The Fence - Dick Lehr [40]
The next month, Mike and Craig were in their cruiser at 3:40
A.M., staking out a party when they saw two men leave the apartment building in a hurry. The men climbed into a car. Mike and Craig then heard on the radio that a shooting had occurred in the apartment. The dispatcher was calling for police units as well as an ambulance to respond. Mike and Craig were all over it. They turned on their lights, raced after the car, and cut it off. They arrested the two men inside and recovered a.38-caliber handgun from the car. The weapon was loaded with four live rounds and one spent shell.
Time and again, Mike and Craig thrust themselves into the thick of it. In the process they’d learned about each other. Both were tall and strong and took pride in their physical fitness. They discovered they complemented each other personality-wise—a bit of yin and yang. Craig ran hot—he was typically a step ahead at an incident, jumping in to size up the crime. “He liked doing that, you know,” said Mike. “Going inside, see what’s going on.” Mike ran cooler and quieter. He tended to work the perimeter.
It worked. They were a good fit. They made arrests—or assisted in arrests—that were clean, intense, and exciting. High-five police moments. Barely two years on the force, and Mike and Craig shared awards for exemplary police work. Their role in arresting the man who shot another officer, for example, resulted in a “medal of honor” in 1991. Then, in early 1993, they won a promotion to the elite gang unit. By January 25, 1995, Mike, having done well on the exam, was awaiting a promotion to sergeant.
Along the way, however, were nights when the crime fighting was not so clean, when in the heat of the moment the lines between the good guys and the bad guys became confused and complicated, when Mike Cox experienced déjà vu to the first time he was mistaken as a suspect. One episode was later during Mike’s rookie year, after he had completed his probation. He and several other officers were chasing a suspect on foot down a street in Mattapan. The suspect jumped over a fence. Mike ran along the fence to keep up with the suspect, and then he began climbing over it too. But as he climbed he felt someone grabbing at his legs, trying to pull him down. Mike turned and saw two officers. “There was apparently some mistaken identity,” Mike said, but the confusion was short-lived. “I was able to verbally say who I was, and that more or less ended the physical grabbing of me.” Mike wasn’t troubled by it. “I wasn’t punched or anything.”
Nor was he troubled by several other incidents. Hearing a report one night that an armed man was walking in back of a building, Mike and Craig headed over to investigate. They carefully made their way down an alley when they noticed an officer they knew standing in the dark. They assumed the officer recognized them. But he had not. Mike and Craig, dressed in hooded sweatshirts like a pair of gangbangers, continued walking toward the officer. The officer shouted, “Show me your hands, show me your hands!” He drew his gun. Finally Craig said something. “Mark, Mark—it’s me, Craig.”
The officer relaxed, and the suspicious persons incident was recorded officially as an “8-boy,” police code for no person to be found. Unreported was a mix-up that, in a blink, could have gone bad but luckily had not. For their part, Mike and Craig had not helped matters. They had not radioed ahead to say they were responding so that the officer in the alley would be on notice