The Fence - Dick Lehr [64]
They’d run the length of a couple of football fields when Kenny drew his Glock semiautomatic handgun. “Fucking stop!” he yelled.
Smut did, and he raised his arms. “You don’t have to shoot me.” Smut did not turn around. He yelled he was not armed. “I haven’t done anything.” Kenny ordered Smut to get down on the ground on his belly. Smut did, with Kenny’s help. “I pushed him with my forearm on the back of his shoulder blades.”
Smut did not resist. He was worried. He had seen plenty back at the fence, a stampede of cops beating a man he thought was Marquis. Smut was worried he was next—that this officer with the gun was “going to come and jump on me.”
But it turned out he didn’t have to worry. Kenny put his gun back in its holster, leaned over the drug dealer, and snapped on a pair of handcuffs.
When Mike turned to see what had hit him, he was hit a second time. His head exploded, and he could not see. His only thought was wondering why he did not feel more pain. “I just remember saying, like, Ouch, to myself.” It was a strange question to be asking, as if his mind had left his body and taken up a position of clinical observation.
The first blow to the back of his head had rocked his brain, causing it to collide with the inside of his skull. The trauma triggered an inflammatory response of infection-fighting cells. Mike’s head began swelling immediately, a bump the size of an egg.
The second blow then ripped open the right side of Mike’s forehead. Blood began pouring from a laceration along his hairline that was nearly three inches long. Next Mike was pulled off the fence, and he fell toward the front of the marked police cruiser that was to the right of the Lexus. More blows followed, ferocious blows. Mike’s radio fell to the ground by the front of Dave Williams’s cruiser.
He was down on all fours, wobbly like a dog on its last legs. He lifted his head and saw a puzzling image. “It looked like an officer,” he thought. But that was crazy, a hallucination. Mike looked again, but the initial impression would not vanish: It was a cop, a white cop. “He was standing in front of me.” Mike tried to raise his head up higher to get a better look. But the only thing he saw was a boot coming flush into his face.
Now Mike felt the pain—pain in his face, his head, his shoulders, his back. The kick was followed by more blows. He curled his arms over his head for protection against the blows to “all sides of my body, from different directions.”
He fought to stay conscious; he wanted to see who was doing this to him—and why? Blood ran from his nose and mouth. He was alternately conscious and semiconscious, and he’d lost any sense of time. The blows to the head happened so fast, but now everything seemed to be happening in a clouded slow motion.
“I don’t know how long it took in actual time,” he said.
Then, suddenly, it stopped. There was quiet, too. “I saw that there’s no one, there’s no one there.” Mike was alone. He struggled to get back up on all fours. He crawled to the rear of the nearby cruiser. “I used it to lift myself,” he said. “I was having trouble breathing and standing.”
He tried to balance himself. His hands swished in the blood on the car’s trunk—his blood. He was facing the end of Woodruff Way with the hole in the fence. Then he detected that someone was standing a few feet away. He heard the man saying something. But in the thick fog that had overtaken him, he could not make out the words right away.
Mike then realized the man was ordering him to submit to an arrest. Mike couldn’t believe this. He looked and saw a black officer. It was Ian Daley, but Mike didn’t know that; all he saw was the uniform. Mike began trying to explain who he was, but blood, not words, spit from his mouth. The officer seemed disgusted and jumped back a step. Mike heard the man yelling at him to put his hands behind his back.
Mike couldn’t believe this. He felt sore and dizzy and like