Paul Bacon (14 page)

When Mulligan walked into the tombs a half hour later, he was carrying a riot helmet. Our helmets were fitted with clear plastic
face guards—very helpful, I realized, in dealing with spitting perps. “Good thinking,” I said. He’d need it.

Mulligan stared back at me with a fake smile.

“What?” I said nervously.

“I had to borrow this from one of the Two-four cops, and it’s too small for my head.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “I’m not pulling your perp out of there.”

“How else can we move him?” Mulligan said, pushing the helmet into my hands.

“How should I know?” I said, pushing it back.

“You make all the collars,” Mulligan said. “You must have learned something.”

I’d never locked up anyone like this before. Most of my prisoners were motorists, people who could afford to drive a car in
New York. They tended to have jobs and apartments and clean clothes, and they never resisted arrest. I didn’t want to admit
how easy I’d had it so far, so I changed the subject. “Why’d you collar a homeless person anyway?” I asked Mulligan.

“It wasn’t my decision,” he explained. “The guy was panhandling next to an ATM, and the lieutenant told me to bring him in.
He put up a fight, so we had to go a few rounds on the sidewalk before I could cuff him.”

“For
panhandling
?”

“I know, right? I guess he’s there all the time, and the lieu was sick of seeing him.”

“Great,” I said. “And now I have to pull some crazy guy out of a toilet.”

“Either that or we call ESU.”

ESU, the Emergency Services Unit, was the NYPD’s version of a SWAT team. This was all I’d learned about them at the academy,
so I always pictured them like the SWAT teams I’d seen in movies—breaking down doors, rappelling out of helicopters, and the
like.

I told Mulligan, “I don’t think we can call in the cavalry for a spitting perp.”

“But the desk sergeant said we could,” Mulligan replied.

“He did?”

“Yeah, you know, if it came to that.”

“It’s come to that,” I said. “Let’s call ESU.”

An hour and a half later, Mulligan and I were sitting in the metal chairs outside his prisoner’s cell, still waiting for ESU
to arrive. The perp was sleeping soundly, but with the threat of airborne spittle growing more real by the moment, the wait
was becoming unbearable. I looked at my watch and whispered to Mulligan, “What’s your arrest time?”

“About six hours ago,” he said.

“I could have put three five-elevens through the system by now,” I said.

Mulligan nodded.

I asked him, “You couldn’t just say, ‘Thanks, lieu, but I’m not lookin’ to collar today’?”

“No,” said Mulligan. “It was an order.”

At around seven thirty P.M., the Two-four desk sergeant peeked his head into the tombs and waved us out into the precinct
lobby. Mulligan was napping, so I left him with the prisoner while I went out to talk with the sergeant.

The boss closed the door to the tombs behind me and said, “I thought you should know, ESU just pulled up in front of the house.”
“Fantastic, I’ll wake up the perp now,” I said, and started opening the door to the tombs.

“Wait,” the sergeant said. “They still gotta put all their shit on, so don’t wake up nobody.”

I walked back into the stinky hallway, sat down in my chair, and watched Mulligan sleep. His mouth was hanging open, with
a faint snore trickling out every few seconds. How could anyone sleep in here? Whatever happened between Mulligan and his
perp must have been a battle royale to leave them both so exhausted.

At eight o’clock, two officers in beefed-up uniforms walked into the tombs and started stomping up the hallway. Every part
of their bodies was shielded by thick black padding, including a crescent-shaped flap that hung in front of their crotches
as if to protect them from enraged Women’s Studies majors. Both men were wearing helmets, and one was carrying a clear riot
shield with POLICE written in large, angry letters on the front. They looked like they were ready to put down an insurrection.

I nudged Mulligan out of sleep and said good-bye while he was still coming around. “ESU is here,” I said under my breath.
“Catch you later.”

“Okay, sure,” said Mulligan, sitting up in his chair and rubbing his neck.

I nodded politely as I slid past the ESU cops in the narrow hallway. Just as I reached the door, one of them turned around
and said, “Before you go, could you back us up here?”

“Back
you
up?” I said to the man dressed like a bomb shelter.

“Just in case,” he said. “And grab a couple more cops from the lobby.”

Until this night, I had been one of those New Yorkers who cringed whenever I saw a group of police officers surrounding one
person on the street. Since cops seemed to come in pairs mostly, I thought two was the magic number for handling any one suspect,
and any more than that was de facto brutality. And in fact it did take only two ESU cops to pull the prisoner out of his cell,
but that was just the beginning. The perp didn’t actually wake up until he was out in the hall, when he began screaming and
thrashing his limbs around. I saw this happen from the other end of the hallway, accompanied by Mulligan and the two cops
I’d rallied for backup.

“All you guys clear out now!” shouted one of the ESU cops, as if the perp was about to explode.

I was already next to the door, so I darted into the lobby not knowing why. Mulligan came out after me looking just as confused.

A voice from inside the tombs shouted, “Somebody open the nut-bag!”

I looked at Mulligan, and he looked at me. “Nutbag?” we said simultaneously.

“I got it!” one of the Two-four cops shouted back, and we turned around to see him unzipping a seven-foot-long brown canvas
sack that was lying on the floor. Part sleeping bag, part casket, the “nut-bag” was shaped in the rough outline of a human
body, with a breathing hole at one end and leather handles along its sides.

The two ESU officers dragged the man out of the tombs, each holding one of his feet, while the prisoner continued to scream
and flail his arms like he was drowning. When they’d gotten the perp completely out into the lobby, one of officers sat on
the man’s legs while his partner struggled to get hold of one of his hands.

Sitting on the prisoner’s arm, he looked up at me and Mulligan and told us, “One of you grab the other hand, and the other,
hold his jaw shut.”

Mulligan said to me, “You better take the head, or I’ll snap his neck.”

We both went into action, but when I knelt down over the man’s head, I froze up. As far as I was concerned, if I touched someone’s
face, we were dating. Of course, the idea that he might bite or spit at anything near his mouth also weighed heavily on my
mind. I tried to reach in to help, but I found my palms glued to my thighs.

“The fuck’s wrong with you?” shouted one of the Two-four cops, leaping around the prisoner’s body to take my position. He
rushed at me like he was stealing home plate, so I bounded off to the side and wound up sprawled across the floor.

I stood back up and watched the rest of the containment unfold as a bystander, relieved to see that the commotion had roused
officers from every corner of the station house. Once I’d gotten out of the way, the perp was zipped into his nutbag after
only thirty seconds of frenetic teamwork by seven grunting, cursing cops.

* * *

Helping Mulligan had been my only assignment of the night, so I decided to wait around while he tied up loose ends with the
Two-four sergeant. I was standing next to the desk when a female paramedic approached me with a clipboard in her hand and
a supremely pissed-off look on her face. She’d obviously just met the prisoner and was about to take him to the hospital.
The man wasn’t claiming any injuries, but since he’d thrown a number of violent tantrums, he had to get a psychiatric evaluation
before Mulligan could leave him at Central Booking for arraignment.

“Where we takin’ your little friend?” the paramedic asked me.

“He’s not
my
little friend,” I said, pointing at Mulligan.

“Saint Luke’s?” Mulligan guessed, then looked at me.

“Can you take him to Bellevue?” I asked the paramedic.

She looked at her watch and said, “Sure.”

Mulligan sneered at me and said, “Bellevue? Isn’t that a hellhole?” “It’s closer to Central Booking,” I said. “Unless you
want the overtime.”

“No, no,” Mulligan said. “I want to dump this guy as soon as possible. Thanks for all your help. I don’t know what I would
have done without you.”

As Mulligan walked out of the Twenty-fourth Precinct station house with the paramedic, I thought:
Super cop!

I rejoined my squad the following night hoping to make another five-eleven arrest. We drove around the Twenty-third Precinct
in Spanish Harlem looking for the usual opportunities and came up with nothing. Around eleven o’clock, the sergeant told me
to drive us back to the Nineteenth, but I was still in a collaring mood. I was wide awake, propped up by a bottle of Mountain
Dew I’d bought from a vending machine at the Two-three station house. I lived on Mountain Dew and Cheetos these days. Before
I’d entered the police academy, I’d been on a strictly vegetarian raw-food diet. I ate only nuts and beans and fresh fruits
and vegetables, and this had done wonders for my energy level. I’d kept up this healthy routine through most of my recruit
semester, but the academy had had vending machines, too. Over time, I succumbed to the superior taste and convenience of snack
foods—first as a treat, then as a staple of my existence.

Now powered by caffeine, corn syrup, and trans fats, I still had this amazing energy, which made me feel more invincible.
If I could thrive on junk food at my age—eating like a teenager in my midthirties—then I thought I must be aging more slowly
than ordinary mortals. It didn’t matter what I put in my body or how much I abused it.

So when my colleagues were ready to sign out for the weekend, I remained on the hunt. Driving down Lexington Avenue toward
the Nineteenth station house, I kept one eye on the road and another eye out for traffic violations. Lexington at eleven P.M.
was still a bustling thoroughfare, but this kind of multitasking was second nature by now.

We were stopped at a red light four blocks from the precinct when a Nissan sedan pulled up along my side of the van. I looked
down and scanned the passenger compartment. The windows were not tinted, so I had a clear view of the interior, seeing two
men in front and a jacket laid across the back seat. While nothing criminal seemed afoot, I did notice a tiny infraction that
most cops would have ignored: a tree-shaped air freshener hanging from the rear-view mirror. I knew I’d take some heat from
my coworkers if I pulled the guy over for having an air freshener, so I didn’t say anything before I did it. When the light
turned green and the Nissan rolled into the intersection, I hit the roof lights.

Randall was the first to complain, “It’s thirty minutes before end of tour.”

The sergeant said, “What is it now?”

“Obstructed view,” I told him, just as the Nissan pulled over and came to a stop.

“Fine,” said Sergeant Watts. “But do you really want to risk stepping into a bag of shit this late at night?”

A bag of shit was anything that took a lot of time to deal with or exposed the officer to increased liability. Bags of shit
were what guys like Mulligan stepped in, not me. My feet barely touched the ground these days, so I ignored the sergeant’s
warning. I followed through with the car stop and ran the driver’s ID on the computer, which produced the following results:

NYS Supreme Court Warrant
: FAILURE TO APPEAR 05/19/03

Charge
: FELONY CRIMINAL SALE OF A
CONTROLLED SUBSTANCE

“Nice goin’, Bacon,” Sergeant Watts said. “Now we gotta toss the whole car.”

Because the driver was wanted for selling drugs, everything in his vehicle had to be turned inside-out. While I handcuffed
the driver and brought him into the van, the sergeant searched the inside of the Nissan, starting with the jacket on the backseat.
In the pockets, he found twelve small bags of crack cocaine, two unidentifiable white pills, and a marijuana joint. The driver
and his passenger both claimed the jacket belonged to someone else, but the law dictated that anyone within reachable distance
of these substances was culpable for their possession. This meant that the passenger, to whom I’d planned on giving the car
keys, also became a collar, and the vehicle I’d hoped to get rid of was now arrest evidence.

Watts, Witherspoon, and Randall helped me get my prisoners and the car back to the Nineteenth. After that, they were gone.
I had stepped into the proverbial bag of shit of my own choosing, and on the last tour of the week. They headed straight up
to the locker room, done with police work until Monday.

What ensued was a kind of lost weekend, except that much of what took place was fastidiously recorded into the public record.
Over a fourteen-hour period, I performed no fewer than 120 separate tasks, most of which resulted in some kind of official
document. Handling contraband was a stressful and exacting chore, since any mistake we made could be seen as an attempt to
divert evidence for our own purposes. On this collar, I had to account for three different types of drugs, two pocketfuls
of hundred-dollar bills, two cell phones, and one car. The joint alone required forty minutes and seven kinds of documentation
to process: a quadruplicate voucher, a paper security envelope label, a plastic security envelope label, a handwritten property
log entry, a typewritten property log entry, a letter of transmittal, and a request for laboratory analysis.

And there were the prisoners themselves. In addition to being strip-searched, questioned, fingerprinted, and photographed,
they both had to be fed and taken to the bathroom. I fervently believed in humane treatment for the accused—I just didn’t
much like to provide it myself. I’d vouchered their huge wads of cash first, not realizing they’d need something for the vending
machines, so I had to buy them snacks and bottled water all night with my own money. Of course, properly fed and hydrated
prisoners had to visit the toilet almost every hour, and I had to be cuffed to them when they did their business. Before we
left the Nineteenth Precinct late the next morning, I had handled, inspected, or facilitated the functioning of every part
of their bodies. Thankfully, both of them were cooperative and hygienic, as crack dealers went.