The Narrator

I never saw the angels come. I know they were there. They had to be. But I never saw them. Maybe I was late each time and they had come from heaven and returned. Maybe my eyes were not ready, maybe my soul was not. Woodlawn Cemetery - almost in the 47th Precinct, NYPD   In The Bronx of the 1980s, if you were a cop and you worked "midnights" - 11.30 pm to 8.00 am - which we pretty much all did one out of every six weeks, we figured you'd have a 20% chance of ending your shift with a "SIDS baby." The calls seemed to come every dawn, and I'm certain the dispatchers tried to spread the pain... but still, you could count on this every night. It didn't take long for us to learn to try to hide. Even that Bronx was pretty quiet at 5.30 am, before people started moving toward the subways, before cars stolen and businesses burgled were discovered, but we'd all grab any call we could to be busy before, "child not breathing" came across the rad...

The rain was whipping up Fourth Avenue, and the air was brittle with salt and impending cold. But here on this third floor it was crazy hot as the radiators sizzled. Everybody was awake, the kind of wound up anticipation to be expected. I was too, certainly, but I was working on staying in character, so I was pretending to sleep, lying face down on one of the beds, wearing nothing but Irish flag colored bikini underwear, my arms stretched out above my head, as I breathed the smell of my own sweat.   When I had found my way here an hour ago after the run through the chill wet streets from the Smith-Ninth Street Station, unexpected routes on both trains and streets, slipping through the narrow alley alongside the Bodega around the corner, climbing the fence and then through the stair window of this place, I'd been soaked to the skin. As I took in the team that would cover me tonight, and make all the collars, I peeled my jeans, my jacket, my shirts, my socks off, ...

93 degrees. 92% humidity. Radio Car 1352. 2232 hours. 47 Precinct, Sector Eddie, which is not ours. Division 9 radio crackling, "holding 83 in the Four-Seven, anyone available?"   The Police are on the radio. "Every Breath You Take." MTV is the thing you have cable for right now. Limelight, in that old church downtown, is the hottest club, and Liam and I know a few of the bartenders, so we get in. Imus in the morning on WNBC - "Hear the new excitement from Rockefeller Center, Sixty-Six, W-N-B-C" - and Howard Stern in the afternoon keep the day shift laughing but now we're flipping through FM, the volume loud, as if it could drown out the dispatcher. I tell the guy I'm refusing to fight with to get lost. The sweat is pouring down my chest and back under the vest. we have no time for the kind of bullshit this moron and his buddies are trying to pull in the parking lot of the shopping center by Laconia and 2-3-3. We climb back into the ...

haimléise The platform was cold. Not freezing. Not winter or anything. But all I had on was a T-shirt and jeans - the day had been one of those autumn days when summer had rushed back in on a Gulf Stream wind but as the evening had set the wind had circled - and a chill night air was dropping from the streets down into the tunnels, and I was shivering, waiting for the train to come. I was working, but, it was hard to really understand that. I wasn't carrying a gun or a shield or even an ID card. I didn't have a bullet-proof vest on. I sure wasn't wearing a uniform. I hadn't been in a police building in almost two weeks. I was young and very thin and dirty and jumpy. There were no displays of confidence dressed with mirrored sunglasses. Just small wads of cash spread here and there among my clothes and six cigarettes and four joints in the Camel box jammed into my left front pocket. If I might have been professionally identified at all it was by a small code stampe...

I heard about it, of course, before I knew who was involved, and when you hear something like that you immediately do what everybody does: You blame the guy. "I wouldn't make that mistake." "I wouldn't of been in that position at all." "I'm smarter than that." "My vision is better." "I would've waited." Because if you don't blame the guy, it means it could happen to you. Denny was the kind of guy you just didn't expect in the academy. He'd been working as a nurse at Sloan-Kettering. He had two little kids. He was really, really smart. And pretty quiet. Sometimes he and I would stand at the edge of the parade deck during meal and watch the city below and talk about complicated things. We were never close pals or anything, but he was a friend.   It was a robbery in progress call. That's a bad one. You know there are weapons and you know you've got innocents involved and you know there...

I go first, sprinting from the car to the door of the project. Colin follows, but races across the width of the doorframe to put himself on the other side. Then I kick the door open, it is not locked, I already know that, we have watched them run inside, but I need the door to explode open, I need it to make a lot of noise, and I burst through and flatten myself up against the wall and the mailboxes, the stairway providing cover. I duck around and look up, gun in hand, and see no one. Using those old WWII hand gestures I let Colin know. He bounds past me and up to the first landing. We'd been drinking coffee, and eating doughnuts. And Colin was complaining about editorials in The New York Times , "it's just the government paper," he said, as usual. We were, I suppose, hidden by the El pillar, and the early morning newspaper trucks, but not so hidden that we couldn't see the drive-by hit, six or seven shots, sounding like a nine, blowing up the windows of tw...

   The radio asked us to "ten-one the house," so we stopped at the diner and I used the phone to call in. It was hot but not crazy, summer and very busy, but workable, just after dark on a Tuesday. I listened to the lieutenant, hung up, and called central. "Seven-Adam's going to be out on a job from the house," I said, "we'll advise." The rumor had flowed through the department an hour ago, the way it always does when a cop gets shot. A rookie in Manhattan was all we knew, but as we always tried to do, we'd all stopped and called home. The "I'm ok," call because the rumors spread through cop families too. I was home one night, sitting watching TV with Carolyn, and at 9:45 during a commercial break the news guy came on with his teaser. "Cop shot in The Bronx, details at Eleven." I looked at Carolyn and she looked at me and I understood something I simply hadn't before.   I told Colin what was going on and ...