Shards (4 page)

In the Fishbowl, I observed how different cops and receiving desk officers treated their detainees. I also learned how to build a rapport with the arrestees and the patrol officers. When I would take the detainees to their cells, I heard a lot of complaints about their treatment by arresting officers. I learned what officers were dicks and what officers were respected. There is a quote by Frank Barron—“Never take a person's dignity, it's worth everything to them and nothing to you.” I felt everyone should be treated with respect, even those that broke the law. That is what I began to learn in the Fishbowl, and that lesson was hammered home to me when I hit the road again.

My life at this time revolved around work. I would get up at four a.m. to go to the fitness center, and then report to the Fishbowl for an eight-to-twelve-hour shift, studying arrest records and reading reports on Report Warrior, the template we used to record information about our cases. After that, it was back to the gym before going home to sleep for a few hours. I was in the best shape of my life, but my life had been funneled down to work and the gym. No hobbies. No beach. No social life. All my friendships from Lulu's had faded quickly once I became a cop, and my long-distance relationship with Dalton wasn't going so well.

I loved my life, but I was lonely.

Around this time, I ran into Officer Davis, the Hawaiian officer I had first seen in Plans and Training. He came into the Fishbowl with an arrestee, and I felt that connection again.

It turns out he did too.

He said, “You made it through the academy, huh?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Congratulations. And I hear you'll be joining us in Bravo Watch.”

Even I hadn't heard this yet.

“It will be great to have you,” he said. “You look like you've been hitting the gym.”

I turned red with embarrassment. “Thanks, Officer Davis,” I said. I was planning to visit Dalton in Miami soon and had become obsessed with wowing him with my body.

“If we're going to be working together you have to call me by my first name,” Officer Davis said.

“Okay, Charles,” I said.

“Nah, my close friends call me by my Hawaiian name. Keawe.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Say it,” he said, teasing me. “Ke-a-we.”

“Okay,” I said again. “Keawe.” I knew he was flirting with me. I also knew he was married.

I had a few days off between leaving the Fishbowl and starting my first assignment, and I used them to visit Dalton in Miami. Seeing him when I got off the plane felt wonderful, but within minutes I could tell something wasn't right. He was gentlemanly, but he felt distant and cool, and I didn't fit in with any of his friends, who couldn't get past the idea that I was a cop. They were all deciding between getting law degrees or MBAs. On the last night of my visit, we went bowling, and his sister said to me, “You seem nice so I just thought I should tell you. He's cheating on you.”

That was the end of our long-distance romance.

•  •  •

Back in Maui, my first assignment after the Fishbowl was Happy Valley. These are the largest projects on Maui and are mostly full of local Hawaiians, with a mix of Filipinos and a few white families. All poverty, all drugs. Ice—as methamphetamine is called in Hawaii—is an enormous problem in Maui, and Happy Valley is where the ice epidemic is hitting the hardest.

I was scared shitless working in Happy Valley. In MPD, you're solo—no one has partners—and if you're white, you stand out. Even more so if you're blond and a girl. I was a target for a lot of people because I was new, and they wanted to test me and see how far I would go.

Gangs from all over the island meet to fight in Happy Valley. If the Happy Valley Boys are going to beef with the Kihei Boys, or the Lahaina Boys are going to beef with the Wailuku Boys, they're going to do it in Happy Valley. When the cops are called, there's
always the chance you'll be the first car there, so you have to react. You're not going to sit in a patrol car and wait for backup while potentially someone's getting hit in the head with a bat.

On my first felony traffic stop in Happy Valley, I was working Wailuku beat 10. An undercover officer called in and said, “Hey guys, I see this stolen car headed down Main Street.”

I was so excited. I'd never done a felony traffic stop before, and I was just a minute away. When I got there I was alone. I identified the stolen car and lit it up. When the car pulled over, I got out of my patrol car and pointed my firearm at the car. A guy got out of the passenger side, pulling out these two giant pit bulls behind him.

“I'm letting them go,” he said. “You watch it.” The pit bulls snarled, straining at their leashes.

I started to shake, thinking I might have to shoot the guy, and if I did, he would let go of the dogs. I wasn't sure I could shoot both of them before they got to me. Meanwhile, the female on the driver's side was trying to toss her dope, the radio was blasting for me to update, and my firearm hand was shaking. I was behind the driver's side door and could hear the sirens, but at this point I was still solo.

“Put those dogs back in the car,” a deep, confident voice ordered.

That voice was
mine
. I don't have that normal command presence that men or butch women have, but I do have this calm
man
voice that comes over me when I'm really nervous. I used that voice, and it startled the guy. I told him again to put the dogs away, and lo and behold, he did. I closed in on him, and when my beat partners finally showed up, we found a bunch of dope in the car and made the arrests.

I couldn't believe it—my first big awesome case. I was a cop.

I felt strong. Untouchable. Badass.

Until the next week.

One of my beat partners got into a high-speed pursuit on Honoapiilani Highway, and I joined in the pursuit. Abruptly, the guy we were pursuing turned his truck off the highway and onto a dirt road headed for the Maui Block. The Maui Block is an area of wilderness above Wailuku where most criminals hide out because it's treacherous and hard for us to navigate.

I was considered a pretty aggressive driver throughout recruit school and was keeping pace with the pursuit. The next thing I knew, I was looking at water. The nose of my patrol car was pointed down and I had to brace myself against the steering wheel to keep from falling into the windshield.

I was in some sort of Maui Block swamp, stuck in my car because of the angle—not to mention the water all around me. Thankfully the water was not very deep—it barely covered the engine block. I was going to radio in my predicament as soon as I felt the chase was over, but before I could do that, I saw some lights behind me and heard a bunch of laughter. My beat partners approached my car as I rolled down the window.

“Need some help, Alli?” one of them asked, and I thought the others were going to die laughing. I was on the verge of tears.

“Don't worry, honey. We'll get you out of there,” one of the guys said condescendingly. Turns out they had caught the man we were chasing, and they made him use his own truck to tow me out of the ditch. For that they let him go. One of the guys took pictures, and they had lots of laughs, but they were decent about it. They never told any of the brass. It was the most embarrassing thing I had gotten myself into, but after a day or two I found it as funny as they did. Keawe kidded me about it in the station, and I was able to laugh with him. I guess it took badass me down a peg.

•  •  •

In Happy Valley, I earned the reputation of being a good cop. I wasn't arrest-happy like some of the others. If a guy was driving drunk and I knew he didn't have the money to bail himself out or pay the court for the DUI fine, I would make his wife come pick him up. When people living in that kind of poverty don't pay a traffic ticket because they can't spare seventy bucks, they get picked up and sent to jail. Then they can't work, and their families fall even further into poverty. I tried to keep that from happening.

We didn't have quotas when it came to writing traffic violations, but there was an unspoken (but sometimes spoken) requirement from our sergeants to issue traffic tickets regularly. In attempts to produce drug arrests stemming from traffic stops, I pulled people over all the time and learned all the traffic violations and even county codes, but I rarely, rarely wrote traffic tickets. I was often scolded by my sergeants for not issuing more traffic violations, but I felt that traffic citations were the wrong way to enforce the law. When people drove recklessly, I pulled them over, warned them, and enlightened them on how to drive. Why issue a hundred-dollar ticket to people in an economy where we all knew they probably wouldn't be able to pay?

Cops could be so insensitive when it came to issuing tickets. They just couldn't see the big picture. Often an officer would issue a standard hundred-dollar citation to someone who couldn't afford car insurance. If the woman is making minimum wage and has to choose between paying her traffic ticket or feeding her family, she won't pay the ticket. Then a warrant is issued for an arrest, and she is visited by a rookie patrolman at her home during dinner and arrested for contempt of court for failure to pay a traffic ticket. Of course, the asshole rookie cop doesn't take the time to figure out where her children could go while he takes her in because he's on a deadline and needs to get his arrest report done, so CPS is called
and the children are removed from the home. The woman didn't have the money to pay the ticket, so why would she have the money to now bail herself out of jail? She's kept in county lockup until her arraignment, misses work—no call, no show—so she's fired. When she finally makes it to her arraignment, the judge scolds her, orders her to pay the court, and releases her. At that point, her children are in the custody of CPS and she no longer has a job, so CPS won't release the children to her. She can't find a new job because she has recently been arrested, and her life is officially effed up because of one traffic ticket.

That is not the reason I became a cop.

However, the second a guy hit or even threatened to hurt another person, he was going to jail. They always knew that about me in Happy Valley.

MPD covered three islands in
Maui—Maui, Molokai, and Lanai—and it was the policy of the department to send rookies out to one of the smaller islands for patrol. After Happy Valley, the sergeant sent me to Lanai for a one-year assignment.

I wasn't thrilled about it. Lanai was a tiny little island, forty-five minutes by ferry from Maui, a backwater town with mostly dirt roads and not a single stoplight. It was a small community—three thousand people, predominantly Filipino, predominantly Catholic. I had no idea what I would do there.

My only consolation was that I was going to have a dog to take with me, a 180-pound gentle mastiff named Mo. My soon-to-be beat partner on Lanai, Walker, had agreed to take Mo from one of his church members. Mo's owner, a woman, had recently died, and her husband couldn't stand to keep Mo around because he was too much of a reminder of his wife. A dog breeder himself, Walker
knew that Mo would do best with a female and asked me if I would take her. Without thinking, I said yes, though my landlord in Kihei freaked out until he saw how mellow and friendly Mo was. I had never had any dealings with mastiffs before and had no idea a dog could be so sensitive and loving. Mo became an important part of my life almost immediately.

My sergeants threw a going-away party for me before I left for Lanai, a huge barbecue at Sergeant Alvarez's house in Lahaina. Everyone came—my fellow recruits and all of my beat partners from Bravo Watch. I rarely drank alcohol, but I drank a couple of cans of Heineken that night—the chosen beer of most MPD officers.

Of course Keawe was there. With Dalton out of the picture, I had been fighting my attraction to him. Once we started working together, it was hard for either of us to deny that something was brewing between us, but Keawe was a married man.

I wore a long-sleeved gauzy shirt, and several times that night I caught Keawe watching me. At one point he came up and whispered in my ear, “Nice outfit, but it covers up too much of you.” I found this very flattering, and that bothered me. Part of me was actually relieved that I was leaving because I was worried about what might happen between us if I stuck around.

I put off my departure until the last possible moment and had to leave straight from the party to catch the last ferry of the night to Lanai.

When it was time for me to go, Keawe walked me to my car, where Mo was quietly sleeping in the backseat. As I opened the door, Keawe said, “I don't know what I'm going to do without you, Alli.” To my horror, he leaned in to kiss me. I quickly turned my head so he ended up kissing my cheek.

“Hey,” I said. “What are you doing?”

“You know what I'm doing,” he said.

“I also know that you have a wife,” I said angrily.

I got into my car and slammed the door. As I drove away, I tried to brush off his behavior. He had been drinking and was being a dog, the way a lot of cops are dogs. But in the end, I was so pissed at him for threatening our friendship that once I got to Lanai I stopped taking his calls.

On Lanai, Mo became a station dog. He wasn't eating very well—Walker thought he was in mourning for his old owner—so I wanted to keep him with me all the time. I didn't even ask my sergeant—I just brought him into work one day and everyone loved him. He started sleeping in the report-writing room and riding in my patrol car. He got the reputation for being a police dog, but he was never deputized. I found Mo to be a great tool for proactive police work. If I made a traffic stop, all he had to do was peek his head out the back window and the driver would cooperate. He rode on the ferry with me back and forth, and when people saw him coming, they just assumed he was a drug dog. There were always a few backpacks with dope in them left behind when Mo and I were on the ferry.