December Park(41)

My dad stood, went to the nearest uniformed officer, and spoke quietly and very closely to his face. Once he backed away, the uniformed officer addressed the crowd, telling them to step back. More house lights came on farther down the block.

My dad headed down Bessel toward the Ransoms’ house. I bolted after him, reaching him just as he went around to the driver’s side of his car. “Go on. Get in,” he said without looking at me.

I jumped in the passenger seat and slammed the door. My dad backed down the block, spun the car around, and gunned it toward Haven.

I wanted to ask where we were going, but I didn’t. I thought it best that I sat there in the passenger seat and kept quiet. When we hit Haven, I expected him to turn in the direction of Worth Street. Instead, he swung the car around in the opposite direction. The fireworks were in the rearview mirror now. My dad reached down beneath the console and switched on his police radio. Static blossomed in the car. Unintelligible voices spoke in eerily calm tones to each other.

When my dad took a right onto an unnamed service road that ran through the woods, I knew what he was doing: circling Bessel Avenue on the far side of the woods. The service road was unpaved, and the sedan jounced like a roller coaster as we advanced deeper into the trees. The high beams caused the shadows to shift, and the trees looked alive.

When the service road forked, my father took the road that led deeper into the woods. He slowed the car to a near crawl and diligently surveyed the darkened landscape all around us. There was a floodlight affixed to the mirror on the driver’s side of the car, which my father switched on. He directed the beam into the trees and manipulated its direction by thumbing a lever on the inside of the window. We drove like this for a while until our mutual respiration fogged up the glass.

The radio beneath the dashboard came alive with a man’s official-sounding voice. “Intersection of Bessel and Waverly. Possible suspect. Need backup.”

“Hang on,” said my dad to me. He gunned the car through the trees and took a secondary dirt road. The decline was steep and bumpy, the roadway not designed for vehicular traffic. Tree branches clawed at the sedan’s roof. At the bottom of the hill, the secondary road widened as it merged with a section of asphalt. This was Waverly Street, one of the single-lane beach roads on the far side of the woods behind Bessel Avenue. As the car’s tires touched the pavement, my father placed a bubble light on the dashboard and hit a switch, turning it on. Blue light reflected off the windshield and blazed down the dark street.

When we took a sharp turn, I saw a police cruiser farther up ahead, the dome lights painting the nearby woods in red and blue. Two men, one of them in a police uniform, stood outside the vehicle. The cop’s gun was still in its holster, but he was resting his hand on the butt, ready to draw at a moment’s notice.

The other man looked to be about fifty. He had a neatly trimmed beard and wore a puffy brown parka and a Baltimore Orioles baseball hat tugged down on his head, flattening his ears. He held both hands up, though not in the reach-for-the-sky way criminals raise their hands on TV when cops tell them to freeze. There was a casualness to the whole thing that seemed strangely rehearsed.

My father had his door open before the car was fully stopped. “Stay inside,” he told me and got out. He withdrew his gun as he approached the man in the Orioles hat.

I rolled down the passenger window so I could hear what was going on.

“Chester?” my father said, taking two careful steps toward the man. He kept the gun aimed at him. “The hell you doing out here at this hour?”

“Walkin’.” The man’s voice was indignant. “Just what I was tellin’ your protégé here.”

“You been drinking?”

“Is that a crime all of a sudden?”

My father spoke to Chester in a low voice. I caught only a few words, among them Aaron Ransom’s name.

Chester’s expression changed from indignation to outright disbelief, then to something akin to horror. When he lowered his hands, the uniformed officer instructed him to keep them up.

“Turn around, Chester,” said my dad.

When the man turned around, my father holstered his gun. I held my breath. My dad patted down the sides of Chester’s parka, the pockets of his dungarees. They were still engaged in conversation, but I couldn’t hear a word of it until Chester turned back around and said, “I’ve already told him that.”

“Come on,” my dad said. There was a pleading quality to his voice that sounded very informal given the situation. “Help us out here, okay?”

Chester sighed, waggled his hands like they were coming loose at the wrists, then placed them behind his back.

The uniformed cop closed in and handcuffed the man.

“I ain’t talking to no one but you, Sal,” Chester said as the cop led him into the backseat of the police car.

“I’ll be there right behind you,” said my dad. He got in the sedan, breathed warmth into his cupped hands, then smiled wearily at me. A nerve jumped below his left eye.

“Who is that guy?” I asked.

“Chester Vaughn. He works down at the piers.”

“Is he being arrested?”

“No. I’ve asked him to cooperate and he agreed.”

“How come that cop put handcuffs on him?”

“To be safe. You don’t trust anyone.” My father pulled away from the curb and drifted slowly past the police car.