Chapter 1: Smell (Oakland)
The man looked like a rag doll in the corner of the bus stop shelter. Blood was smeared across the graffiti-scratched plexiglass, turned burgundy onto the concrete and pooled and glowed purple under the halogen lights.
Officer Jenkins briefed his partner, “Someone kicked the shit out of him. He’s lucky he’s not dead. Nearly dead from hypothermia, being a drunk and homeless to begin with.” To hardened cops, such acts were particularly disturbing. The man still had money in his pockets. He had been beaten right there at the bus stop, at 6PM. Oakland, California was a rough town, but not in the business district and not during daytime.
”This looks like troll stomping…” Troll stomping was a term for gangs of teenage boys beating up dirt bags for fun.
The shivering man was regaining consciousness. Bleeding out of the gash that had once been his jaw, he yelped, “It weren’t kids. Just some crazy fuck in a suit.”
The cops leaned down over the gurney, genuinely concerned. “What’s that?”
“He was screaming to beat Jesus. He stared, crazy eyes at me: ‘it’s you! Get out of my head!’ Then he just run off.”
The homeless man passed out and was loaded into the ambulance. The cops looked at each other. Roberts mumbled to no one in particular, “Crap. It’s usually the homeless that are the crazy ones.”
Random, wind-packed, rubbish was stuck in the cyclone fence behind the bus shelter. Officer Jenkins stared at it blankly for minutes, wondering how anyone raised in his family would react if he had even tossed so much as a cigarette butt onto the ground. Then, his eye caught a bloody, knotted wet wipe and two empty bottles of hand sanitizer. “Tidy little shit, wasn’t he?”
A trail of blood drops running west ward on the sidewalk didn’t make pursuit hard. Jenkins and Roberts un-holstered their guns and started up the street. About three blocks on, there was blood on the handle of the front door of an apartment block. “This is too easy!” mumbled Jenkins.
They rang the doorbells to all 23 apartments, before they realized the lobby door was unlocked. As they pushed the door open, an overpowering wind of bleach filled their lungs. They both blotted tears out of their eyes, searching for the path of blood, which seemed to indicate one of the two units on the second floor. They mule-kicked both doors, simultaneously. The one on the right revealed a room wrapped in polyethylene sheeting. There was the man, curled on a blood-smeared, plastic-wrapped sofa, weeping uncontrollably. “Kill me! I don’t care. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry! It wasn’t Him.”
A year later, Jenkins (or any other beat cop) would simply say, “It looks like a bad wind.”
