Hero To Zero 2nd edition (23 page)

“SKIDMARK” WAS THE COP’S NICKNAME;
his real name was Skidlaski. Skidmark was what we called him when we thought about him—which wasn’t often. It wasn’t because he smelled bad (which he did); we just had to consider him because he made our jobs more difficult.

He had zero common sense, and no feel for the street. He was one of those guys who thought he knew more than everyone else, and wouldn’t listen to anyone. My first memory of him is him pulling over a vehicle in a grocery store parking lot so that lots of people could see him. He’d been assigned to my area, so I had to take some calls with him.

It was Christmas Eve, and it’s an unwritten rule among us cops that Christmas is hands-off: no bullshit tickets, no arrests unless it’s absolutely necessary and only when there’s no other choice. We’d talk about it in briefing, with no objections from the sergeants.

So Skidmark pulled over this vehicle and started running the occupants. The son of a bitch was digging for warrants—and he’d already violated the rules just by stopping them.

I drove past to see that he had pulled over this station wagon full of wrapped presents with three scared little kids in the back; as I drove off, Skidmark waved at me as I passed like he was thanking me for checking on him. I left this bullshit scene and listened for the outcome of the stop on the radio: the plates on the station wagon had expired, and the mother was driving on an expired license.

Skidmark called for a wrecker and impounded the car with the gifts inside; he actually put the kids and the mom on the street on Christmas Eve. He did at least call someone to come pick them up after giving her a ticket. A regular St. Dick he was.

From that point on, I was done with him. I cancelled him on every call; I wouldn’t work with him. He had a really fucked-up way of seeing the world, which I couldn’t understand and didn’t want to.

I became one of his most outspoken opponents in the department and on the street. I started to hear from people in the area where we worked about how poorly he treated everyone, and how they really didn’t like him and couldn’t talk to him, which was pretty much unraveling everything the rest of us had worked so damned hard to establish; it was blowing relationships and eroding all the trust that we were trying to build. He was constantly making our jobs harder by being such a horse’s ass. He was a real cheese dick.

One night, Skidmark had arrested a guy for drinking beer in one of the city parks. He felt like he was cleaning up the area by arresting everyone for anything he could think of, anytime they moved; like I said, he had no feel for the street.

We overlooked a lot of smaller crimes because we needed the cooperation of the residents of the city to land the bigger fish. Maybe you just mentioned the statute of limitations that would allow us to file the charges any time in the next two to four years, whatever it was; maybe you didn’t mention it at all if you didn’t need to. Inner-city dwellers knew about how the criminal justice system worked as well as we did.

Skidmark couldn’t grasp this concept, though, and he arrested everyone for even the slightest of violations in order to pump up his stats. In some misguided attempt to break up cliques in the department, management had come up with a shift-bid system in which the highest performers on each squad could pick their shifts for the following year. They called it the golden squad; we called it the golden shower squad. It didn’t work, but it lasted for a long, long time.

New guys like Skidmark saw this as a way to get better shifts without having to pay their dues on the street like all the rest of us had. He wanted to get off the graveyard shift as soon as possible; I, on the other hand, loved “graves,” particularly since my latest marriage was coming undone. It allowed me to avoid the wife and spend time with my kids.

On this particular day, Skidmark had arrested this guy for drinking in the park; he had done so under an obscure ordinance meant to help us keep the parks clear of drunks, not common citizens sharing a few beers while barbecuing.

The guy Skidmark arrested was pissed off, and Skidmark was talking shit to him as he was taking him to his car, telling the guy what a waste of a human being he was. He handcuffed him, put him in the car, seat-belted him in, and locked the door. He then left to go back to the park to arrest a couple more guys he saw drinking there.

This was really stupid, not to mention a safety problem, creating real potential for a violent cluster; any cop who’s worked the streets will tell you that. You don’t load up your car with drunks to take to jail just so you can get stats.

Skidmark arrested another guy and brought him back to his car—only to find it empty, with the passenger door wide open; the first guy had unlocked the car and run off with his handcuffs. The cuffs were your personal property back then. We had to buy them, and of course Skidmark always carried a lot of them.

He jumped on the radio, screaming for backup because he had an escaped prisoner. I didn’t move; I just listened to the shit storm unfold, and shook my head. Several units looked for the guy for hours, but couldn’t find him. How impressive is that: shaking people down for details on the guy who stole an officer’s cuffs?

I just stayed out of it. I didn’t want anyone on the street to see me with this dickhead, or associate me with helping him. He finally gave up and took the rest of his catch to jail, then bitched for days about “that piece of shit who stole my cuffs” and how he’d get even. Gave his pitiful little life direction, I guess.

About a week went by, and I got a call to meet a woman I knew at her home. When I showed up, she was sitting on the front porch with her son and daughter. She said that she wanted me to hear what her son had to say.

He was just a kid, maybe 19 or 20. I listened, and he told me about how he was arrested and had escaped with the officer’s handcuffs. It was Skidmark’s escaped bad guy! My reaction wasn’t what he expected. The kid was all tense and edgy, and I think he expected to get hit or take a beating; instead, I started to laugh—and laugh hard!

“Really? That was you?” I asked.

He said that it was, and he recounted how Skidmark—he didn’t know it was Skidmark, of course; he called him “Officer Cheesedick” (quite funny, really)—made him angry talking down to him, so after he was left in the car, he felt it was his duty to try to escape. He also described how Skidmark had a distinctive odor, and was fat, and wheezed. The kid said, “I felt like a bitch going down without fighting this guy.”

I was laughing really hard by now at his descriptions, amazed that it reflected almost exactly how most of Skidmark’s fellow officers felt about him. His mother, however, wasn’t happy, and didn’t see the humor in it; she didn’t want her son to feel that this was acceptable behavior.

To hell with that. I explained that “Skidmark” was his nickname and that he was exactly what her son had described—and although I didn’t endorse his escape, I did understand it.

She asked, “What are you going to do now?”

I looked at the son and said, “Well, that’s up to you. I don’t wanna lose
my
cuffs. If you’re gonna run, have at it, man. Go!”

He didn’t move. I told him that if he went with me, he’d go willingly, then gave him my cuffs and told him to put them on. His jaw dropped. He asked if I was serious.

“Yeah man,” I said. “You put them on, then you can show me how you got out of Skidmark’s car.”

He liked that idea. He was proud of the fact that he’d escaped. He even put the cuffs on behind his back. I took him to the car, buckled him in, locked the door, and said, “Go!”

He was out in 15 seconds. I was seriously impressed with his method—which, for obvious reasons, I won’t reveal. I sat there with him and, with his help, figured out a way to thwart his escape. We then laughed and joked, talking and exchanging ideas.

Then I let him tell his mom goodbye, took him to jail, and booked him on the warrant of the escape charge against him. I told him that Skidmark was on duty that night. “He’s gonna want to come talk shit to you. The cuffs you took were his favorite set”, I said.

“You don’t still have them, do you?” I asked. He said no, that he’d cut them off and thrown them away.

I called Skidmark on the radio and told him that his escapee had been booked into jail. He replied that he was on his way to the jail; for him, this was personal.

I warned the kid about him being on his way, then left. Nothing ever came of it. Skidmark continued doing his thing; I just made a point of not working with him.

O
THER
B
OOKS
A
VAILABLE

F
OR
P
URCHASE

C
URB
C
HEK

C
URB
C
HEK
R
ELOAD

S
TREET
C
REDS

ZACH FORTIER WAS A POLICE
officer for over 30 years specializing in K-9, SWAT, gang, domestic violence, and sex crimes as an investigator. He has written three books about police work. The first book,
CurbChek,
is a case-by-case account of the streets as he worked them from the start of his career. The second book,
Street Creds
, details the time he spent in a gang task force and the cases that occurred. The third book,
CurbChek Reload
, is by far the most gritty. The author is dangerously damaged, suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) and the day-to-day violence of working the street.
Hero To Zero,
his fourth book, details the incredibly talented cops that he worked with but ended up going down in flames. Some ended up in prison and one on the FBI’s ten most wanted list.

If you are looking for gritty, true crime stories, be sure to check out all of Zach Fortier’s novels.