Green Sun Page 2

  The suspect refused a plea bargain, and when the case went to trial, several Hollywood celebrities testified on his behalf and he was found not guilty of all charges, including possession of a quantity of cocaine the officers discovered in his shoe. The court had thrown that out along with all the other charges—assaulting a police officer, resisting arrest, public intoxication, and possession of cocaine—because, in their view, the police had no probable cause to stop him in the first place. He sued the Beverly Hills Police Department and was awarded 1.3 million dollars. The elements of a probable cause stop were going to be even more difficult to establish now, at least in California.

  Jesus, Hanson thought, smiling, the fuckin’ guy was lucky they didn’t shoot him, in Beverly Hills, and that some rich liberal had seen what happened and was willing to testify. Christ, he…

  The lieutenant had stopped talking and was just standing up there behind the podium looking at Hanson. So was the rest of the class.

  “Yes, sir?” he said as mildly as he could. Fernandez was rolling his eyes.

  “You seem to find this amusing. Do you have something that you’d like to share with the rest of us?” The lieutenant nodded for him to speak.

  Fine, Hanson thought, okay.

  “Sir. I’d blame the officers involved more than I’d blame Rose Bird.”

  Lieutenant Garber nodded for Hanson to go on.

  “It was kind of dumb to…I mean, the primary officer…Sir, cops like this guy keep inviting the court to take police powers away.”

  Lieutenant Garber interrupted him by holding up one finger while looking out at the rest of the class. “Our constitutional scholar,” he announced. “Thank you, Officer Hanson, for that insight. The officer in question, a seasoned officer calling on his hard-won expertise and knowledge of the streets, attempting to make an arrest of a suspect who was, in fact, in possession of a quantity of cocaine, is, in your opinion, ‘dumb’?”

  I’m dumb, Hanson thought, for saying anything at all.

  “I’d call him an outstanding officer for making a legitimate arrest,” Lieutenant Garber said. “I’m no scholar, but that’s what I’d call him. Outstanding. But maybe you’re aware of something here that I’m not privy to. Could you share that with the class?”

  “Sir, you know, it’s kind of a game sometimes, a—”

  “A game? Is that what you think? The game of law enforcement? The game of protecting citizens from predators out there,” he said, gesturing out the seventh floor window toward East Oakland, way in the distance. “I don’t know anything about a game. And for the politically correct, I’m not just talking about Tyrone. This isn’t about race, as it clearly is, obviously, to anybody honest enough to see it. It’s about the law.”

  “Sir, I’m not trying to argue here, at all, but…why not just go up to the guy, the suspect, say ‘How you doin’,’ talk to him, and see…”

  Lieutenant Garber held up his hand and Hanson stopped talking.

  “Class is dismissed till Monday morning. Hanson, you are not dismissed.”

  “Sir,” one of the recruits began, “are we still gonna have the search warrant quiz on Monday, or…”

  “I don’t know, Parker. I don’t know. Study for it.”

  Hanson got to his feet, stood beside his desk. The rest of the class left, looking straight ahead. Lieutenant Garber gripped the lectern he was standing behind.

  “What are your intentions, Hanson?”

  “Intentions? Sir?”

  “Intentions,” Lieutenant Garber almost shouted. “What are you doing here? We don’t get a lot of thirty-eight-year-old recruits with degrees in literature. You writing a book?”

  “No, sir,” Hanson said, keeping his expression neutral.

  “Maybe a career in social work, then? To help the downtrodden? Or perhaps law school? You’re not too old for that if you get started soon. Get a job with the ACLU.”

  Hanson didn’t say anything, waiting Lieutenant Garber out.

  “The reason I’m asking, Hanson, is because you don’t seem to fit in very well here at the OPD. Your classroom work is satisfactory, more or less, but that’s only a small part of preparing for the street, as a police officer, here in Oakland anyway. Sergeant Jackson, for instance, tells me that you and he have had some problems in the area of physical proficiency and self-defense, which I, for one, consider a very important part of your training.”

  Hanson nodded to show that he was listening.

  “Very well, Hanson. You need to work harder then, to show us that you want to learn the kind of law enforcement we expect from our officers, and no one is going to make this training any easier for you. Think about it.

  “You’re dismissed.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,” Hanson said, and left the classroom.

  On the way down the hall, he passed the open door of the Training cadre office, where Sergeant Jackson stood watching him from the doorway. Sergeant Jackson was the senior physical training cadre. He was a few years older than Hanson, and he’d been on the street for sixteen years. The word was that as a young officer recruited from somewhere in the South, he’d married a rich, beautiful, politically connected woman and didn’t need the fifty thousand dollars a year the Department paid him. He came to work because he liked the job. He told lieutenants and captains when they were wrong and seemed to do whatever he wanted to on the street, no matter how brutal or outrageous.

  Sergeant Jackson was tough and smart, fluid and fast. He had a temper but used it to his advantage. He fucked with Hanson every chance he got. “You,” he’d say, when he needed a volunteer, pointing at Hanson as he sat cross-legged on the mats, taking a break with the rest of the class. Hanson would stand up, soaked with sweat, and walk up to Sergeant Jackson, who would jam his arm or wrist into a painful come-along hold or use him to demonstrate a take-down, faking a move in one direction, then pivoting to sweep Hanson’s legs out from under him, all the while calmly and never out of breath explaining to the rest of the class what he was doing. Hanson never changed expression when Sergeant Jackson slammed him to the mat or levered a carotid choke hold on him till his vision closed down to black tunnels. Hanson was able to step outside himself and watch it happen, refusing to give Sergeant Jackson the satisfaction of any emotion at all. He couldn’t afford to get angry.

  The following Monday marked the beginning of the fourth month of the Academy. By then, half the class, the 106th Recruit School, had quit, dropped out with injuries, or been terminated for poor performance. Two were fired because of something their initial background checks had missed. Another resigned after being arrested for assault in a downtown bar. Trainees who’d gone through it together called the five-month Oakland Police Academy the OPD Street Combat Course. The cadre wrote out permission slips for the trainees—and a buddy to drive them—to go to the Alameda County Hospital emergency room. Broken finger, broken nose, cracked rib, and concussion were the most common excuses. Trainees limped to their cars after twelve- and fourteen-hour days of five-mile runs, nightstick katas, one-on-one choke holds, take-downs, handcuffing, and come-along drills. The recruits all wore Department-issued white T-shirts with an Oakland PD badge printed on the front and a red, orange, and yellow woodpecker on the back. The woodpecker’s beak curled into a snarl, and above him were the words TOUGH AS WOODPECKER LIPS. That afternoon they were sitting in a half circle on the floor of the gym, listening to Sergeant Jackson.

  “Anybody who will fight a police officer will kill a police officer,” Sergeant Jackson told the class. “Your badge and gun don’t mean anything to him, because he doesn’t have anything to lose. People. When you stop him on the street this type of individual will lie, interrupt, and argue. If you allow him to do these things, you are giving him permission to kill you, because he thinks you’re weak. He will curse you and walk away if you tell him he’s under arrest. When you reach out to handcuff him, he’ll resist, fight back, and kill you—with your own gun if he doesn’t already have one. Don’t expe
ct anybody out there to obey the law like we have to do. They live by the law of the jungle.

  “He is not like you. Do not believe that liberal happy talk about how, down deep, we’re all the same. He is a different kind of animal than you are. And when you find yourself in a fight on the street, you have no friends out there. You can’t just give up, you can’t quit, because if you do, he’ll kill you. He damn sure—excuse me, ladies—he isn’t going to simply subdue you, then go home to the wife and kids.

  “Winning the fight is the only option you have, and that means the second he looks at you wrong, sasses you, back talks, or raises a hand, you knock him on his ass, hurt him, and keep hurting him till he stops trying to get up, then you arrest him and cuff him and think of something to charge him with later. If it goes bad and you think he’s going to overpower you, then you shoot him and kill him. Do not hesitate to kill him if you have to. We are spread way too thin out there to hesitate. If Tyrone forces you to kill him to save your own life, the Department will back you up.

  “In my years working the street, no officer who has had to kill a citizen in self-defense had to face anything worse than two weeks on administrative leave with pay. Oakland is the ex-con capital of California. These individuals do not fear the courts or prison. The courts are backed up two and three years with felony cases waiting to go to trial. The prisons are full. He knows this. If he has to go back to prison, he’s at home there, anyway. That’s his real home. He was born in prison. Prison was his home before he was born.

  “He doesn’t fear the law, the courts, or prison. So I’m here to tell you that he’d better fear you. You are the law out there on the street. You’re real. You can hurt him now. Many of you grew up thinking it wasn’t like that. Now you know.”

  After the class took a break, Hanson stood facing Sergeant Jackson on a brick-red foam mat for what was called a blocking drill. Sergeant Jackson wore padded red focus gloves on both hands, like stuffed catcher’s mitts made of shiny plastic. Hanson stood with his hands at his sides, waiting for Sergeant Jackson to swing at his head. They were toe to toe, too close for Hanson to see both of Sergeant Jackson’s hands in his peripheral vision, so he watched his eyes to predict when a blow was coming and from which side. He blocked blow after blow, even as they came faster and harder, until Sergeant Jackson, a little out of breath, said, “Don’t look at my eyes. Watch my hands. Hands are what kill you. Not eyes.”

  They both knew he couldn’t watch both hands. He blocked the next blow.

  “Don’t look at my eyes.”

  Still focused on his eyes, Hanson thought about breaking his nose, making him bleed, hurting him as much as he could before Sergeant Jackson kicked his ass, then got him fired. Or punching him in the throat and maybe killing him.

  “Go ahead,” Sergeant Jackson said. “Go for it.”

  Hanson needed the job. He looked down at Sergeant Jackson’s right glove, watching it until Sergeant Jackson hit him in the side of the head with his left glove. Hanson turned his head to watch the left glove, keeping his arms at his sides, making no attempt to block the blow he knew was coming. Sergeant Jackson hit him with the right glove, harder this time, on the other side of his head, almost knocking him down, Hanson’s eyes flaring with red and silver stars. He regained his balance and turned his head the other way.

  “Take off,” Sergeant Jackson said. “Get outta here while you still can. Take the rest of the day off.”

  Hanson walked past him, into his warbling tinnitus and through the rest of the class toward the two pairs of double doors he saw at the far end of the gym, hoping he could make it through whichever one was real before he puked. Something touched his shoulder, and when he heard Fernandez whisper “Fuck ’em,” he smiled. He knew he could make it through the real door if he kept walking, through the Academy, unless they killed him, because that’s what they’d have to do, he thought.

  Down in the locker room, in the empty echoing shower room, breathing the steam, a rivulet of blood running from his nose. Seven more weeks and his class graduated from the Academy. November 19, 1982. He had the date circled on the Three Dragons Restaurant calendar thumbtacked to the water-stained Sheetrock in his kitchen.

  Chapter Three

  My Girl

  It was the winter solstice, December 21, the longest night of the year. Tomorrow the days would start getting longer. He’d be working through the holidays, a week that always kicked the annual murder rate into another ten digits before it dropped back to zero on New Year’s Day. He couldn’t find anywhere to eat in District Five, so after his last call he slipped off to the Junkyard Dog on Foothill for a Coke and a Gangsta Burger. He wasn’t hungry—he’d had a protein powder milkshake for breakfast—but he knew he should eat something for the extra hours of overtime he’d be working. There weren’t enough cops out there as it was, and this week anyone with any seniority at all would be out on vacation time. And others were just calling in sick. There were only two cars assigned to District Five, and half the calls they got dispatched to were off the district. Cover cars would be slow to nonexistent, worse than usual, but he was most comfortable working by himself anyway, and the holiday overtime was okay with him. Better working a patrol car than home alone or out in crowds of last-minute shoppers with supermarket Christmas music.

  His semimonthly paycheck was more than twice what he could make doing anything else, even if he could find another job. He’d bought a sofa, a microwave, and another Crock-Pot he’d never use. He’d just put four new tires on his vehicle, a 1963 D1100 International Harvester Travelall, the four-door model, which he’d bought at a Forest Service auction in Missoula. It had gotten him from Boise to Oakland, but just barely. It was good enough to get him from his flat to the Justice Center. If it died on him completely, he could take a bus or walk. He’d have to get something else eventually, but that meant dealing with a car salesman, and he wanted to put that off as long as possible. Two more months and he’d be caught up on his bills and have money in the bank. What else would anybody hire him for? The next war hadn’t started yet and he’d be too old to enlist when it did. He didn’t think he could hack another two or three years in academia for a PhD, and if he could, then what? And he’d last about a day in some office job cubicle before he threw his boss out a window.

  Once he got through roll call, away from the Justice Center, and out on the street, things weren’t so bad. Out in East Oakland, by himself, with the life/death/life/death. And the way they shuffled him from beat to beat and district to district every night, there wasn’t much in the way of any consistent supervision. He didn’t have to look over his shoulder all the time for some sergeant showing up to second-guess him, expect him to handle things the OPD way. As long as he kept up his arrest quota, they seemed to pretty much leave him alone. The job might even work out, and he could retire and die in twenty-five years.

  The Junkyard Dog was an old Airstream trailer painted wiener brown with a mustard stripe down its back. Mounted at the end nearest the street was a savage robot dog’s head that had been welded and riveted and pounded out of a truck cab, its teeth and pointed ears fabricated from junked cars—grilles, bumpers, tail fins—its spotlight eyes glaring down Foothill day and night. The head sheltered the bulletproof service window like a carport. Hanson backed his patrol car into the parking space closest to the street, got out, and walked up to the window. The only other car in the lot was an older tricked-out gold Cadillac with a young woman in the passenger seat.

  The driver of the Cadillac was already at the thick Plexiglas window that worked like a miniature revolving door. He’d put a bloody five-dollar bill down, but the chubby black kid in the Doggie Diner paper cap refused to turn the revolving door and take it. The name tag on his stained, too-small white tunic was JIMENEZ, but he didn’t look Mexican. “We don’t accept bloody money,” Jimenez said, his voice muffled behind the bulletproof plastic. The blood was fresh, wet, gleaming through the paper fibers in the artificial light. Neither of them see
med to notice Hanson standing there, uniformed, armed, wearing his name tag, his PAC-set hissing and barking as Radio sent cars to and from calls.

  “It’s legal tender,” the customer said, glancing back at the girl in his car. “Federal law say you gotta accept it.” He was wearing a suit woven with iridescent threads that threw off a green-gold nimbus.

  Jimenez just looked at him and shook his head.

  “You think I’m just makin’ this shit up? It’s the law, my man. Nobody above the law.”

  Hanson hadn’t asked Radio for permission to leave his district. He was glad the police union had opposed the Department’s last proposal to put transponders on the patrol cars so they’d know where the cars were at all times. He’d never get anything to eat on duty when they finally pushed that through. The kid in the suit asked Hanson, “You gonna enforce the law, Officer?”