Captain Pekach probably wouldn't say anything. He was a good guy, and before he made captain they had worked for him when he was a lieutenant in Narcotics, but that sure hadn't made them look smart.
And an hour after that a northbound Buick had clipped a Ford Pinto in the ass, spinning him around and over into the southbound lane, where he got hit by a Dodge station wagon, which spun him back into his original lane. Nobody got hurt bad, but there wasn't much left of the Pinto, and the Buick had a smashed-in grille from hitting the Pinto and a smashed-in quarter-panel where the Pinto had been knocked back into it by the Dodge. The insurance companies were going to have a hard time sorting out who had done what to whom on that one. It had been forty-five minutes before they'd gotten that straightened out, before the ambulance had carried the guy in the Pinto and his girlfriend off to the hospital and the wreckers had hauled the wrecked cars off.
Sergeant William "Big Bill" Henderson had shown up at the crash site about five minutes after they'd called it in, even before the ambulance got there. He clearly got his rocks off working accidents.
First he called for another Highway car, and then he took over from Charley McFadden, who by then had a bandage on the forehead of the guy in the Pinto where he'd whacked his head on the door and had him and his girlfriend calmed down and sitting in the back of the RPC.
He sent Charley down the expressway to help Hay-zus direct traffic around the wreck. And then once the other Highway car and then the ambulance and the wreckers showed up, he really started to supervise. He told the ambulance guys to put the guy in the Pinto in the ambulance, which wasn't really all that hard to figure out, since he was the only one bleeding. Then he told the wrecker guys how to haul away the Pinto and the Buick. He even got his whistle out and directed traffic while that was going on.
Sergeant Henderson, in other words, confirmed the opinion (asshole, blowhard) Officers McFadden and Martinez had formed of him when he delivered his little pep talk at Bustleton and Bowler before sending them on patrol.
Neither Charley nor Hay-zus had liked standing in the middle of the expressway, directing traffic. They had especially disliked it after the southbound lane had been cleared, and four hundred and twenty assholes had passed them going fifty miles an hour two feet away while gawking at the crumpled Pinto and the other cars.
It had to be done, of course; otherwise the assholes would have tried to drive right over the Dodge before they got that out of the way. Both privately wondered if the Highway guys got used to having two tons of automobile whiz past them-whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh – two feet away at fifty miles an hour, or if they were scared by it.
But directing traffic did temper their enthusiasm to enforce rigidly the Motor Vehicle Code insofar as it applied to permitted vehicular speeds. There were several things wrong with stopping a guy who was going five or ten miles over the posted speed limit but doing nothing else wrong.
First, there was something not quite right about handing a guy a ticket for doing something you knew you had done yourself. Then there was the fine; and there were a lot of points against your record in Harrisburg for a moving violation and so many points and you lost your license. And finally, the goddamn insurance companies found out you had a speeding ticket and they raised your premiums.
If a guy was going maybe seventy where the limit was fifty-five, or he was weaving in and out of traffic or tailgating some guy so close that he couldn't stop, that was something else: Ticket the son of a bitch and get him off the road before he hurt somebody.
That made the other things wrong with handing out tickets worthwhile. You never knew, when you pulled some guy to the side of the road to write him a ticket, what you were going to find. Ninety times out of a hundred it would be some guy who would be extra polite, admit he was going a little over the limit, and maybe mention he had a cousin who was an associate member of the FOP and hope you would just warn him.
Four times out of a hundred it would be some asshole who denied doing what you had caught him doing; said he was a personal friend of the mayor (and maybe was); or that kind of crap. And maybe one time in a hundred, one time in two hundred, when you pulled a car to the side and walked up to it, it was stolen, and the driver tried to back over you; or the driver was drunk and belligerent and would hit you with a tire iron when you leaned over and asked to see his license and registration. Or the driver was carrying something he shouldn't be carrying, something that would send him away for a long time, unless he could either bribe, or shoot, the cop who had stopped him.
And one hundred times out of one hundred, when you pulled a guy over on the Schuylkill Expressway, when you bent over and asked him for his license and registration, two-ton automobiles went fifty-five miles per hour two feet off your ass-whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.
At five minutes past nine, heading north on the Schuylkill Expressway, Officers McFadden and Martinez spotted a motorist in distress, pulled to the side of the southbound lane.
"The time of day, prevailing weather conditions, the traffic flow, and other considerations will determine how much assistance you may render to a motorist in distress," Sergeant Big Bill Henderson had lectured them, "your primary consideration to be the removal or reduction of a hazard to the public, and secondly to maintain an unimpaired flow of traffic."
"In other words, Sergeant," McFadden had replied, "we don't have to change a tire for some guy unless it looks as if he's going to get his ass run over changing it himself?"
Officer Charles McFadden had a pleasant, youthfully innocent face, which caus
ed Sergeant Henderson to decide, after glowering at him for a moment, that he wasn't being a wiseass.
"Yeah, that's about it," Sergeant Henderson said.
Officer Martinez, who was then driving, slowed so as to give them a better look at the motorist in distress. It was a two-year-old Cadillac Sedan de Ville. Apparently it had suffered a flat tire.
The motorist in distress was in the act of tightening the wheel bolts when he saw the Highway Patrol car. He stood up, quickly threw the other tire and wheel in the trunk, and finally the hubcap.
"Marvin just fixed his flat in time," Officer McFadden said. " Otherwise we would have had to help the son of a bitch."
Marvin P. Lanier, a short, stocky, thirty-five-year-old black male, was known to Officers Martinez and McFadden from their assignment to Narcotics. He made his living as a professional gambler. He wasn't very good at that, however, and was often forced to augment his professional gambler's income, or lack of it, in other ways. He worked as a model's agent sometimes, arranging to provide lonely businessmen with the company of a model in their hotel rooms.
And sometimes, when business was really bad, he went into the messenger business, driving to New York or Washington, D.C., to pick up small packages for business acquaintances of his in Philadelphia.
Narcotics had been turned on to Marvin P. Lanier by Vice, which said they had reason to believe Marvin was running coke from New York to North Philly.
Officers McFadden and Martinez had placed the suspect under surveillance and determined the rough schedule and route of his messenger service. At four o'clock one Tuesday morning, sixty seconds after he came off the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge, which is not on the most direct route from New York City to North Philadelphia, they stopped his car and searched it and found one plastic-wrapped package of a white substance they believed to be cocaine, weighing approximately two pounds and known in the trade as a Key (from kilogram).
The search and seizure, conducted as it was without a warrantwhich they couldn't get because they didn't have enough to convince a judge that there was "reasonable cause to suspect" Mr. Lanier of any wrongdoing-was, of course, illegal. Any evidence so seized would not be admissible in a court of law. Both Officers Martinez and McFadden and Mr. Lanier knew this.
On the other hand, if the excited and angry Hispanic Narcotics officer who had jammed the barrel of his revolver up Mr. Lanier's nostril and called him a "slimy nigger cock-sucker" went through with his suggestion to "just pour that fucking shit down the sewer," Mr. Lanier knew that he would be in great difficulty with the business associates who had engaged him to run a little errand for them.
If he had been arrested, the cocaine, illegally seized or not, would be forfeited. It would be regarded as a routine cost of doing business. But if the fucking spick slit it open and poured it down the sewer, his business associates were very likely to believe that he had diverted at least twenty thousand dollars worth of their property to his own purposes, and that the Narcs putting it down the sewer was a bullshit story. Who would throw twenty big ones worth of coke down a sewer? That was as much as a fucking cop made in a fucking year!