The Heat of Darkness

I was a tunnel rat for Halloween, and my nerves were on edge right from the start of my shift downtown, strap hanging between Canal and 14th Street, following my nose. A full moon brings out the crazies and the repeat offenders, but Halloween doubles down on the madness, lets them operate in disguise, indistinguishable from the civilians. Tonight, it was both, Halloween and a full-moon, and the city was febrile and electric.

Gangs are hard to spot on Halloween. Is it just a bunch of revelers, or is it a marauding pack of animals, their blood up? Who’s in the gang, who isn’t? I know we’re not supposed to profile certain types and tribes, but without some kind of clue as to the identity, whose to know whether the fare dodger is a problem or not? You might end up arresting all the NYU frat boys by mistake! God forbid you slap a bracelet on a rich white kid or book a beer-bong party by mistake; there’s so much Dear Chief paperwork involved, and the desk sergeant will get an earful from an upper East Side matron. 

Shifty fellow, black, very black, something about him made me uncomfortable, like we’ve crossed paths before. Kind of gave me a wink as he jumped the turnstile, like he knew me. Dirty, filthy, a wino, I caught a whiff of urine. I figured I’d need nitrile gloves before I could deal with this one. He was about my age, with angular shoulders and stringy neck, and he hopped the turnstile, fluid, like a cat. He looked like a fighter. Maybe he had a knife or a gun? It seemed like a lot of risk… a fare-dodger? But I remembered that face, for later, for when I got numbers, but, for now, I let him go. He looked back at me as he scooted along the platform.

This was my thirteenth Halloween on the force, every one of them nerve-wracking. You’d think you’d learn how to cope, but there’s not a cop in the force that works Halloween without bellyaching over the shift, wants out, an early night. Something freaky inevitably happens, especially on the bridges and in the tunnels. Some nutjob loses their shit over drugs or a girlfriend, or loses their job, or their home, and they take it out on the cops or the transit system.  The jumper on the bridge, he’s waiting for the cops; mid-town traffic comes to a halt. The jumper on the subway platform, he’s waiting for the motorman: the working stiffs are stuck in a tunnel. Suicide by cop, suicide by transit, the stuff of nightmares. I remembered the time that a woman jumped in front of the 6 train on the Lexington line, a rag doll, got caught between the train and the platform, and spun like a top along the side of the train as it pulled into the Union Square. Still conscious, when I got to what was left of her, a head and a torso, not much else. Apparently, she’d lost her dog. Lost her fucking dog! I lost the contents of my stomach.

It's close to midnight. There he was again, the black wino. Skinny, sharp-edged, probably not a wino, probably a skel, a junkie. He kept looking at me and fucking winking, like he’s coming on to me, sticking his arm out all awkward, like he’s showing me his jewelry. Bro made me heave. I don’t need this kind of weird. I moved along the platform, but I had him under surveillance. Why was he just sitting there? I should have called for backup, then and there. Meanwhile, the subway’s busy, unruly, pub crawlers, gays, a few anxious tourists, not too many face masks, but I could feel the bad energy, the bad moon rising.

I fingered the new taser on my left hip, I caressed the trusty Glock that’s weighing against my right side. The taser was on my weak side so I wouldn’t accidentally grab it when I meant to grab my Glock, it’s a cop’s trick. Some uptown transfer asshole on lightning training said we should carry the firearm on the weak side, the taser should be the first reach! Same asshole said we need to engage with words before we engage with force, especially if it’s a psycho – an “emotionally disturbed person, ”blah, blah, “cooperative controls” and blah, blah, “continuum of force,” blah blah. Fuck that! I swear I fell asleep listening to the instructor’s mumbo jumbo about containment and de-escalation. Try containing and de-escalating road-rage or a knife attack! I’m going for the gun first, taser second, asking questions last. It’s got me through thirteen years in this job. Made me what I am, a hairjob that gets to call his own shots, gets to go home to his kids. A couple more years and I’m done. I’m bagging the pension and going into private security… a bank. A nice comfy bank job.

A gang in Trump masks spillt down the stairwell, rowdy, swearing, they jumped the turnstiles, one, two, three, a half dozen, more, they just kept coming and their blood was up, animals, infectious. Strange how that happens, how the craziness spreads like a virus. Skel makes his move, but there’s hollers from the other end of the platform. A man dressed like a ghoul was shouting at a white couple, who were scuttling backwards. Skel was mingling with the Trumps, like they were his cover. The ghoul saw me and stopped his antics, but an old man, Asian with wild silver hair, started rapping the railings with a stick, which woke up Speedy Eddy, itinerant, a harmless bit of street furniture, who rides the rails to keep warm, except this version of Eddy jived and howled like a wolf, cranked out if his mind. The Trumps ganged up near a young woman, single and unprotected, the skel was in there too, close to the woman and closer. She was scared witless, she was screaming, the Trumps were mimicking her cries, a couple of them were jostling her, feeling her up, but it’s the skel that made the first big move on her, grappled her, he’s got a gun, even the Trumps were spooked. I grabbed my Glock.  

It wasn’t exactly bravery. It was more like compulsion. The opposite of mindfulness. I ran towards death.

“Stop, Police,” I shouted, gun drawn. The Trumps scattered, one jumped down onto the tracks. Skel was waving the gun in the air, taunting.  I fired, he dropped, she screamed, she ran. I heard the blood pulsing through my skull, and I could feel a rush of adrenaline that was so intense that I felt like barking, like a goddam wild dog.

“Fuck, Frankie!”, said the skel.

My name is Frank Sanoli, but everybody on the MTA beat, and at the station , calls me Frankie. 

“Drop the fucking gun,” I shouted, but what started as a command, almost ended a question. How does he know my name? He was looking up at me like a dying animal, pathetic, like a deer I once wounded and killed on a hunting trip; it staggered around in circles, it couldn’t comprehend why its back leg was suddenly smashed up and bleeding, why one moment it was nibbling at berries, the next minute it's got death shakes. The skel had the gun in one hand, and he was making that weird jerky motion with his other hand, like that deer shaking its useless leg. Skel was showing me his jewelry again, like it mattered.

The gun fell out if his hand, there’s blood.

“Fuck, Frankie, you asshole!”.

It was Washington. TJ Washington, from SNAG. It wasn’t jewelry he’d been waving at me, it was a yellow wristband. He was undercover. It wasn’t a skel, it wasn’t a weird jerking movement; he’d been flipping me a sign, letting me know he was a brother cop.

TJ was a one of the high-fliers, got a lot of weight in the precinct on account of his deep undercover operations, good at his job, too good. He probably staked out this platform to go after this gang, the Trump gang. There was blood on his chest, blood down his arm, and on the tiled floor, I’d shot him in the shoulder, just below the collar bone. It wasn’t a fatal wound, not for him, but this was gonna be a very ugly shit-show.

There was nobody left on the subway platform, except for the Asian man with the magic wand, and Speedy Eddy. They were both unhinged, unreliable witnesses. 

I shot TJ in the head, a bit off center, so that it looked like a hasty shot, a snatched shot, like I'd fired under duress. I leant over, grabbed his wrist and pulled the yellow wristband off, and tucked it deep in my pocket. There was no point in ruining two lives, at least one of us would be OK. The gun was still in his hand, but TJ was dead. Only now he wasn’t TJ, not in my mind, not without the yellow wristband. Now he was just a vox motherfucka, a Black man with a gun, a bad dude.

Shooting someone is always a bit fucking overwhelming, so I didn’t really have to put on an act, in fact I felt as sick as a dog, and because I was so badly shaken, the sympathy was with me, I had momentum in my favor.

“You OK, Frankie?” A couple of the MTA boys arrived before I’d even made the call, naïve blue flames, that I’d got to know over the last few months. They were easy to manipulate and fell in line with my narrative.

“Black man, looks like he went psycho, about 30, he was strapped, stolen Glock looks like, no ID”, said Officer Jerry Fall, one of the two MTA cops, talking into his radio. “Officer Frank Sanoli, he’s taken the mutt down. Sanoli looks badly shook. 10-78. He’s gonna need attention.”

I threw up on the platform. A Black man. A mutt, a perp. 

A couple of patrol cars must have arrived upstairs. There were four or five cops on hand, including a couple of tunnel rats. It took about two seconds for Sergeant Tasaki to ID the dead man.

“Oh shit, Frankie. You shot officer Washington on the Narcotics and Gun team. He’s been undercover for weeks now. You shot a brother”.

“Naha man, It was an assault. He was waving a gun at the woman. I shot him before he shot her, and I fired at him again when he tried to fire on me. It was him or me. A Black man with a gun. That’s what sized up”. I was crying like a little girl by now.

Tasaki was bent down next to the dead man, pulled up the dirty shirt sleeve, looking for something, the yellow wristband. Tasaki shook his head in disbelief. 

It was a split-second thing, poor lighting, no identification, not wearing the yellow wristband, a tragedy. Washington should have moved slowly, shouted out a warning, announced his assignment post, It was Washington’s sloppy policework, undercover and underground, alone, like Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. Washington had only himself to blame. Should have been better trained. It was the brass at fault. There would be an enquiry, there’d be an outcry, the Grand Council of Guardians would get involved, the mayor’s office too, it would be front page news, but it would also blow over. It always did.  

The EMS technician placed a blanket over my shoulders and gave me a bottle of water. Tasaki left the dead man, and came and knelt next to me, placed a consoling hand on my knee. “It’s not your fault Frankie, you weren’t to know,” said Tasaki, nodding, “fucking Halloween, you can’t tell the good from the bad.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” I said.