Milton Ramos
The handcuffed drunk in the backseat had lost three thousand dollars betting on the NCAA Final Four and decided that it was the fault of his wife’s face, which he promptly set to rearranging.
“March Madness. I was you, that would be my defense,” Milton’s partner said without turning around.
“Fuck her, and fuck you.”
“You know what? Stick with that attitude, because judges hate sincere remorse.”
“And what are you?” the drunk said, squinting at Milton sitting silently behind the wheel.
“Excuse me?” Seeking the guy’s eyes via the rearview mirror.
“You know what SPIC stands for?” The drunk leaned forward, his alcohol-fueled malice expanding, searching. “Spanish Indian Colored. Otherwise known as Greaser, Savage, Nigger. Put them all together you get one big fucking unibrow Monkey. You.”
Milton pulled the car over alongside Roberto Clemente Park, then turned off the ignition. He sat there for a moment with his hands palms up in his lap.
“Can we not do this?” his partner asked with an air of resignation.
“Ook, ook,” from the rear seat.
Milton popped the trunk via the lever beneath the steering wheel, got out, and walked to the back of the car.
“The fuck’s he doing?” the drunk asked.
“Shut up,” the partner said, sounding both angry and a little depressed.
The rear door opened abruptly and Milton lifted the prisoner out of the car by his elbow. In his free hand he carried a telescoping baton and a grease-smudged towel.
“The fuck are you doing?”
Without answering, Milton frog-walked his prisoner into the maw of the park until he found what he considered a suitable spot. Not too open, not too constricted, and branches low enough to grip.
“What are you doing?”
“Down, please?”
“What?”
Milton popped him in the chest and the drunk was suddenly lying faceup in the grass, his shoulders on fire from the impact of landing with his hands cuffed behind his back.
“Jesus, man, what are you doing?” Near-pleading now, his voice suddenly much closer to sober than a few minutes earlier.
Milton knew he should never have been given a gold shield. It was a misguided reward for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, a barbershop during a holdup in his own Bronx neighborhood when two assholes with .38s had come in while he was buried in aprons, towels, and shaving cream. The shop was a known numbers drop, easy pickings, and after they kneecapped one of the barbers, Milton kicked his chair around on its swivel and started shooting from beneath his polyester body bib, which promptly caught fire. By the time his barber whipped off the flaming sheet he had second-degree burns on his left arm and thigh.
Both perps, one shot in the throat, the other in the face, survived but went directly from Misericordia to the Tombs. The mayor and the police commissioner came to see Milton in the burn unit of that same hospital, the PC presenting him with his detective’s shield in front of cameras.
The question put to him was “Where do you want to go.”
Where. He wanted to go wherever he could hide.
Patrol had always been his thing, the street his wheelhouse—frontier justice, an eye for an eye, and the culling of information through extracurricular beatdowns. He would be a terrible detective, and he knew it: not too bright with paper trails, not particularly subtle or patient in an interview room, and possessed of a freakishly violent yet icy temper when provoked.
Since the shootout at the barbershop he’d been transferred to seven different precincts in five years. Truculent and inept, he was a burden to each squad, until he landed at the 4-6 in the Bronx. Even before Milton arrived, the lieutenant there got the message that he was doing a great job with Detective Ramos, we all appreciate it, no more hot potato. Milton’s new boss made the savvy decision to stash him in the burglary squad, which averaged thirty-five cases a month, all difficult to solve. But even in that Eeyore world of low expectation he managed to go three years without a single arrest, at which point he became the supervisor of night complaints, his job to come in at eight a.m. and farm out the complaints that had accumulated since the previous midnight to the other incoming day-tour detectives—a housecat gig that reeked of dunce cap.
But after a long stretch in that purgatory, a new boss finally put him back in the regular squad, and six months after that there wasn’t a known actor in the 4-6 who didn’t come to dread hearing the phrase, usually spoken in a low-key, near-distracted monotone, “Get out of the car, please?”
Milton took the dirty towel and carefully folded it into a thick band. He then straddled the drunk and laid the towel across his throat. Snapping the telescoping baton out to its full length, he perched it lengthwise along the center of the towel. Carefully stepping on the narrow end with his right foot, he pressed the steel rod into one side of the guy’s throat. Then, holding on to a branch in order to keep his balance and modulate the pressure, he placed his other foot on the handle end so that now his full weight was coming down on the Adam’s apple, that weight fluctuating between 180 and 190 pounds, depending on the time of the year and what holidays had just passed.
The drunk’s suddenly bulging eyes turned a damp, golden red, and the only sound he was capable of making was a faint peeping like a newborn chick heard from one farm over.
After thirty seconds or so, Milton stepped off the baton one foot at a time, then squatted and lifted the thick towel beneath; the throat was unblemished. He replaced the towel on the guy’s throat and once again balanced the baton across its center.
“One more time?”
The drunk shook his head, even the weak peeping sound gone.
“Come on . . .” Milton rose to his height, found his balance again at both ends of the rod, and started seesawing. “In case I never get to see you again.”