Tied Up in Knots (Marshals 3)

“It’d be on the home page of MSN and Yahoo and all those too.”

“Make sure he keeps his coat on,” Becker instructed. “Neither one of us, CPD, or our office needs any of that.”

“They started it,” I flared.

“They did,” he agreed. “But sometimes you gotta rise above.”

“Kage is gonna have an aneurysm,” Ching commented from his side of the car, letting his head roll forward and back and side to side.

“What’re you doing?”

“This displaces tension,” he explained. “And I need to pee.”

“You should have gone at the restaurant,” Becker told him. “What do I always say?”

He grunted.

“Why aren’t you pissed?” I asked Becker, because I would have been livid.

“Are you kidding? This has been happening my whole life, man. I’ve been pulled over a hundred times more than you have, just because of the color of my skin.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know you are, buddy, and I appreciate that, and I will say now that the badge normally makes this shit stop before it escalates, but that guy right there, holding the gun on us, he just wanted me out of the car. He didn’t want to let me get my ID out of my coat or the car’s registration out of the glove box. This could have been over before it started, but now he’s done, and he doesn’t even know it yet simply because he saw a black man and nothing else.”

“So you are mad.”

“Yeah. This is me mad.”

I snorted and he smiled back, and then we all heard the command from above from one of the helicopters. “Show us ID.”

All of us together, carefully, slowly, pulled out our badges. I had no doubt that the stars were very visible, as evidenced by the collective groan from the law enforcement clustered around us.

“Motherfucker,” the cop holding the gun on Becker and me swore under his breath before he holstered his weapon.

Oh yeah, he was so done.

WE WERE all sitting in a conference room in the main police headquarters at Thirty-Fifth and Michigan, looking out our window and across the hall into another room, where our boss was sitting with the interim superintendent of police, Matthew Kenton; Alderman Robert Dias from one of the south-side wards; Chicago police chief of support services, Edward Strohm; and too many others I didn’t know.

All these people coming in on a Sunday confirmed how serious a mess this was.

One of the mayor’s aides showed up an hour later—and I only knew because she popped her head in on us first to make sure we were all okay, did a double-take as she saw Ian’s uniform—and then went into the other room with everyone else.

“You see?” Ryan said into the silence. “This is why we don’t want any new guys.”

I turned to look at him, as did Becker and Ching.

“What?” Ian asked irritably.

“We’re bonding here, right? How’re new guys ever gonna be able to top this?”

“Oh dear God,” Dorsey groaned. “I really don’t think this is anything but a clusterfuck of biblical proportions.”

“And you guys are gonna be in trouble,” Becker made known.

“Not us,” Ching clarified, “only you guys.”

Ian grunted.

“We didn’t draw our weapons,” Dorsey reminded them. “We didn’t escalate anything.”

And he was right… kind of.

An argument could be made—and was by the police—that the four of us could have walked away, or even better, remained inside our vehicle for the duration of the stop. For our part, with the track record of the Chicago PD, it was reasonable to assume that we were in fear for Deputy US Marshal Christopher Becker’s life, as well as that of his partner, Wesley Ching.

Clusterfuck was going to be an understatement, I was guessing.

While I was there, since Kage was a multitasker, he got the cops’ Internal Affairs Department guy in to talk to me about the incident with Cochran with the marshals’ service’s Office of Professional Responsibility liaison, Shepard McAllister. He was a nice enough guy, but as far as I could tell, his mouth was broken, as he was incapable of smiling. Ever. There was a lot of squinting, so much legalese, and too many interruptions to count. The IAD guy—Trey Covington—got really annoyed, but McAllister kept banging away at the same stuff over and over.

“So Norris Cochran accused Chief Deputy US Marshal Sam Kage of lying to him,” McAllister clarified for like the seventh time.

“Yessir,” I answered.

And McAllister shot the IAD guy a look that clearly said Are you getting the seriousness of this? Covington’s groan said he wasn’t missing a thing.

“Are there records that support the chief deputy’s claim?” Covington asked.

I was going to answer in the affirmative, but McAllister raised his hand to shut me up. “We are not here to debate the issue of whether or not the firearm does in fact exist, or whether or not it was ever in the custody of the marshals’ service.” He had a ferocious clipping tone that made every word seem like it was bitten off. It was really annoying, and if I were Covington, I’d want to pop him. “What we are here to determine is whether your detective attacked my marshal without provocation, and the glaringly obvious answer is an emphatic yes.”