Then I did something curious even for me. I exhaled, so I could watch my breath form a misty trail in the ice-cold night.
That satisfied me. Made me feel that the scene was exactly right.
“Has he called?” I asked softly.
“Five minutes ago.”
I glanced at my watch, set a mental deadline. “Let’s go.” I held out my arm, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world for nine-year-old Michael to loop his hand through it. I smiled down at him. He gazed solemn-eyed back up at me, and again, the scene felt right.
Tomika had called dispatch for the first time six months ago. Usual story. Drunk, angry husband, tearing up the place. Usual results. Police showed up, talked her husband down; she refused to press charges.
But six weeks ago, Michael called the hotline. Their mother had gone out, leaving him and his little sister alone with their father. Now they were huddled in the closet, trying not to be seen or heard because other men were over and had gotten to arguing and one had pulled a gun and Michael had grabbed his little sister and jammed them both into the back of their parents’ closet and he didn’t know what else to do.
I did what comm officers do. I asked questions, I got answers, I dispatched several officers to the scene, and I kept Michael on the line. Forty-five minutes that call lasted. We sang silly songs. Exchanged knock-knock jokes. Michael and Mica even taught me some ghetto slang to improve my street cred.
By the time the first of my officers had arrived, the men were gone, and Stan grew pissed off at having a patrol man on his doorstep. Officer Mackereth, Tom, had been on duty that night. He’d done good. Never mentioned Michael or Mica, two frightened kids huddled with a phone in the closet. Just said he’d responded to reports of an argument in the neighborhood. Had Stan seen or heard anything?
After that, Michael started calling more often. Sometimes just to talk. Because nights were long in his house, and who cared about monsters under the bed when the real thing was passed out drunk on the family room sofa? He worried about his mom. He was terrified for his sister.
After the last recorded call, three weeks ago, Social Services had paid the family a visit. As Michael explained to me days later, Stan rounded up the family and sat them before the caseworker. They were to answer all questions openly and honestly. While Stan stood there and glared at them.
The moment the social worker left, Stan got out a hammer. He broke all of Tomika’s fingers, then four of Michael’s, then two of little Mica’s. No one, he informed them, would be dialing the phone ever again. Or next time, he wouldn’t be getting out a hammer—he’d get out an ax.
It had taken Michael twenty-four hours to work up the courage to dial 911 with his pinkies. Then he’d had to wait another two days for it to be my turn on graveyard shift. If anyone ever listened to that recorded call, it would sound like a little boy, playing with the phone, looking for his mother’s number. It would sound like an exasperated dispatch officer finally rattling off a number to appease the child.
That it happened to be the dispatch officer’s own prepaid cell was just because, of course. What other numbers do you know off the top of your head?
Michael and I took our conversation off-line, where his mother, Tomika, joined the party. Then I liquidated my entire savings accounts, all forty-two hundred dollars, to buy a woman and her two children brand-new IDs, to cover first and last month’s rent plus security deposit on a new apartment, and to pay for the bus tickets that would get them all there.
Seventy-three hours and thirty minutes remaining.
What would you do?
I ESCORTED TOMIKA, MICHAEL, AND MICA to the bus stop. It would take three more exchanges to get them to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, but Tomika had an old girlfriend there, who’d set her up with job. New names, new life, new opportunity.
Tomika was crying.
“I love him,” she said, then brushed her cheeks with hands thick with finger splints and white bandages.
“He’ll kill you.”