Deep Nights

It was around midnight and we were cruising down Colfax Avenue in the Capitol Hill area, and I was behind the wheel. Colfax Avenue, or “The Fax” as everybody called it, was sort of like the spiritual heart of downtown Denver. It was the epicenter of all that was good and bad in the Mile High City. For forty miles Colfax Avenue cut like a ribbon through the center of the entire metro area, from Golden in the West to Aurora in the East. It was and is the longest continuous main street in the United States and for all that length it was the central artery that pumped the city’s lifeblood. By day it was crisscrossed by lawyers and executives going to their cool metal and glass high-rises to work million dollar deals, and politicians and their staff and reporters going to and fro at the Capitol, and the homeless people on the street corners begging those people in suits for their spare change. Sometimes they got it, sometimes they didn’t. By night the Fax was transformed into the hangout of drug dealers doing swift furtive deals in the bus shelters, hookers trolling the passing cars for johns, the mentally disturbed stumbling down the sidewalks having conversations with people that weren’t there, the suburban yuppies coming downtown to go bar-hopping and carousing, and watching over the nightly parade was us; the cops, the heat, Five-O.

On this night we were cruising the Capitol Hill area. There were a few bars in the neighborhood that had been the site of more trouble than usual recently so we were keeping an alert eye out. I was near Logan Street, heading westbound, when out of nowhere a man suddenly appeared right in front of my patrol car. His head and his shirt were bloody, and his eyes were wild. He thrust his hands out toward my car like he was going to use The Force to stop it, and was yelling “STOP! STOP!” I slammed on my brakes and nosed down to a stop just inches from the psycho’s legs. He then started to run around to the driver’s side window, which was down on this warm summer night. The thought immediately flashed into my mind that this might be some crazy suicide-by-cop attempt, so when he started coming around toward my window I skinned my Sig 9mm and brought it up in a close two-hand hold and leaned back away from the window.

His bloodied head appeared in the window and he started jabbering at me loud and fast. I couldn’t understand what the hell he was saying because he was Indian or Pakistani or something, and had a thick accent. I yelled at him to move back away from the car, and when he saw the muzzle of my gun pointed at his chest he got the message. He took a couple of steps back but kept shouting. “He robbed me! He beat me! He took my money!” I got him to calm down a fraction, but he was still very excited and kept repeating “He robbed me! I gave him my money and he beat me anyway! He had a gun!” I said “Who robbed you? Where is he?” The crazy Pakistani said “He had a gun! He robbed me! And he’s right there!” and with that he pointed back to the sidewalk. Standing on the southwest corner of Colfax and Logan was a big black dude with dreadlocks and a white t-shirt. His right hand was at his waistband, up under the shirt, and he was looking right at me. I yelled at Crazy Pakistani to Move! and I thrust my gun up and out the window to aim it at Dreds, and I yelled for him to freeze. He was one cool customer, and just looked at me and my gun nonchalantly, and slowly turned around and started walking down the sidewalk, heading south on Logan.

Usually when a suspect commits an armed robbery he can’t get out of the area fast enough. This guy stuck around, and even when the police showed up and were talking to his victim, he just stood right there, forty feet away, watching us. Something was wrong here, I thought to myself as I watched him turn his back and start walking away. Wyatt was out of the car and running down the street as I was starting to open my car door. He had his gun out and up, and was yelling for the suspect to stop. Without even turning around the suspect started to run. I slammed the door and gunned the engine, forcing our witness to leap out of the way. I bore down on them fast, but I didn’t want to get right on top of the suspect because he probably had a gun and would start shooting. When I got right behind them I skidded to a stop and jumped out and started running after them. I could see past Mike and saw the suspect’s right elbow going up and down. What the hell is he doing? It suddenly dawned on me that he was trying to get his gun out but it was snagging on his pants. We were both yelling at him to stop, but he kept going. We were running next to an apartment complex now, and just ahead right at the corner of the building there was a big tree growing right up next to the wall. Just a few steps away from the tree the suspect’s gun came free. He slowed and turned, and I could see him swing the long black barrel of his revolver around toward us. My gun was up but I was afraid if I fired I might hit Mike if he suddenly made an evasive move. So I held my breath and held my fire, and I heard the report of a single shot just as the suspect disappeared around that tree.

In emergency situations, for some people the mind works at the speed of light. You could recite the entire Declaration of Independence in two seconds. For others it slows down so that every movement feels as though time were moving through molasses. For me it did neither, as my long years of training automatically kicked in. As the suspect went out of sight around the tree I thought to myself that the shot did not sound like the boom of a .357 Magnum, which I believed the revolver was. It sounded more like a pop from the nine millimeter Mike carried, which was just like mine, a Sig P228. So I figured it was Mike that fired. We both skidded to a stop by the tree, and fell right into our combat training mode. We sliced the pie, just as we had been trained, slow and careful as we edged around the big tree. I was in front now, and as my angle around the tree increased I saw a leg, and then a torso, and then the whole body.

The suspect was lying on his stomach, and his head was slightly raised and he was looking up at me. His hands were underneath his stomach, and I started yelling for him to put his hands out. He didn’t speak, didn‘t move, just kept looking at m