Two Shifts in the East Precinct

It’d been almost ten years since Officer Burrow—now Sergeant—arrested me for simple battery and underage consumption. I was seventeen and already an alcoholic, already a pimple-faced delinquent held together by a rage that would take decades to untangle. I had an open beer in my pocket and three others empty and tossed over a fence just minutes before the fight began. When the kid, no older than I was, tackled me to the ground, the beer can spilled down my pants. When I punched back the first time, my knuckle split against the sharp edge of a tooth. The second punch came a while later once I freed my wrist, but missed entirely, as his body weight was pulled from atop me and replaced with another, much heavier and louder. Officer Burrow was shouting for me to cut it out, to roll over, put my hands behind my back. The beer can crumpled beneath the weight of two bodies, and I lay there panting, soaked through and useless.

            Just over a year later, it was Officer Burrow who shook my hand and welcomed me to the police academy. He had a knowing grin on his face. The smile of a man who had taken me to the police station the night I was arrested and sent me home with my clean record intact, never having seen the inside of a cell.

“Everyone gets one fuck up,” he told me then. I remember trusting him through his language, like saying fuck meant we shared some indecency that separated us from the rest of the world. I was waiting on a lecture that never came, my hands clenched between my knees like the handcuffs were still holding them together. There were swatches of red at my wrists, but even they were fading.

            It’d been almost ten years of knowing Burrow, owing him some credit for the trajectory of my life. He’d never once mentioned how I’d come to know him. Not to me, not to anyone else. But I felt it between us. I was like a kid, scared to disappoint him. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t look up to him, even if that came with the feeling of being looked down upon.

The week before Burrow was laid off, I had two consecutive 12-hour night shifts. It was on that first day that I pulled over a truck for failing to maintain its lane of traffic. I was out on the backroads past midnight, too dark then for me to see the law enforcement decal on the bumper. So it was only after I flipped my lights on and radioed in the license plate number that I recognized the truck to belong to Burrow.

            I hesitated before stepping from my squad. By then, dispatch had radioed back—say again?—and the brake lights on Burrow’s truck suddenly went out, pulling him briefly forward before they were back and the truck was slamming to a halt.

            I told dispatch to standby.

            Burrow’s face was staring at me from his driver side mirror. I was waiting for the moment of recognition, not yet convinced of what I was walking up to. At the window, Burrow was grinning, his eyes watery but still tracking me fine. He had his license in his hand, ready to hand it out before he saw me. He didn’t look surprised, just relieved.

            “How fast was I going, officer?” he attempted the joke, and slowly his hand retreated, the license disappearing back to its place in his wallet.

            “Hey, Sarge,” I said, greeted by the smell of alcohol wafting from inside the truck. I had to lie to him. “We got a reckless driver call,” like I hadn’t been following him for a mile. “Where you heading?”

            “Home—I’m just around the corner.”

            “No problem, no problem.” There was a heaviness in the air between us, on my end at least. Burrow’s mustache was slanted over his lopsided smirk. I thought about holding my hand out for his license but the card was buried away out of view. Without thinking, I took a step back, grabbing at my radio to look busy. “Just gimme a minute.”

            “I was texting my wife,” he said suddenly. “Know I shouldn’t have. If you gotta write me the ticket, I get it.”

            “Gotcha.” I shuffled back a few steps, hand still pressed to the button at the top of the mic. “Requesting LT,” I said to dispatch.

            Dispatch radioed back, 10-4.

            “Link,” Burrow called, a hand out the window like he’d thought he could reach me. He’d always called me that, except the day I graduated from the academy—that day I was Officer Lincoln, just that once and never again. Burrow was leaning his head out the window. It bobbed in place like it was floating along on rough water. “I really gotta get home,” he said. “To the wife.”

            I froze an inch from the question I knew I should be asking. I could feel the weight of being watched, of being scrutinized. There were Burrow’s glassy eyes and a hundred others strapped to my chest, recording. A courtroom, a chief, the local news channel.

            “How much did you drink tonight?” I blurted out, and the disappointment followed. Burrow pulled his head back and tutted at the notion. I crept forward. “I can smell it on you.”

            “You shouldn’t be making accusations like that,” he said, suddenly more coherent. I believed him for that split second, and I thought I could forget it all, go with my head hanging and apologize later, but the radio was sounding off again with a two minute ETA for the lieutenant and I knew I had to wait it out. It wasn’t too bad of an idea—the lieutenant could decide; it’d be out of my hands. “You called me in?” he asked, spit collecting at the sides of his mouth.

            “We’ll get it figured out,” I said and I almost shrugged like it was no big deal—like he’d be on his way in just a minute.

            “Turn your cam off, Lincoln. At least give me that.”

            I was watching him there from a distance, my hands at my vest, unsure what to say. The lieutenant was pulling up behind my squad. It was dark enough to see it coming, and when the LT came up beside me, he was sighing. Burrow turned away with a choked, exasperated noise.

            “Come talk to us out here for a minute,” the LT said beside me.

            Burrow stumbled his way to the asphalt. He threw his hands up as he stood there, eyes on me the whole time.

            “This is ridiculous,” Burrow muttered, then repeated it a second time, loud and angry.

            I was a seasoned officer, one of the longest standing in our precinct, but at that moment I might as well have been as green as I’d been on ride-alongs. I wanted to turn to the LT and ask him what to do, or if there was any real way out of this, but he answered before I could.

            “You gotta follow protocol,” he said. “Your cam on?”

            I nodded.

            “Keep it running.” He pulled out his phone and returned to his car, no doubt calling some higher rank above him.

            “You’re really gonna do this to me?” Burrow asked.             “I don’t have a choice,” I said with as much confidence as I could muster under his stare.

            “You always have a choice,” he spat back. “You know that better than anyone else.”

            The familiarity of rage swelled inside me. The lights from the two squads were blinking in opposite time, one red one blue, and the space between us glowed a steady purple.

            “You gonna do field sobriety exercises?” I knew his answer before he said it.

            “No, absolutely not.”

            A car drove by agonizingly slow. From beyond the noise, I could hear the lieutenant on the phone, his harsh whispers into the speaker. Burrow stared down at me with his dark, glassy eyes. I unlatched the handcuffs from my belt.

I was off of the night shift at seven, but didn’t make it home until after eight. Evie was up by then, and I found her hovering over a pan of eggs and a cup of coffee with milk. There were enough eggs for the both of us, more than enough coffee left in the pot. I kissed her from behind and, as I sidled toward the fridge, she held the bottom of my shirt in a delicate grasp. The fridge door forced its way between us.

            “I’m not very hungry,” I said. I crouched to grab the beers from back behind the leftovers. Evie always piled the food in front of them, like I’d forget they were there and see only the food we’d had for dinner two nights ago. I set one on the counter beside me and popped the tab on the other.

            “Was it a bad shift?”

            She did that a lot—tried to find the justifications for the way I was. Like if she could lead me gently to the reason I was upset, I might stop myself from retreating, from drinking so much. But I always had some reason. And maybe that’s why she never actually stopped me.

            “Yeah,” I huffed and drank down half the can in one go. My eyes watered from the carbonation. Evie waited for me to continue. She was always waiting, always patient.

            I took the cans and started toward the bedroom, knowing she would follow. I needed a shower but couldn’t be bothered. So I stripped down, finished off one beer and got under the covers before I spoke again.

            Evie sat with one leg folded beneath her, the other hanging off the edge of her side of the bed. She was facing me but wasn’t looking. There was always this thing between us, the same as it was now. Something about it was massive and impenetrable, and it lingered there alongside the painful knowledge it was of my own making.

            I told her the short version of the night.

“I hope he’s okay,” is what she said first. I popped open the next beer and rested it on my chest.

“He’ll sleep it off.” I let my eyes close at the notion of sleep, hoping to draw it near.

“Will they fire him?”

“I think so. Probably.”

“Jeez,” she said. “I know you guys were close.” She separated every other word with the faintest of pauses.

I opened my eyes to see what expression she held, and seethed silently to myself when I found her face to be still and blank. She was looking at her hands, pushing her cuticles back. I thought then about what my life would be if we didn’t last—if I carried on until I was a miserable old man like my father, or if I started on that seemingly inevitable decline that I’d been pulled from once but still held within reach. For a while, it was Burrow’s presence that held me back.

“It’s not like I could let him go,” I said, thinking only after the fact about what it must have told her about me. About who I’d been, and who I chose to be today. “My bodycam was recording.”

She hummed and stood from the bed. In a silence she looked totally unaffected by, she rounded to my side of the bed and collected the empty can from the nightstand.

“I’m sure that was hard for you,” she said. “After everything. That’s all.” And she was halfway to the door by then. Far enough that any subsequent anger from me would have to wait. I didn’t yell at her. Couldn’t.

“I’m taking a nap,” I called after her. “Shut the door behind you.” She did.

I rolled over and set the beer aside, my handprint still visible in the condensation. And I was suddenly hungry, suddenly awake and restless.

I left for my second twelve-hour shift an hour early under the pretense that I’d be at the gym. Instead I was at the station, sat at a computer opened to the officer database.

            Burrow became an officer in ’06, a detective in ’08 and a sergeant in 2016. He was listed for twelve different exemplary performance awards over the years. There was one spot on his record, written in large letters next to the verdict. “ENGAGED IN OFF-DUTY EMPLOYMENT WITHOUT AUTHORITY OR PERMISSION TO DO SO. — GUILTY.”

            His arrest hadn’t been entered in yet, but I was sure his mugshot was released to the public. When I typed his name into Google, I had to scroll past news articles with his name attached to them, a Facebook profile, and his contact information for the precinct. But there at the bottom was the arrest record, and when I opened the page, his sad, drunk face was staring back at me alongside my own name listed as the arresting officer.

            I held the cursor over the back button, but couldn’t click it until another officer walked by the large-windowed office, spotted me there, and swung around the door frame to say hello.

            I had to click back twice to see the safety of the empty Google page.

            “What the hell is everyone talking about?” It was Fitz, and he skipped any pleasantries.

            “Burrow?” I asked, already agitated. I’d been forcing myself through the exact timeline of the night since it happened. The black rubber of his tires sliding past the white reflective paint on one side of the road, then the double-yellow on the other.

            “Yeah, Burrow.”

            I could only shrug. I moved my hands back to the keyboard like I was going to type something.

            “What’d he blow?”

            “Point-three-six.”

            Fitz whistled. He crossed his arms over his chest, his eyes trained on something distant. “You know how often you gotta drink to keep yourself standing at that level? I didn’t even know he was an alcoholic.” I accidentally pressed the letter K with my middle finger. “Went drinking with him a couple times. You were there—ever notice anything weird?”

            I sighed and shook my head at the blank screen. “I don’t know.”

            “Well, no one’s above the law I guess.”

            When he left, I backspaced far beyond the one letter I’d typed.

I was called out as the primary unit to a code 15 after an hour of sitting in a median not far from the station. I pulled up on the emptying parking lots down by the pier. It was that in-between time of the night, where half the city was trying to sleep and the other half was heading out for the night, and both of them called the police to deal with the other. Dispatch just told me it was a noise complaint, and when I pulled up on a quiet street corner, I knew it must have been one of those situations where the noise mysteriously disappears as soon as the red and blue lights show up. I stepped out to look around anyway, and regardless, I had an address for the call, so I’d have to go knocking.

            “I’m on scene,” I said into the radio. “Gonna find the caller.”

            I knew the area from the calls we got during the spring break months. Two streets down, there was a double roundabout where I worked crash cases in the cooler months when the tourists came down. Here, though, there were only a handful of beach-adjacent houses. Even the closest bar was another quarter mile away.

            I heard the muted clatter of something falling close by as I made it to the sidewalk. I could see dark shards scattered within the grass, glinting at every red and blue flash from the cruiser. I had my hand on my taser as I rounded a blind corner between two houses, then another. Beyond them, there was only a large stretch of grass before the dock, and standing in it was a figure with his back to me, his arm raised just above his head. He threw what he was holding at the hard brick of the house in front of him, and with unsteady feet he stumbled forward and narrowly avoided falling over. The glass bottle shattered where he threw it, a hundred pieces raining down to the dirt.

            I knew without any real evidence that this kid was drunk. And I knew pretty quick that he was young, too.

            He turned before I could call out to him and, now empty-handed, he took in the sight of me and stepped forward. “What?” he said, and I knew that lack of sense—that absence of self-preservation that could walk you right to the edge of a cliff and have you peer over the edge without any fear.

            “Everything okay over here?”

            “None of your business, pig,” he spat back.

            That kind of talk didn’t get to me so much as it did for others, at least I liked to think so. Being an officer was just a job of ruining people’s days, and it was something I’d grown a thick skin against. We’re pigs, monsters who break up families and end careers, we’re corrupt and out to get people, and when we help, we’re heroes. No middle ground.

            “Someone called in a noise complaint. You know anything about that?”

            He shrugged.

            “Do you live here?”

            “Am I being detained?” There was a recent influx of that question—I think most people thought it was some kind of leg up on us.

            “Yes, actually,” I said. “You’re drunk and you’re throwing glass at someone’s house.”

            “And that’s a crime?”

            “A few different ones.”

            He shrugged again.

            “You got ID on you?” I wasn’t even sure if he was eighteen, but I guessed he wasn’t. Surely younger than twenty-one.

            “I’m not giving you shit,” he spat, holding his arms out like a challenge.

I dropped my hand from my belt, trying to return to that mindset I’d had at his age. I relaxed my posture, considered my tone. And then I did something I’d never done before. I clicked off my bodycam and watched the red light blink twice before it faded.

            With a subtle step forward, I said, “Tell me what’s going on then, at least. You having a bad night?”

            It could have worked, maybe on someone else. But as soon as I asked, he took off running, past the docks and houses, and I chased after him. He didn’t get far, his legs unsteady, and as he ran, I noticed he was barefoot, which probably didn’t help.

I didn’t want to but I had to secure him. Still, I tried to keep him upright as I did. He slipped my grasp at the exact second I started to cuff him, and I hadn’t even begun reaching back out for his wrist before he ducked under my arm, spun around and threw a clumsy punch at my face.

We struggled about for another minute before I had a knee on his back, holding him there in the grass as he yelled obscenities at me from where he lay.

Safely in handcuffs, though, the kid calmed to perfect stillness. He walked himself obediently to the back seat of my squad car, got in, and leaned back without being prompted to when I moved to buckle him in. I slammed the door shut with a violent shove and turned away before I reached a hand up to my face to check for any damage.

            There was no blood, just a tenderness under the touch of my shaking hand. Instinctively I reached for my radio, clicked it on to speak. For a long moment, I said nothing, just worried at the painful part of my lip.

            Then, before I could consider it, I called the code for my meal hour. It was only nine.

Dispatch radioed back, 10-4.

I found his ID when I pulled him out to be searched. His name was Viktor and he would be seventeen next month, which wasn’t all that surprising to me. Usually, I’d have more to do on scene, reports to call in, but I stopped myself from doing any of that, and instead drove straight to the station.

For half the drive, Viktor carried on insulting me from behind the barricade. I could have turned up the radio, but I left the volume low and listened as he yelled, though I refused to respond.

“I should’ve hit you harder,” he said, which soon became “I could take you in a fight,” then “You’re a bitch,” and “You’re only a cop to compensate for your small dick.” I’d heard it all before.

“You got a wife?” he asked suddenly, and maybe it was under the guise that I wanted to offer him the attention he craved, but I felt an urge to respond and so I did.

“Yes, I do,” I said.

“I bet she hates your fucking guts.”

He stayed quiet the rest of the drive, though the air between us was heavy with the sensation I’d lost something there to him—some ground I could not gain back.

At the station, I locked my gun inside the locker and walked Viktor in by the arm, passing the woman at the desk up front with a silent nod. I switched his cuffs to one hand, anchored the other side to the table, and he tugged at them every few seconds in some show of protest.

Strangely enough, he did cooperate as I filled out the processing form with his information. I was aware once again of the body cam on my chest, like its lack of power had changed something about its presence there.

I missed Evie then. I often did when I was away, drawn to the promise of our quiet home and her company, but I always returned home, on edge and tired, and when she tried to speak to me I’d wish it would end. She always had questions—who did I arrest, did anyone fight us, how was this or that person doing? I rarely humored her, settling for vague, clipped answers which she took at their minimal value and attempted to contort into something more interesting. I’d feel bad later, while she talked with her mom or someone on the phone. She felt very far in those moments, like I’d let her slip away, and I wished she would hang up and return to me.

She only spoke to me like that when I was exhausted, that’s what I decided. She could never figure out when I needed her, or maybe our schedules were just too opposite. I looked ahead to retirement, a decade out, imagining then life would be simple. We just had to stick it out till then, and for four years we’d done it.

I thought maybe tonight I ought to try harder. I would tell her about tonight, every last detail, and she’d watch me with wide eyes and perfect attention. An urge rose within me, an urge for her to understand what tonight felt like, but when I searched within myself for a word to describe it, I came up empty.

The boy had stopped tugging at his cuffs eventually, and I considered undoing them, trying to cut through some of the tension between us.

“If I take those off, are you going to be cool?”

“Sure,” he said, and so I did. He rubbed at his wrist and pulled it closer to his chest, eyeing me with a look still brimming with hatred.

            I kept looking over my shoulder, knowing what I’d done, what I was continuing to do. It was a quiet night and the arrests had been slow, thank god. I was the only one in the processing office, my palms sweaty as I scribbled uselessly on Viktor’s forms.

In the fluorescent light, I found him covered with bruises in various stages of fading. There was this one on his neck that swirled around one side, splotchy and inconsistent like a pathway of veins.

I looked up his name and found his record easily. It was riddled with status offenses—truancy, curfew violations, but mostly running away which was listed there a handful of times. The runaway offenses each had a mugshot, spanning the time of what seemed to be his entire older childhood. The first one documented looked as if he could’ve been thirteen or so, his face round and full and his front teeth still seeming too big for the rest of his features. I clicked through the rest, seeing him slowly age until he looked close to how he did now. But here, he looked older somehow, his eyes pale and heavy.

He was on probation—had been for three months—and the conditions of it were lengthy: no drinking, staying in school, counseling—pretty typical. Still, I read over it in its entirety, noting each one and its relevance in this moment of him sitting there across from me. Any charge would be a violation—the courts would send him away. I continued reading. I was buying time anyway, pretending to be doing something important. The end of my lunch was nearing, and the tension of time passing was building inside me.

“Listen, Viktor,” I began and cleared my throat when I drew his attention. “I’m not gonna book you on anything.”

He looked up, utterly confused. My lip wasn’t even hurting anymore. I didn’t think it would even be swollen by the time I got home. That first night I met Burrow, he’d taken an abrasion to the elbow as he wrestled to restrain me. I remember staring at it from across a similar processing room as he took down my information—how it had smeared up his arm and dried to a dark brown. I thought he might have a scar from it, but I’d never found the opportunity to check. Viktor was still staring; maybe he could see the swelling there now in my lip, as temporary as it would be.

“Everyone gets a fuck up,” I said and he laughed at me. He laughed in that bitter way that teenagers had perfected, somehow more condescending than someone older could manage. Like they had it all figured out. Everything in the world.

“You cops are all the same,” he said, shaking his head, the laughter from just a second before long gone. I could feel the subtle anger write itself across my face, but I said nothing for that moment. Viktor leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest. “What? You want me to thank you?”

            “I’m trying to keep you out of juvie,” I said with a hurried glance over my shoulder to the exit.

“And you’re a cop, so you can do whatever the hell you want.” He maintained perfect eye contact and I did the same, but my heart was pounding, probably more than his if I had to guess. I tapped my pen on the table, then realized it was a nervous behavior and made myself stop. He sat forward with such force, the chair scraped along the floor. “Whatever, just let me leave.”

I clicked the pen twice and found myself even angrier at the sound.

“You need to call a ride,” I said. “I need to release you to an adult.”

Viktor held his hand out with no hesitation.

“Give me my phone, then.”

And so I retrieved it from his belongings, the half-filled paperwork still in my hand with the pen. On the way back, I stopped at the shredder, buried the paper halfway down the pile of others, all lying there awaiting the end of the day when they’d each be destroyed.

There was a fast food joint close enough to the station that I could stop in between calls so it was where I went after I sent Viktor on his way. Inside the cafe, three girls were giggling, huddled together near the espresso machines and the grills when I walked in. Our gazes met and I forced a polite smile to them. Quickly, each one started to move,  leaving their huddle and grabbing at random things within reach. Two of them exchanged looks and whatever was being spoken between them ended with the closer one meeting me at the register.

I remember early on in my career when I couldn’t make it through any interaction without some grand show of respect—a free drink, a thank you for your service. It was the kind of thing that made my skin prickle with a strange sensation.

Now, it’d been a while since something like that happened. I didn’t know what I preferred more, but I thought of Burrow and his exemplary service awards, how he had earned so many over the years. Exemplary—something to be replicated, something the precinct strived to be each day. Most of us anyway.

The girl gave me my coffee and a sandwich with a mumbled thank you, and I said it back. I started to leave and in the reflection of the glass door I could see the girls drifting close together, their hands twisting rags or carrying cups—anything that made them look busy.

There was only one time I’d been placed under investigation at the precinct. I was a rookie then and a civilian reported me for excessive force. Administrative leave was the consequence, should I have been found guilty. But there was no hearing. There was no consequence. I heard nothing back from HQ.

Later that same week, Burrow had seen me out at a gas station and bought us each a Gatorade. He looked at me with a grin like we were children in on some grand secret. He said nothing outright about knowing. He asked me about Evie.

So I told him she was great—that we were redoing the kitchen because she hated the way it’d come with the house. Everything was in the wrong place, she’d said—the fridge too close to the oven, the counter space broken up unevenly by the appliances. He nodded along and drank down a quarter of his drink. He probably wasn’t even listening.

“You know,” he said as soon as I stopped speaking. “I always knew you were going to be a good cop. From the night I met you, I think.”

“Thank you,” I said when nothing else occurred to me.

“It takes a lot—we put up with a lotta bullshit. Takes a man who’s seen a lot to work a job like this. Most don’t have it in them.” He put his hand on my shoulder, then pushed from the hood of his squad and told me he’d see me later—that we needed to meet up some night, get some drinks and catch up. It had been a while.

I was left there with my unopened Gatorade in the brisk November air. The cool plastic felt strange in my hands, like it was leeching the last bit of warmth left in them. I watched Burrow drive away and remembered the pending investigation. The week before it had worried me incessantly. But now, being on paid leave didn’t sound so bad. I made a mental note to ask if anyone knew how long it’d be until I heard the outcome, but a shame rose up within me and I knew I never would.

Two weeks after those two consecutive night shifts, I’d pull the same type of manila envelope from my mailbox, and inside would be the department’s letterhead alongside the date I found Viktor and the notice that I was under investigation written below it. BODY-WORN CAMERA VIOLATION.

PENALTY: COMMAND DISCIPLINE, VACATION DAYS (5 DAYS).

            The same dread as the first time would overcome me, and I’d read each line carefully, over and over. Fitz would come in behind me, zipping his vest in the front, and he’d chuckle at my concerned face.

            “Well, well,” he’d say and clap me on the back. “Happens to the best of us.” And then he’d leave.

I was home late again after that second shift, but this time Evie wasn’t there in the kitchen. She’d left me coffee in the pot. A mug sat ready beside it.

In the fridge, there were no leftovers from dinner. The beer was unobscured, three gone from the plastic rings holding them together. The taste of the latte from the cafe was still on my tongue, acrid and sour, and I grabbed a can to wash it away. Behind me the coffee machine gurgled, and from down the hall I could hear Evie walking closer. I stood waiting, knowing she’d find me there at the fridge, silent and drinking, and I knew she would be smiling—the same way she always did.

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Rachel Shaver recently graduated from Eckerd College with a BA in creative writing and a minor in literature. She lives in Tampa, Florida with her twin sister and spends her days consuming media in all forms. She has been published in Collision Literary Magazine and worked as editor-in-chief for Eckerd Review, as well as the editorial team for Cleaver Magazine and Creation Magazine.