World's Toughest Cops: On the Front Line of the War against Crime. Vinnie Jones
Читать онлайн книгу.
not even old enough to watch one of my films at the cinema.
It got even stranger. ‘Ask him how he got the gun,’ said one of the cops, a big grin on his face. ‘You’re gonna love this…’
We asked the kid. His excuse was about as surreal as they come. If having a good imagination was taken into consideration when judges pass sentences, he’d be walking out of court scot-free.
It seemed – according to him at least – that possessing the gun was just an accident. What he was really after was…chickens. He had been chasing a chicken underneath one of these houses when he just happened to chance across the loaded piece.
He kept the gun; the chicken got away.
Obviously we needed to get to the bottom of this. It was time for me to earn my keep and get some proper interrogation going. I wanted to see if there were any holes in his story.
‘What happened with the gun?’ I asked. ‘Where did you find the gun?’
‘Under the house,’ he mumbled.
‘And what was the chicken doing under the house?’
‘I was chasing the chicken.’
‘Why were you chasing a chicken?’
‘To sell it for clothes and stuff,’ he said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. ‘You can get 10 dollars a chicken.’
Ten bucks? How come they don’t cost more when I get them from the supermarket? I moved on.
‘Are you quick enough to catch a chicken?’ I asked. We’ve all seen Rocky, we all know that scene where he tries to catch the chicken. If Rocky Balboa couldn’t do it, I was struggling to see how this skinny kid could.
‘Yeah,’ he shrugged.
‘You sure? How many do you get in a day?’
‘I didn’t get none: I found the gun, I was going to sell it.’
It was his story and he was sticking to it; but it had also got him tazered for his trouble – 50,000 volts of electricity disabling his nervous system, knocking him out more effectively than a big right hook from Jeff Roach. We asked him how it felt.
He raised those big, wide eyes and looked at us properly for the first time. ‘I was shaking like a chicken,’ he said.
We couldn’t help but laugh…even though we knew that it was really no laughing matter. In New Orleans even 16-year-olds are involved in serious crime – young though he was, to the cops here there simply wasn’t anything that unusual about a kid of his age carrying a loaded gun in his pocket.
‘A lot of the armed robberies and now even the murders, the suspects are getting younger and younger,’ explained one of them. ‘So who knows what he had on his mind, you know?’
The point was made even clearer to us as the night wore on. The wolf pack drove through the ninth ward on a steady mop-up operation, racing from one incident to the next, pulling over suspicious-looking people on stop-and-searches, flagging down cars they didn’t like the look of…and responding to reports of shootings, muggings, drug-dealing.
And all too often, the people we were questioning, handcuffing, taking away to the cells, were younger than my own son. Officer Dave du Plentier, NOPD veteran of 18 years’ standing, explained that that was just how it was these days. ‘Look at all these people right now, in these cars and in handcuffs,’ he said, as we joined him after yet another take-down. ‘Look at their faces. They’re kids, they’re children and you look at the hardware that they’re carrying out here. The rifles, the guns.’
According to some reports, as many as 50 per cent of teenagers drop out of high school across this state – and, in the poor areas of New Orleans especially, many of them turn to crime to make a dollar.
‘By the time we get to see them, the only thing you can tell them is death or jail,’ said Dave, ‘and guess what? They don’t care about either one. Jail is almost like graduating from college for kids out here, it’s like a pen on their shirt. They just do their time, learn in jail and come back out and keep doing it.’
On just the one night shift with the wolf pack we must have seen nearly a dozen suspects questioned, cautioned, chased or arrested – most of them, it has to be said, were teenagers. I did my bit too, talking to them, checking stories, filling in back-up units and helping look for anything dodgy that might have fallen out of their pockets…and the more work we did, the more I got into it.
It was high-adrenaline, edgy stuff: and it was about to get a whole lot more edgy. I was beginning to think like a cop a bit too much for my own good.
Back with Barbetti and we’d received a call to respond to yet another stop-and-search when the unit ahead spotted a suspicious car at the junction. Almost before we could radio them back, the car took off, tyres squealing as it disappeared down the road in a cloud of dust.
Barbetti floored it and we sped after them. Houses zipped by in a blur as the speedo clocked up 50, 60, 70…when we hit 80 they were still outrunning us. More gas – and at 100 miles per hour the dust thrown up by the car ahead meant that visibility was down to practically nothing.
Barbetti spoke low and fast into the radio, his voice barely audible over the scream of the siren – and suddenly we were braking, turning, swinging a hard right and then a vicious left before gunning full ahead again. We were on a road parallel to the target now, Barbetti pushing his car as hard as he could to try to cut him off. We flew over one intersection, then another, before the radio burst into life again.
‘We got a runner!’ he said, slamming the brakes and turning left again. The other chasing unit had reported that the suspects had crashed and taken off on foot. We skidded to a stop and jumped out. ‘He’s right around here someplace,’ he said, one hand on his holster, the other swinging a torch. ‘Keep an eye out behind us.’
There were more vacant lots here than occupied houses – some plots didn’t have any buildings on them at all and nature was reclaiming the ground. Sick-looking, stunted bushes, long grass, even trees were growing just off the road – meaning we couldn’t get a clear line of sight for more than a couple of metres. There were plenty of places to hide here, and so far there was only us two units on the scene.
Suddenly I spotted a man legging it across the road and into the bushes. Barbetti saw him at the same time and took off. ‘Come here! Get down, get down, get down!’ he yelled, and dived into the darkness after him.
We looked around. Where was back-up? Barbetti had gone after the runner and suddenly we were totally alone. More to the point – what if the big cop wasn’t fast enough? Somebody needed to head round the other side, cut him off, catch him coming out.
There was nothing for it. Pulling my bullet-proof vest tight, I took a deep breath and sprinted hard over the road, skirting the scrub on my right. Call it brave, call it foolish, call it what you like – the adrenaline had kicked in and after all my experiences with these boys I wanted to grab the chance to show what I could do.
I honestly didn’t think about my own safety, not right then. We’d just come off the back of a 100-mile-an-hour chase after a night of taking down kids with guns and I had the wind up me. If I could nail this guy I was bloody well going to.
I cut diagonally into the vacant lots and burst through the bushes, every nerve straining, every muscle ready to floor the bastard…and nearly ran straight into the cops from the other unit. They had him on the ground, were slapping the cuffs on, and when they saw me come thundering through one of them held up a hand. ‘We got him, Vin,’ he said.
Just then Barbetti came charging out of the trees on the other side. Call it a pincer movement then – I may not have notched up my first take-down, but we couldn’t have co-ordinated it better if we’d planned it. Like flushing out a rat.
One down. But there was still another at large.
The boy we’d chased down – and, like all