Benefit of the Doubt: A Novel Read Free

of the hips emphasized the final point, which was followed by even more laughter. Ben saw high fives go around for everyone but the man in middle, whose objections were met with a hard dose of cop-world reality.
    “Dude, it don’t matter if you triple-gloved. Your ass is quarantined for life after handling that shit.”
    Ben shook his head and smiled in spite of himself. Rough crowd. But he had to admit it was the perfect cop war story: sex, death, and some no-count civilian schmuck to ridicule. Most candy-ass civilian types would no doubt disapprove of the officer’s graphic storytelling. But Ben knew for a fact none of these guys gave a damn that their private conversation about a dead man not yet in the ground might offend the churchgoing populace. Cops figured anybody who didn’t want to hear it, didn’t have to listen. Ben was in complete agreement.
    Okay. Four more minutes. Forget the damn shop talk and get at it.
    To fight the monotony, Ben conjured up a mental picture of the sandy shoreline of Crab Cove back in Alameda, when low tide and sunrise came together to create perfect running conditions. The taste of sea salt drifting in on the light breeze, the surf breaking a hundred yards out. He’d do six miles, ending up at the South Shore Café, where he’d spoil himself with a well-deserved twelve-hundred-calorie breakfast and the sports section of the Oakland Tribune.
    You really know how to screw up a good gig, Sawyer.
    Ben was honest enough to accept the blame. He’d been a thirteen-year veteran of Oakland PD. A sergeant in charge of the prestigious Gang Suppression Unit. His star on the rise, lieutenant bars in his future. High-ranking bosses threw his name around as a future commander, maybe even chief. Then it happened. Shitcanned back to Newberg, his childhood home. A place that on the law enforcement career ladder came in about six rungs below mall cop.
    Oh, let it go already.
    Ben put in his earbuds, turned up the volume on his iPod, and notched the speed up another two points. The rhythmic hum of the treadmill fell in sync with AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell,” and the antics of his fellow officers faded away. Ben did his best to drown out the internal critic by concentrating on the opening guitar riffs, but the usual insults ran amok in his head.
    You’re lucky to have any kind of job. How about a few years in prison, you ever think of that?
    He counted the impacts of his left foot on the moving rubber surface. Anything to keep his mind a safe distance from the past—but he couldn’t stop the emotional drift. Memories flooded over him in relentless, violent waves. Years of street work in Oakland. A band of brothers. Human bonds that could stand any test. Any test, that is, other than twenty seconds of insanity and a convict-turned–urban folk hero named Hector Espudo.
    The past took form in a series of staccato sounds and still images, flashing in his mind as isolated moments. Shifting angles and light. A rookie officer’s sudden and frantic call over the radio.
    “Foot pursuit of 187 suspect. Westbound on Fortieth approaching Broadway.”
    The crime and location said it all. Every cop in Oakland knew the suspect was Hector Espudo, a convict put back on the street through the governor’s bullshit early-release program. A made member of the Nuestra Familia inside the walls and a high-ranking lieutenant of the Norteños street gang on the outside, Hector had been on parole less than three weeks when he got into a beef with an adversary from a rival gang. Hector went at the man with the ass end of a table lamp, and by the time he was done, his victim’s face was mashed flat into the orange shag carpet of an Oakland crack house like a pile of stepped-in dog shit. The rival gang put a bounty on his head, and the state of California officially reneged on the early out. Every cop in Oakland was on the lookout for Hector … not to mention a couple thousand gang members hoping to get famous.
    The next