Dennis Copeland dismissed him with a wave, climbed into the Mustang, and roared off. I pulled in behind him and got on the cell phone.
Chapter Twenty-three
We descended back into the Valley on the Squaw Peak Parkway and exited at Indian School Road, going the speed limit. I held steady about half a block behind the Mustang. We were headed toward Central when my cell phone squealed.
“Deputy Mapstone, look behind you.” A Phoenix cop was on my tail. “I’m Officer Brenda Jackson. Chief Peralta tells us you need some help.”
“It’s the black Mustang just ahead of me,” I said, pushing it to make the light at Sixteenth Street. She was still with me. “He’s the guy from the Metrocenter shooting.”
“How long has it been since you’ve done a felony traffic stop?” Brenda Jackson wanted to know.
“A little while,” I said, lying. It had been fifteen years. “But it’s like riding a bicycle.”
She laughed. “We’ll pick up another unit at Central and then we’ll box him. I want you to be on his outside as we rope him in. By that time, other units should be with us. If he starts to run, let him go at a distance.”
“Ten-four,” I said.
He continued westbound on Indian School Road and crossed Central almost leisurely. Just as Brenda Jackson had said, I saw another PPD cruiser in the rearview mirror. He came up very quickly and passed us all, positioning himself ahead of the Mustang. Traffic was fairly thin. The sidewalks were deserted and few buildings were close to the street. It wouldn’t get any better than this.
“Let’s do it,” Jackson said.
I pulled into the outside lane and punched the accelerator to close the gap with the Mustang. Jackson came right up on his tail and hit the emergency lights. Then the cruiser ahead slowed suddenly. I pulled up beside the Mustang and the trap was closed. All I could see through the dark tint of the windows was the outline of a man.
Jackson hit her siren and he was forced to slow again by the cruiser right ahead of him. Then he slammed on the brakes, and we were all out of our cars, facing him with pistols drawn and automobiles between us and him.
“Driver of the Mustang,” Jackson announced on the PA system. “Roll down your windows so we can see you. If you have any weapons, throw them out on the driver’s side. Keep your hands where we can see them. Slide across and get out on the passenger side-repeat, the passenger side. Keep your hands in plain sight.”
A long time seemed to pass as cars whizzed by behind me. She repeated the order. The driver just sat there behind his dark windows. A thought crept into my head: What if it’s the wrong guy? The cop from the lead car edged in toward the Mustang, semiautomatic pistol drawn. He was tall, skinny, blond, and very young.
Then his face just disappeared in a mist of blood and smoke and the splinters of his sunglasses, followed by a massive boom and echo. His body snapped backward and fell heavily to the pavement.
I squeezed off a round, the big Python jumped in my hand, and the window on the driver’s side of the Mustang exploded from the impact of the.357. But Copeland was already moving fast, kicking open the passenger door and rolling out onto the sidewalk. I couldn’t see him.
“He’s going east on foot!” Jackson yelled. I could see her talking into her walkie-talkie, calling for assistance. I scuttled low around the Blazer and the police cruiser in front of the Mustang. The young cop was flat on his back and his face was gone. I felt for a carotid pulse in the gore. Nothing. I was shaking, and I thought very clearly, Copeland must have shot through the windshield of the Mustang.
Then the side windows of the police cruiser came apart and bullets were whizzing past me. I fell to the asphalt and immediately got burned from the heat. I rolled and rose to a crouch. I could see his feet. Then I didn’t know where he was. Somewhere on the other side of the police car, maybe. Or maybe coming toward me.
I heard Brenda Jackson on the other side of the cars, ordering him to freeze. I rose, still separated by two vehicles, and watched him turn toward her, a long-barreled.44 Magnum in one hand and my old friend the machine gun in the other, both traveling upward. Three quick cracks. She was firing.
“Fuck, he’s got body armor!”
He fired a burst from the machine gun, and she went down, groaning, squeezing off more rounds herself. I fired in his direction but couldn’t get a good aim because of the sun. I felt terrified and useless. I fired again, and he fell to the ground.
Then part of the cruiser’s light bar disintegrated as he fired the Magnum at me. A
I backed up to Jackson, the Python at the ready. I still didn’t know if he’d run or try to finish us off. She was back against the rear bumper, sliding a new magazine in her semiautomatic pistol.
“I’m okay,” she mouthed. But she was bleeding. “Go!” she whispered, nodding toward Copeland.
I fought off my fear and came out low and fast on the other side of the cruiser. But he was gone. I ran east on Indian School Road. One block, two. I ran and crouched, ran again and crouched. The heat burning in my lungs, I scanned the low-rise office buildings and condos for a sign of him. Nothing. I could hear sirens coming up the street behind me.
My first memory of a police officer being killed in the line of duty was when I was ten years old. A motorcycle cop was shot at a traffic stop near downtown Phoenix, and another motorcycle officer responding to the call for assistance was killed when a car ran through an intersection and hit him. It happened at Seventh Avenue and Roosevelt, not all that far from our home, in a city that seemed miles removed from the riots and mayhem of the 1960s. The photos of the two dead cops were on the evening news for days afterward, and it seemed unalterably grave and sad. I remember Grandfather, who had many old-fashioned notions, saying that killing a police officer in the line of duty was the worst crime because it was an attack on society itself.
Ten years later, when I joined the strange, closed world of the police, it was not so rare for cops to be murdered. We started wearing flak vests and carrying backup firearms. I remember one winter night when a two- man unit stopped a car at a citrus grove south of Guadalupe, not knowing it held two prison escapees from Oklahoma. The convicts had automatic weapons and the.38-caliber revolvers of the deputies were no match. Both deputies were two years away from retirement. We pulled up with the gun smoke still in the air, and Peralta jumped out of the car with a pump-action shotgun before I could even open my door. It was the first time I really saw his fury. He killed both cons where they stood, a surreal scene, like something out of a Western. And he said just what Grandfather had: To kill a cop in the line of duty was to attack society itself.
My mind returned to the young officer obliterated by the man in the Mustang. In the line of duty. Duty was an increasingly quaint idea to most Americans. My colleagues in academia scoffed at such a notion. But it must have at least partly inspired this young man to take a job paying $27,000 a year, where the most he could hope for was to be spat upon and called a pig as his marriage crumbled and his debts grew. His name was Glenn Adams, he was twenty-four, and he had a new wife. All his hopes and dreams ended on Indian School Road on an ordinary summer afternoon.
In a few days, I would put on my uniform for the first time in a decade and a half. I would drape my gold star with a bar of black tape and join my comrades at Glenn Adams’s funeral. We would honor his sacrifice and vow to keep him in our memory always. It is what we would hope for ourselves.
Chapter Twenty-four
A half hour before midnight, I finally headed home from Madison Street. Was it still Tuesday night? I couldn’t even remember. The term
