A Visible Darkness Read Online Free PDF Page B

block is silent but for the one urgent yelp of a siren growing louder in the distance.
    I manage the corner of Locust and look to the west toward Broad and four blocks down is a patrol car, light bar spinning, sitting across the one-way street, its headlights painting two bright globes on the wall of the one-hour dry cleaning place. I start running along the edge of the parked cars when the ambulance from Jefferson comes wailing around the corner and the second, no, third, patrol car screeches up on the scene and I see two officers jump out with weapons drawn and I reflexively reach down for my own.
    Another block closer and I see the other patrol car, dark against the corner, a knot of guys on their knees at the trunk, their hands busy with something on the ground, their faces bobbing up into the light, their voices sounding too anxious for cops. One gets up and starts directing the ambulance and his wet hands are glistening in the headlights and now I’m thirty feet away.
    “Christ, hurry up, man, hurry,” one is snapping. “Get the goddamn stretcher.”
    “Keep pressure on the chest, pressure,” says another.
    “You’re cool, Danny. You’re cool, man. We got you, man. You’re cool,” says another.
    The paramedics are out with their bags. When I get twenty feet away the backup cops standing at the other side of the group pick up my movement and their guns come up and I am in three sight-irons.
    “Cop. I’m a cop,” I yell, palms going up and wide so they can see my empty hands and my jacket. The other officers and paramedics look up only for a second and then are back to their focus. On the ground behind his squad car I see Danny Riley. He’s on his back, his eyes shut, skin gone white in the lamplight. Another officer has ripped open his jacket and is pushing a reddening towel into his chest and the medics are trying to take vitals and one is saying, “Fuck it. Let’s get him to Jeff. We’re only four blocks away—let’s go.”
    And now all of us but the two backup officers are lifting Riley onto the stretcher and he feels so light with all the hands working that I think to myself, He’s too light, he must be dead.
    In seconds we have him in and the ambulance pulls away and we’re all just staring after it when two more units come swinging in from the north and south. In the crosshatching headlights the intersection is glowing and I am looking around for a familiar face when the mood and attention of the gathering shifts.
    For the first time I see what the backup guys are focused on. Their guns are still loosely pointed at a black man sitting on the curb. His legs are stretched out into the street. His head is bent to his chest and long ropes of braided hair are dangling into his lap. His hands are cuffed behind him and one shoulder is oddly twisted. The material of his coat sleeve is soaked and dark. Eight feet away a chrome-plated handgun lies on the sidewalk.
    The uniformed guys are standing back. Not one of us from the group that lifted Riley takes a step closer. I turn to the cop holding the blood-soaked towel and ask what the hell happened.
    “Fuckin’ homeboy shot Danny Riley in a traffic stop’s what happened. Danny got a round off and wounded him but the motherfucker put a kill shot into Danny while he was down.”
    The newly arrived cops are getting the same story. I watch their faces change from an intent listening to an anger that tightens their jaw muscles and narrows their eyes, and when they cut their looks at the wounded man on the curb I know I am looking at my own face in an angry mirror.
    A second ambulance pulls up. A police step van right behind it. A sergeant has appeared from somewhere and some of us gather around him as the cop with the towel fills him in. The paramedics climb out of the second unit and approach, watching us, watching the wounded suspect, watching the guns still unholstered.
    “Got a guy needs attention here, Sarge,” the first medic says, and it is not a