Free The Big Fear by Andrew Case Page B

make judgments. Good for a laugh and an old story, but someone who would never have lasted at the new NYPD, even if they had let him stay.
    The call had come in at the Ebbets Field Apartments, on the border of Crown Heights and Flatbush. Twenty-six stories of misery, then, rising above a broad cement plaza that was itself a good twenty feet above street level. Once you climbed the stairs off of Bedford and into the houses, you were in another world. It wasn’t technically a housing project, but there wasn’t a soul inside that paid market rent. The whole thing had been a boondoggle from the start between a developer who knew someone in the Section 8 office and found a way to make a fortune off of poverty. The Dodgers had left, the stadium had been torn down, and affordable housing was all the rage. But it had never worked out to be anything other than a hellhole, a place where for thirty years the few honest people unlucky enough to be stuck there locked their doors and ran down the stairwells with their eyes to the floor, hoping not to be caught in the crossfire on their way to the street.
    The call had been vague, like they all were. Woman in distress. When they had arrived, Mulino and Ramsay had found her hiding in a Dumpster. Jeans, barefoot, topless, she was curled in a ball and bleeding from the head and neck. She wouldn’t speak to them and wouldn’t unlock her arms from around her knees, the only thing protecting the shame of her breasts from the two cops. Mulino didn’t blame her. Ramsay tugged at her arm and gave up. The paramedics could take care of her; he called for a bus and described her injuries. She muttered an apartment number and they muscled their way into the building and upstairs.
    They should have just shot the guy when they first saw him. That’s what Mulino had come to believe over the past twelve years. The door was open, the man was screaming incomprehensibly, and he was smashing everything in sight with a foot-long claw hammer. The television was in shards, there were dishes in tatters, about seven or eight good-sized gashes in the drywall. If they’d just pulled out their guns and opened fire, they would probably have been able to weather it.
    But this was just after Louima, not long past Diallo, and people remembered Baez and the others too. So Ramsay, out of character, had taken it slow. He’d pulled out his pepper spray—they had just upgraded from the chemical mace to the pepper spray, and all the officers had been encouraged to use it. The mace interfered with the nervous system—someone on angel dust wouldn’t even notice. Pepper spray swells the soft tissue of the eyes and throat. Even if you’re drugged out, you can’t do a thing if you can’t see and you can’t breathe. So after Ramsay had told the guy to stop, and instead he spun around with the hammer, Ramsay had let loose with the pepper spray. When the man went down, Ramsay had worked on cuffing him and Mulino had called in that they had one under and needed another ambulance too.
    Months later, in the trial room, Mulino had done his best. He had said he didn’t see Ramsay cuff the man; didn’t see how he was sitting; had been watching the stairway for the paramedics the whole time. He didn’t mention that Ramsay had pulled out a second set of cuffs and shoved the man’s face into the ratty carpet. He had pretended he hadn’t seen the knee to the back, the twisting of the neck. He had never heard the words positional asphyxia, and he figured that when the coroner came back and said there was cocaine in the man’s blood that would be the end of it. But that wasn’t the end of it. The paramedic had said that the man had been on his chest and rear-cuffed when they came, and somewhere in the Patrol Guide regulations on pepper spray it says you’re supposed to turn someone onto his side, because the coughing and hacking caused by the pepper spray is indistinguishable from the coughing and hacking of suffocation.
    So