Read Online We Are the Cops by Michael Matthews - Free Book Online Page B

some guy once died on my front lawn. He had a heart attack on his bicycle and died onmy front lawn. Other than that I had never seen anything gory, although they did take us to the morgue during our training at the police academy. It was so gross. The smell was worse than anything. There were even a couple of bodies that moved on their own and that kind of flipped everybody out. There was a woman – a crackhead – who died from a drug overdose and her body had been opened up in the morgue, you know? She looked like a lobster opened up there. But then her head moved – literally – from left to right on its own. Everybody freaked out.
    We were like, ‘How did that happen? Oh my God she’s alive!’
    It’s disgusting when you’re looking at her, because it’s this disgusting crack head. Imagine some druggie from the street – you know how bad they already look – but now they’re dead and they’re moving! Their parts are actually moving!
    ****
    So, we got a dead body in the alley and we go over there. We’re in this alley and it’s full of garbage and we’re looking for this body. So, here we find it and there’s some guy laying on top of the dead guy and we’re like, ‘What are you doing?’
    He’s having anal sex with this guy – this dead guy.
    He goes, ‘He was my friend. We used to do this all the time.’ He says, ‘I thought he wouldn’t mind, one last time.’
    And really, you’re just like…‘What?’
    ****
    The only death that I’ve ever been on that bothered me was the death of a child and I’m not even sure what happened. I was the second or third unit to show up on a ‘child who is deceased’ call.Any time that that happens, we have to go to it because people that are young just don’t die – so it automatically becomes sort of suspicious.
    I remember walking up to the door of the house. You’re so used to seeing bags and stuff come out but they have little body bags for children. And I’d never really thought about that before. I remember the coroner, the investigator or whoever it was, bringing out this little body bag. I didn’t even see the child but just knowing that it was in this little tiny bag, I mean, that was probably one of the most horrible things I have ever seen. And I don’t even know what happened on that call.
    I spent all of probably fifteen minutes on that call and just that one moment of him walking out with that little tiny body bag… it just wasn’t right.
    ****
    The worst call I’ve ever been on was a death notification. What sucks about working in a small community is that you kind of know everyone. You watch these kids grow up. You know who they are and you often know who the parents are as well.
    We had two kids who got killed a number of years ago, right before their graduation. They were good kids, they were popular kids and I knew the parents. These kids were racing down the road, they’d been drinking on the beach and they’d deflated their car tires down so that they could get out of the sand. The thing is, they never re-inflated them. So now they’re driving down the road doing fifty to sixty miles an hour and they were fucking around. One kid went to pass the other one, pulled back into thelane, over corrected and rolled out. Neither one was wearing a seatbelt. They both got ejected with the car on top of them.
    I remember getting the call telling me to go to the family home to tell the parents that their son wasn’t coming home. And I’d known the father. I was field training that night with a new cop and I told him that we had the worst assignment you could ever get. I told the new cop to take the other kids upstairs so that I could talk to the parents.
    I said, ‘Hi, can I come in?’
    They said, ‘Sure. How are you?’
    ‘Can we sit down? I need to talk to you. There’s no easy way for me to say this but there’s been a car accident tonight. Your son was very badly hurt.’
    They were like, ‘No, no. That can’t be