The Fence by Dick Lehr

Author:Dick Lehr
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-11-10T10:00:00+00:00

By early spring, it didn’t take much to awaken Mike. He slept on edge, as if waiting for something to happen. It could be a telephone call; the crank calls had continued as February passed into March and March into April. Or it could be the nightmare in which he was helpless against police attacking his house and family. Or it could be something else. Mike was always wondering, what next?

The pounding at the front door therefore saw Mike bounding out of bed and hustling downstairs in his shorts and T-shirt. It was the middle of the night, and he didn’t want his boys or his sisters’ family downstairs waking up. Kimberly, however, was out of bed and right behind him.

Before Mike reached the landing he heard the loud crackle of police radios outside. He opened the door. Two uniformed officers stood on the stoop. Mike recognized one of them, but didn’t know his name. They were from the B–2 station in Roxbury.

The second officer, the one Mike did not recognize, spoke up. He said they’d been dispatched to the house on a 911 emergency call—a 911 call, the officer said, for a disturbance. “For a man being beaten.”

Man being beaten? Mike couldn’t believe what he was hearing. You gotta be freakin’ kidding me, he thought. Man being beaten? The beating was January 25. Woodruff Way.

The two officers seemed poised, ready to barrel into Mike’s house.

Mike didn’t say a word. He filled the door frame. It was a silent standoff lasting a few seconds. The cop Mike had recognized then recognized him, and he turned to his partner.

“Let’s go,” the cop said. The second officer, confused, hesitated. The first kept going, heading toward the cruiser parked on the street. C’mon, he called back to his partner. To Mike he said, “Sorry.”

Mike shut the door firmly. Kimberly wanted to know what was going on. “Just go back in,” Mike said. Upstairs, he told her they had the wrong house. It was a mistake. Oh, was all Kimberly said. They got back into bed and tried to get some sleep.

Both knew Mike was lying. It was not a mistake but a new twist in the ongoing harassment—a phony 911 call, almost funny in a perverse way.

Mike understood that inside the department, there was no longer any question about where he stood. Everyone knew he was cooperating. He’d met with Internal Affairs and made it clear he wanted justice.

With that, it seemed to Mike the message behind the harassment was changing. It had gone from being a warning to lie low and not cooperate to a kind of punishment and payback for deciding to push the matter. The new message was: You’re not one of us.

Thoughts like that were taking their toll. Instead of feeling better three months after the beating, Mike was feeling worse. It was blowing his mind—he’d been beaten, he was the victim, and yet he was the outcast.

“What is it about me?”

He found himself obsessed with the question. “What

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.