uniform and showered the stink of the beer off me, put on my regular clothes, and went in search of an open desk to do my write-up. Halfway down the hall, I ran into Morrison coming out of the men’s locker room.

“What the hell was that?” I asked him.

“Thought you could handle it.” Morrison shrugged, something he liked to do because it showed the world that he had broad shoulders. “Big dyke like you, I figured you were all over it.”

“It’s called ‘contact and cover,’ you asshole.” I stressed the word “cover” and not the word “asshole.” “Remember how that works? One officer makes contact, the other officer provides cover. You were supposed to provide me cover.”

Morrison rolled his eyes. “Don’t be such a baby, Hoffman. So you got a little wet, a little knocked around. I know half a dozen guys who take it worse every night, they don’t complain.”

“Then you know half a dozen guys with fractured skulls. He should never have gotten that second throw. You were doing your job, he wouldn’t have.”

“You should hear yourself,” Morrison said, moving past me. “Everybody’s fault but your own.”

“You were my cover, damn it!”

He was walking away then, and without looking back at me, he said, “If you can’t handle it, Hoffman, you shouldn’t be on the job.”

I WAS TWO days off, and by the afternoon of the second day, the bruise on my cheek had blossomed fully, the headache had gone away and I’d reached out to both Jen Schaeffer and Sophie Gault. They were each willing to get together, but it took another day to arrange everything with the shifts we were all working, so it wasn’t until the end of the week that the three of us were actually able to meet.

We got together at Mother’s for breakfast. Sophie arrived last, because she’d just come off shift in the North and had to change and fight the morning traffic back to downtown. We’d just had the first rain since July, and after two months of good weather, it always seemed that everyone in Portland forgot how to drive on wet roads.

“Jesus, Tracy,” Sophie said when she saw my face. “You could at least put a base down over it or something.”

“Doesn’t embarrass me, why should it embarrass you?” I asked her, but I knew the reason. Of the three of us, Sophie was by far the prettiest, and working hard to stay that way. Patrol makes the best of us expand, and despite my best efforts, I’d added at least ten pounds to my frame in the two years I’d been an officer with the Portland Police Bureau. I liked to think I carried it well and that I was the only one who noticed. I also liked to believe that one day the U.S.A. men’s team would win the World Cup, so I had pretty much accepted that I lived part of my life in denial.

I waited until all of us had ordered and the first round of coffee had been poured before raising the topic of Morrison.

“Told you,” Jen said. “Didn’t I tell you? He’s a bully with a badge.”

“He’s more than that,” I said. “Bullies with badges, they’re everywhere. Bullies with badges, they honor the contract, Jen.”

“C’mon,” Sophie said. “You’re talking like he wouldn’t have stepped in. He’s a pig, but he wouldn’t have let you go down.”

“That’s what’s bothering me. Until now, I thought there was a limit. But that second throw, Sophie, that one could have really fucked me up. It was a full bottle with a drunk’s strength behind it. That had connected, it would have cracked my skull, no question.”

Sophie stirred her coffee, frowning. Jen was staring past me, at the morning traffic on Stark. She was the smallest of the three of us, and the youngest at twenty-five. When Morrison had done it to her, she’d ended up wrestling alone with a guy twice her weight in the middle of Interstate. As she’d told it to me, Morrison had deliberately delayed moving to assist, just stood by his car, watching the show, until things had escalated so much he’d used his pepper spray to break it up, hitting Jen with a hefty dose in the process. She’d been blinded for several minutes, unable to see and unable to function. When she’d complained that Morrison could have, say, used his hands instead of his spray, his response had been vintage.

“Next time, baby, hold your breath,” he’d told her.

She’d gone to the sergeant with it, tried to actually lodge a complaint, but nothing had come of it.

“He claimed he couldn’t get to me sooner because of the traffic,” Jen had said. “Three in the goddamn morning at Interstate and Ainsworth, there was no goddamn traffic.”

It embarrassed me that, like Sophie had just done, I’d diminished it, thinking – if not saying – that Jen was overstating what had happened. We were all police, after all. That didn’t make us special, maybe it didn’t even make us different, but it did make us united. You could hate your fellow officer, but in the end, he was still your fellow officer, and that meant you could count on him for cover, and he knew he could count on you.

That was how it was supposed to work.

“I don’t know,” Sophie said, after the server had brought our breakfasts. “I mean, maybe you’re both right, but… if we put it through channels, that might make things worse. I’m not even a year and a half in right now, and Jen’s just come off her probationary period, Tracy. He’s got three more years on you, he’s got friends downtown. They’ll give him the heads-up.”

“That domestic you had where he was supposed to back you up,” I said. “You remember what you told me? You remember what he did?”

Sophie poked a piece of her honeydew. “Of course I remember. He left me alone with the husband and the wife and went to look for the kids.”

“And?” Jen asked.

Sophie sighed, conceding. “And they did what domestics do, and when I went to put the cuffs on the husband, the wife came at me, and then I was dealing with both of them together.”

“That’s not quite how you told it to me,” I said. “The way you told it to me, you went to put the cuffs on the husband, and as soon as you did, the wife throws a punch. You want to tell her the rest?”

Sophie took another stab at her melon, her mouth going tight. “I turn to deal with the wife, the husband pounds me into the wall face-first. He starts punching at me, mostly in the back. Morrison came back before it got totally out of control, used his stick to get the guy off me. I was wearing my vest, so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but for a couple of seconds there I was more than a little scared.”

“The son of a bitch could have taken your gun, Sophie.” I looked to Jen. “And she’s sugarcoating the beating. She was out for four days on a medical as a result of it, she had to overnight in the hospital before they were sure her insides were still doing everything they were supposed to.”

“How big’s this residence that Morrison doesn’t come running when he hears you hit the wall?” Jen asked.

“It was a two-bedroom in Kenton,” Sophie said.

“So where were the kids? In the backyard?”

Sophie gave up pretending to eat her melon, dropped the fork onto the plate with a clatter.

“There were no kids,” I told Jen. “There wasn’t even any evidence that there had ever been kids there. He just stood there and watched it, Jen, same as he did to you, same as he did to me.”

“Okay, fine,” Sophie said. “So what do you want to do, Tracy? You want to write a letter to the chief? You want to send it to HRD?”

“That’s exactly what I want to do,” I said. “I want to write a letter, and I want to list what’s happened to each of us, three separate incidents and the half-dozen other cases of his bullshit we all know about. There’s a pattern of behavior here, Sophie, you can’t ignore it, and it’s going to get worse. Morrison has a problem with women, and it’s beyond the standard sexist bullshit. He thinks we shouldn’t be on the job, and he thinks we can’t take care of ourselves, and so he goes out of the way to prove it by hanging us out to dry.”

“It’s not just with women on the job,” Jen said. “It’s with women. I’ve never heard any of the working girls have a nice thing to say about him.”

“Maybe because he doesn’t tip,” Sophie said, trying to smile.

“We write a letter,” I said. “We put it all down, we attach the relevant reports, we all sign it.”

“That’s a great idea, Tracy. What happens when we’re all put on extended leave without pay while our ‘allegations are investigated’?”

“So you’d rather wait? Just continue responding to calls and hoping that, when you call for backup, it’s not him who shows?”

“We could transfer out of the North, move to another district.”

“That’s giving him what he wants,” I said. “I won’t do that.”

“And it doesn’t do anything for the next girl to come along,” Jen added.

Sophie raised her hands, as if trying to ward both Jen and me off.

“All right,” she said. “All right, you guys win. Write the letter, I’ll put my signature next to both of yours.”

I PUT THE letter in the following Monday, through channels, to the head of personnel, which meant that the letter had a lot of distance to cover before it would reach its destination. Putting it through channels meant that it had to start with my sergeant, then move up to the precinct commander, then over from the operations division to the services branch, finally to personnel. But putting it through channels meant that it would make the journey unmolested, that it would move along the chain of command without being rerouted, delayed, or denied.

Except that wasn’t what happened.

NINE DAYS AFTER I’d submitted the letter, Jen, Sophie, and I all ended up rotating onto the third shift at the same time. We left briefing together, headed to the lot, and were finishing the checks on our vehicles when Morrison found us. It was almost eleven at night, the weather starting to turn crisp, and I saw him lit by the sodium lights of the lot, coming our way, and I figured he’d left something in his vehicle from his tour on second shift. When he corrected to head straight for me, I figured the car he’d used was the one I was checking.

“Hello, girls,” he said.

“Something you need, Morrison?” I asked.

“Actually, yeah. I need you to stop pissing on my shoes, Hoffman.” He pulled the letter from his back pocket, unfolded it, and held it up for all of us to see. “What the hell is this? Things you’re saying about me. Why are you trying to make trouble for me like this?”

Off to my right, at her car, Sophie swore under her breath, turning away from Morrison. I couldn’t tell if she was cursing me or him. To my immediate left, Jen had stopped her check, just staring at him.

Morrison looked at each of us in turn, still holding out the letter, anger flushing his cheeks and ears. He was a fair-skinned blond, and when he got mad, you could see it not only on his face but in his flesh.

“Where the hell did you get that?” I demanded.

“Never mind where the hell I got it. I got it, okay?” He lowered his hand, crumpling the letter in his fist and stepping forward, toward me. “You don’t want to make accusations like this, Hoffman. None of you do. Saying that I don’t give you ladies cover. You don’t want to say things like that.”

“You don’t give us cover.”

“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.

Dispatch put out the request, and Morrison came back as if he’d been hanging on every word, saying that he could be there in three minutes. Dispatch relayed, and I confirmed.

Then I waited, feeling my stomach contracting and my hands beginning to tremble, thinking that this was really the only way to make things right. I was committed now – we all were.

In the rearview, I caught the nimbus glow of headlights through the pines, and within fifteen seconds Morrison’s car appeared, slowing as it came around the bend and he caught sight of my vehicle. I popped my door and got out, taking my stick and sliding it onto my belt, then pulling my flashlight. He parked behind me, and I watched him exit, waited until he’d approached before speaking.

“Single male occupant.” My voice sounded strained, the way it had when we’d faced each other in the precinct lot, but this time I knew that it wasn’t due to anger. “Think Caucasian, can’t tell.”

Morrison squinted past me at the pickup, raising his own flashlight and hitting the car with its beam. I watched as the pool of light drew itself over the license plate, then to the rear window of the cab, where Sophie’s head, covered by the hood of her sweatshirt, seemed to loll against the driver’s-side window. Morrison snapped the beam off, then grinned that smug grin of his.

“That little thing in there’s got you scared, Hoffman?” he said. “I must goddamn terrify you. Tell you what, I’ll handle the contact and you can take the credit for it. Keep you nice and safe.”

“Just be ready in case I need you,” I said.

Then, raising my own flashlight, I approached the pickup, snapping the beam on and shining it into the cab. I used the butt to tap the window, and Sophie showed me her hands in her lap without moving her head, so I could see the camera was on and recording. I tapped a second time, and Sophie moved her head slightly, as if waking up.

“Police officer,” I said loudly. “Can I see some identification please?”

Then I stepped back and turned to face Morrison, putting the beam from my flashlight directly into his eyes, effectively blinding him. The door, now on my left, opened, and Sophie slid quickly out, holding the camera with both hands, lining up Morrison in the shot.

Morrison had his free hand up, trying to shield his eyes. “The hell – ”

“This is Officer Mark Morrison,” I said for the benefit of the camera.

“Wait a – is that Gault?” Morrison demanded, still trying to free the light from his eyes. “Get your flash out of my eyes, damn it! Is it that little cocktease, is that Gault?”

“He’s about to get the shit kicked out of him,” I added, watching Jen as she came up behind him.

To his credit, Morrison shut up when he heard me say that. Then he started to turn away, and he dropped his hand from where it had been shielding his eyes. He was already half-blind from my flash, and there was no way he saw Jen until it was far too late for him to do anything about it.

“Try holding your breath,” Jen said.

Then she hit him in the face with a shot of pepper spray.

Morrison gagged on a curse, staggered back, flailing in pain. I used my stick and took his right knee, and he dropped forward, managed to land on his hands, and I gave him another one in back to put him down, then dropped my own knees on him and put him in a choke hold. Jen had reached into my car by then, throwing the spot on again, suddenly making every detail in the scene brighter than day. She came back to us, began stripping the gear off Morrison’s belt, going for his cuffs first. She did his wrists, then took his gun and his Taser and his stick, all of it, before running over to his car and dumping it inside.

Morrison shuddered and gagged, and when I released the hold, he collapsed heavily. A fountain of snot was running from his nose, his mouth open wide, dripping its own rush of fluid.

I got my feet under me and watched as Jen put a kick into his ribs, then I backed off to where Sophie was still standing. We traded: I got the camera, and she got my stick.

Sophie just looked at him for a couple of seconds at first. I could see the conflict in her face, see the shifting of her emotions from hesitation and even fear into anger. She was remembering what had happened to her, what could have happened to her. I could see it in her eyes.

“You bastard,” Sophie said.

Then she brought the stick into his side. Not too hard, just enough to make sure he knew what was coming. Morrison choked, squirming, and she hit him on the opposite side, harder. He was still gagging, and he tried to lurch forward, but he couldn’t get far without the help of his hands, and he gave it up when Sophie hit him a third time, harder, high in the back. Then she did it again, and again, and again, working along his side, until she’d reached the small of his back. Morrison was crying out, his inarticulate pleas filled with phlegm.

“You let him hurt me,” Sophie said, and she rammed my stick viciously into his side, and Morrison stopped crying out, for a moment entirely unable to breathe. “You let him hurt me and you laughed while he did it, you son of a bitch.”

Jen had the six-pack for me, and I gave her the camera and took it, then took my stick back from Sophie and replaced it on my belt. Morrison was struggling to regain his breath, trying to get his knees beneath him. I pulled the first bottle, felt it cool and heavy and smooth in my hand, a beer-filled rock that could crack a skull and end a life. Morrison managed to flip himself onto his side, and the spot from my car made the mess on his face shine like a glass mask, and through his tears he saw me, saw what I held, and he sputtered.

“Jesus Christ,” he wheezed. “You can’t do this, you can’t – ”

I threw the bottle, missing his head by six inches or so, and it burst on impact, glass shattering and beer spraying, and Morrison flinched. I took a second bottle, stepping closer.

“You can’t – ”

I threw again, this time harder, again missing him, this time just barely. More glass, more beer, and the scent of it mingled with the pines and the road and the autumn and the bile. Morrison choked back a strangled scream, and it wasn’t enough, and I grabbed two more bottles and threw them at his head back-to-back, still missing, and this time he did scream, closing his eyes and trying to roll away from me. Sophie moved to cut him off, pushing him back with her boot.

“Now who’s on the ground?” I told Morrison, and I threw my second-to-last bottle, letting it shatter beside him with all the others.

He screamed for me to stop, for Jen or Sophie to help him.

I picked up the last bottle, used the church key Jen had stuck in the pack to open it. Then I tilted it over his head and let gravity take half the contents, watching it run out and fall onto his face, washing away his tears and his snot as he spluttered and gagged some more.

Then I let gravity take the bottle itself, and it hit him just above the bridge of his nose, and what was left inside foamed out as it clattered onto the road.

“Bet you wish you had backup,” I told him.

He blinked beer and tears out of his eyes, looking up at me, miserable, full of rage. Then Jen stepped closer, the camera still running, and he seemed to finally see it, and the rage abated in confusion.

“Yeah,” I told him. “All of it recorded for posterity.”

“You’re all crazy,” he croaked. “Fucking crazy.”

“No, you’ve got it all wrong, Morrison,” I said. “It’s not for our posterity, it’s for yours.”

Jen handed the keys she’d taken off him to Sophie, who went around behind and began unfastening his cuffs. Morrison tried tracking her, craning his head, then looked back to Jen, then finally to me. If he hadn’t looked so pathetic then, I probably would have laughed.

“It’s not for us,” I told him. “It’s for you.”

He licked a thin line of mucus from his lips, blinking rapidly. Sophie rose, dropping the keys and the cuffs on the ground in front of him with a splash. He flinched again.

Jen lowered the camera, turning it off. She looked at me and I nodded, so she set it on the ground beside his cuffs and his keys.

“We’re on it,” I told Morrison. “Our names, our badges, all of it. Everything we just did, it’s all there. Everything that just happened to you.”

He forced himself upright, doubled over with a new fit of coughs, then swiped at his eyes and his mouth with a beer-soaked sleeve. The pepper spray still had to be working him something awful, but the beer had probably gone a long way to relieving the pain.

“Hand it over to Internal Affairs,” I told him. “Give it to the commander. Take it downtown and hand-deliver it to the chief, send it through channels. Whatever you want, it’s yours.”

“You think I won’t?” he asked softly, furious.

I looked to Sophie and Jen, then showed him my palms. “I don’t know what you’re going to do, Morrison. You could get yourself cleaned up and go back to District and spin some story about a drunk-and-disorderly call or some other bullshit to explain your sorry state. You might even get away with pretending this never happened. After all, we did a pretty good job of staying away from your face.”

Morrison started hacking again, trying to clear his sinuses. I waited until he was finished to continue.

“Then again, you could drag your sorry ass back to District right now,” I told him. “You could raise holy hell, try to get the commander out of bed, hand him this camera here in person and tell him he’s just got to watch what’s on it. You could run it to your buddies downtown, you could give it to Internal, you could flip them to us and try to land our badges.”

I paused, wanting him to hear the next part, to make sure he got it and got it clear. Sophie and Jen were each standing with me now, the three of us together, and I realized that my fear had gone. I realized that everything I was saying to him wasn’t just the truth, it was what I believed. If I had to, I’d take the fall, and I knew Sophie and Jen felt the same way.

“I don’t know what you’re going to do, Morrison,” I said finally. “But I do know this: you deliver this camera to anyone in the department come morning, and there will be no one who hasn’t heard about it by lunchtime. And come roll call at third shift, they’ll be making up details of their own, there’ll be patrolmen in the Southwest talking about how you wet yourself, there’ll be bicycle cops riding Central, swapping details about how you begged – begged – for someone to help you.”

The radio on my belt crackled, dispatch asking my disposition. Looking Morrison dead in the eye, I radioed back that the situation had been resolved and that Officer Morrison and I were going 10-6. Dispatch came back with confirmation.

“Bring charges against us,” I said. “Charge us all, you’ve got the evidence. We’re agreed, we’ll all plead guilty, if that’s what it comes to. Each one of us is more than willing to stand up in open court and tell the world what we just did to you.”

Morrison didn’t move, and I thought that maybe he was staring at the camera, but maybe he wasn’t looking at it at all. Maybe he wasn’t hearing me anymore.

Sophie and Jen went back to the pickup, and I returned to my car, climbing in and killing the spot before restarting the engine. The light around Morrison vanished back into the night. He was finally beginning to stir, but he was doing it slowly, and I watched him, because I sure as hell wasn’t going to help. He made it into his vehicle and got it started, and I heard his 10-7 come over the radio, and I called mine in on top of it.

We headed in different directions, he toward the river, me up toward the top of the hills, the direction my fellow officers had gone, tiny Jen and gorgeous Sophie. We’d meet up after I got off shift, feel guilty and giddy as we waited to see if the phone would ring, if some officer we knew would be paying us a visit, asking us to clear up some confusion, to answer some questions.

Or maybe we’d find ourselves waiting for nothing, that Morrison hadn’t dared to breathe a word. Maybe we’d find that we had gotten away with something we never should have done, something we never should have had to do.

Driving up that hill, I didn’t fear the worst.

I knew I was covered.