A Round of Shots (Part III)

Street Rhythm

Everything has a rhythm. We can’t always recognize the rhythm like we do a classic one-two beat in hip hop, but everything has a rhythm.

Conversations between friends have a rhythm.

Encounters with cops have a different rhythm.

Cops in cruisers solo pulling over someone for expired plates shut doors.

Cops in cruisers pulling over someone who ran a red and took their time pulling over slam doors.

Cops who have backup and think shit might get hot leave doors open.

Break doesn’t turn to look at the cops who pulled up.

He looks at Joyce’s eyes, wider now, and puzzled as to why the cops roared up and kicked up over the curb a good twenty minutes after her accident.

The cop car doors don’t shut.

It’s a beat in the rhythm Break wasn’t expecting, the percussion of the door absent.

“Stand up!” a cop orders.

Joyce’s face is now confusion, with anger draping over it.

Break knows the cop isn’t talking to Joyce.

He raises his right hand, still not turning, his left still in Joyce’s hand.

“Both hands up, both of ‘em! Back away from the woman!”

Joyce holds the t-shirt above her head, believing her cut is easily visible to the cop. A second cruiser pulls up, keeping all four tires on the street.

“He’s helping me, officer.”

“Turn slowly and face the car!” the cop barks.

Break has been here before.

He turns to his right. Another cop, a cop from the second car is palming his weapon as he walks. He’s fat and his gait is a racehorse not wanting to go into a stall.

Both Break’s arms are in the air now.

The fat cop is Abramson.

The first cop, the cop barking orders, is a light skinned, acne scarred guy Break’s never seen before. He’s walking toward Break, gun out.

“Knees,” he shouts.

In this rhythm, Break knows that the cop knows that Break has been through this. The commands are vague, not book procedure.

“He was helping me, Officer!” Joyce shouts, her voice full of unspoken goddammits.

“It’s ok, Ma’am. We got a call about a robbery in progress.”

Break turns his head just enough so that he can see the left side of Abramson, who is still touching his Glock 23, standard 40 cal, but nowhere near drawing it.

“Tell this guy I’m not out here robbing people, Abramson.She was in that Ultima…”

“Shut the fuck up!” the first cop barks.

Break lowers himself to his knees, hands clasped behind his head.

“... kissing that pole. She needs medical attention. Jeezus.”

“The fuck up!” the cop repeats.

Joyce yells something Break doesn’t understand and her voice cracks.

“S’okay Joyce,” Break says quietly, but he’s drowned out by the rattling thump of a kicker in the trunk of a lifted Grand Prix.

The thump stays. The Grand Prix has pulled up across the street.

Boom.

Rattle.

Boom Boom. Rattle.

Break recognizes the rhythm.

Kneeling in front of a woman with a cut on her forehead, Break was barely conscious of the Kimber .357 J frame Snubbie tucked into the ripped elastic of the sweats under his jeans.

Kneeling, facing a cop he doesn’t know, it feels like a Dachsund he’s shoplifting.

The gun itself is legal, registered to Martin Kennedy Murphy.

Leonard James McGrath, convicted felon, is not legally allowed to have it in his possession.

Abramson has approached the light skinned cop and is talking to him.

He’s facing down Fenkell, as though he’s taking to the air.

No young black cop is gonna tolerate a fat white one talking at him.

The steady thump of the music coming from the Grand Prix is making it impossible for Break to tell what Abramson’s saying.

There’s a third cop, and the tow truck driver is talking to him.

The only voices that can be heard are those of Kutt Paper and Swole.

The black cop looks kinda nerdy.

Break knows he ain’t Shawland. Could be from anywhere, but not here.

Swole’s baritone is pumping from the trunk of the Grand Prix.

“....got a O.E. lisp, cirrhosis lurkin, nigga put down the bottle cuz that shit ain’t workin’”

Even Abramson’s free-slice-for-first-responders at Josephine’s Pizza fat white ass knows who Crucialisque Lex is.

Two cousins from Shawland, rapping over trippy jazz grooves and heavy percussion. An intersection of cerebral and hardcore gangsta.

Busted out nationwide with Lead Balloons, the (mostly) true song about the true story of the Schaefer Ave Standoff.

Abramson finishes talking.

Kutt Paper is rolling off one of his signature verbose rhymes full of literary references and multisyllabic words.

His secondary nickname is The Ebony Thesaurus.His real name is Stefan Crossten, and he was class valedictorian of Elliot Memorial High School.

The cop looks at Break.

“So you hood famous, huh? My colleague says you’re hood famous.”

Break shrugs.

An EMS pulls up slow, like someone trying to find a good parking spot at church.

In Shawland they run silent a lot, not wanting to draw attention.

Sometimes oxy junkies swarm the units and the EMTs have to turn the defibrillators on the metal sides of the truck to get ‘em off.

Creative, if not particularly humane.

The EMTs approach Joyce.

Break looks at the truck.

He’s been in the backs of both vehicles, cop and EMS and he’s not sure which one he prefers.

This morning he emailed his sponsor.

Tommy. Tommy’s dead,has been dead for a year, four months, three days.

He emails Tommy everyday, apologizes for the lame thing he does with the whiskey on the coffee cup.

“You got any weapons on you?” the cop asks.

“I was helping a woman who was in a car accident,” Break says, and it’s a controlled snarl, but it’s a snarl.

“Answer the question,” the cop says.Break is holding eye contact with him.

Thinking of the cop as just another guy, maybe a guy at a meeting.

He can’t. The guy is a cop. He doesn’t have to be honest with him.

“No,” Break says.

Wonders who in this neighborhood called in a goddamn robbery.

Maybe nobody. Maybe the nerdy cop was just freelancing, maybe trying to ferret out some dope to resell.

Break knew cops that were better dopemen than some of the dopemen.

The tow truck is starting to lower the towbed to tow Joyce’s car.

Break looks back at Joyce, hands still clasped behind his head. The EMT is putting a blood pressure cuff on her arm.

She looks up at Break.

“I swear it’s gonna be four hundred over whatever hundred. Why is this cop messing with you?”

The cop says “Someone thought you were being robbed, ma’am. And this gentleman matches the description of a murder suspect.”

Break feels his whole body go warm, happy warm.

There were 198 murders in the city last year. 51 of them happened in Shawland Heights, an astonishingly disproportionate number based on square miles and population density. But that was still only about four a month.

This cop had to be talking about the murder of Bao Trang.

If the suspect really looked like him…

Break turns.

A different Crucialisque Lex song is coming from the Grand Prix now. It’s their big hit, Lead Balloons.

And out of rhythm, the nerdy cop reaches for his handcuffs.

***

This is the last installment before it goes behind a paywall.

After this is story is done I may return to standalone short stories. I haven’t decided yet.