Rush Read online

  Rush

  Kim Wozencraft

  Copyright

  Rush is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Kim Wozencraft

  Cover design by Sasha Stratton

  Cover copyright © 2017 by Kim Wozencraft

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  eBook ISBN 978-0-9970894-1-7

  Originally published by Random House. 1st ed. 1990

  ISBN 0-394-57671-3

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Kim Wozencraft

  Author’s Note

  When Rush was first published by Random House in 1990, ebooks were not a thing. I delivered the manuscript on paper, and the file format I saved the document in was quickly rendered obsolete by advances in technology. Recently, I heard screenwriter and playwright Aaron Sorkin talking about how he sometimes retyped entire manuscripts as an exercise to improve his writing. It seemed like a good idea, so I cracked open my copy of Rush and typed it out. I tried not to edit too much, but there are a few minor changes, mostly just a tidying up of awkward sentences and some corrections to grammar errors that slipped through in the first edition.

  I wasn’t prepared for how painful the exercise would be, even this far removed from the experiences I had as a young, naive, female police officer in Texas in the seventies. I went into the job for the same reasons many people do. I wanted to do good; I wanted to help people; I wanted to take criminals off the streets. The job promised opportunities for all of that, plus the possibility of excitement. I had no idea when I applied that my first assignment would be an undercover narcotics investigation.

  And I had no idea, before working undercover, how easy it is to become a drug addict. Or how difficult it is to survive addiction. I learned the hard way. I’m lucky to be alive.

  I wrote Rush because I was bent on exposing The Drug War for the sham it was back then and remains today. I experienced first-hand the way the system works, and I was pissed off about it. I remember my editor saying to me, “Oh, yeah, it’s evident you wrote it on the red-ass.”

  Revisiting the book, I was stunned to realize the number of sexual assaults that occur in the story. We didn’t so much talk about it back then because that kind of admission only resulted in shame and blame—for the victim. I don’t think I fully recognized the incidents I describe in the book as sexual assaults. It was just the way things worked. If you were a woman working in a man’s world, you had to figure out how to deal with it, which oftentimes meant keeping quiet.

  I got a lot of mail after the book, and later the film (produced by the Zanuck Company in 1991), came out, and still get mail today from people who have been slammed by the system, people who are struggling with addiction, people who are locked up in prison for possession or for selling small amounts of drugs.

  If there is anything I hope you will take away from reading Rush, aside from the experience of what it was like to be a young, female, rookie cop thrown into a world of danger, deception, and treachery, it is the recognition that the Drug War itself is every bit as damaging as drug addiction; in some ways it is more so.

  —Kim Wozencraft, July 5, 2017

  Prologue

  The Beta Unit

  There are times, when I've slipped away from concentrating on something specific, that I suffer a rage that takes my sight away, closes off my vision, makes the air around me turn the color of bloodless muscle.

  I try to believe that I would not really do it.

  I have been in this place, the Beta Unit, nearly six weeks now, while the prison shrinks prepare their evaluation. I must not tell them.

  Nothing they might say would change what I'm feeling, and I cannot admit to them how many times each day I lose my focus and find this thing, this raging unwanted something, assaulting my brain.

  I must not think about it. I don't know how not to. But if I tell them, they will decide that I am dangerous. They will call Nettle and warn him. They will run straight to Dr. Mossman.

  He is the one who will decide whether I am sane. If he feels that I am, he will send me back to the population so that I may do my time. But if he certifies me, time stops. He can keep me in here for as long as he wants, for the rest of my life, and it won't count toward my sentence. If I am insane, then legally I am incapable of recognizing the fact that I am in prison. Therefore I am not being punished, and the time served doesn't count. It's Dr. Mossman's decision.

  I'm not innocent. This I understand no matter what the doctor decides. But when I attempt to comprehend what it is that put me in here, why I complied, it always comes back to Jim Raynor and Donald Nettle. But Nettle is the one.

  It wasn't Jim's fault. I fell in love with him quickly, the way a schoolgirl falls in love, and with the same unbending loyalty. That was my own weakness. Jim was my boss, my mentor. He believed in me when I wasn't old enough to know how to believe in myself.

  He'd been a cop for six years when we met. He was mean when the situation demanded it, and was strong because of it. He knew how to deal with brutality, and he believed in what he was doing. On some level, he believed. But he understood the realpolitik of buying dope at street level, that the survival of self was right in the big middle of it. He went in specific directions. "You do the best you can with what you've got at the time," he said. But his was not the philosophy of optimism.

  He made me aware that you have to bend the rules to be effective. He made me a cop. He made me feel, for the first time in my life, that I was functioning as an adult. And from the start, from that first day, he brought me to an understanding of need.

  If I had known what it took, that you have to be able to turn your feelings off, just shut them down completely, I might never have filled out that application. It happens gradually, so slowly that you don't realize it. The injuries and deaths and lies pound away at you until, finally, you reach down inside yourself and find nothing. Empty space. And it feels pretty damn good not to hurt.

  I must not think about Nettle.

  I try to concentrate on what I will tell the Parole Commission, if I get past the shrinks.

  I will tell them that I was an athlete. That I ran track and played basketball and church-league softball, that I belonged to the Drama Club and the Spanish Club and wrote for the school paper. That I spent Saturdays at the stables down the road, bathing horses on the off chance that I would get to ride. I'll explain to them that I believed in God, and that my parents were decent people who struggled like hell to stay together and give their children a home.

  I will tell them that when I was in fourth grade I didn't go to Communion one Sunday because Rory Larso
n had passed around some Sweetarts ten minutes before Mass, that I stayed on my knees and suffered the stare of Sister Mary Joseph rather than mix the Body of Christ with a piece of candy.

  I will try to make them understand that my intentions were honorable. And I will admit that I loved Jim Raynor more than was good for either of us.

  And they'll say, "Cut the crap, Cates. Why are you in."

  * * *

  I am not innocent. It comforts me now, in here, to tell myself that if I hadn't believed to excess, if I hadn't loved Jim, I would never even have encountered Nettle, never have learned the extremes of hatred I now know so well. There are moments, in the middle of the night, when I cannot stop the awful thoughts of vengeance that make my stomach a sodden sponge, that turn the walls red in the dark.

  I try to forgive myself. I work at it. Some nights I try to pray.

  My cellmate has a wood-burned plaque above her bed. It says: and how do we punish those whose remorse is already greater than their misdeed?

  I'm not sure of the answer, but when I go deep inside myself, to places we are taught to be afraid of, I realize with fear, with disgust, the strength of my hatred for Nettle. I fight not to be consumed by it. It punishes. Some night it hurts as though there is an abscess in my heart.

  He feels no remorse for what he did to Jim, or to me. No remorse. What I want from him is an admission.

  Nights in here, I sit backed into a corner on my bed and listen for the guard on his 2 a.m. count. There is the clinking metal echo of keys hitting his hip as he walks on rubber-soled shoes down the corridor, and then a shadow pauses behind the wire-mesh window in the door of this room, this cage. A spot of light hits the bed and searches the covers, finds my feet and jerks upward to my face. It burns quickly, this sudden white glare in my eyes, and then it is gone and the keys clank down the hall. I am left staring at shimmering yellow orbs that float in the middle of the room, like ghosts playing tag in the dark.

  And I despise the need I have to find Nettle and put things right. I don't want to feel this.

  But I do. Jesus God I do.

  1

  I didn’t grow up thinking I would become a cop. I don’t suppose I thought I would become particularly anything. My grandmother called me a tomboy, and I was, but I got the message early that I would someday be expected to assume the female mantle, and I was raised to do that which was expected. I couldn’t see past the crisp green lawns of suburban Houston, and I refused to acknowledge that I was uneasy about the possibility of spending life as a Mrs. Mommy. Perhaps I was playing Cinderella: studying part time at the University of Houston and waiting tables part time at Wild Bill’s Rootin’ Tootin’ Ice Cream Saloon in the Alameda Mall, hoping for someone to dash into my life and change it forever.

  It was Alton Sharply, a regular Friday evening customer, who suggested that I take the exam for the Pasadena Police Department. Though Alton had been coming in for months, I’d never suspected that he was a recruiter. I was standing beside his table, balancing a tray full of sundaes, when he said, “You ought to get out of here, Kristen. This is nowhere.”

  I put his hot fudge malt on the paper placemat and went about delivering the rest of my orders. When I came back with his check, Alton handed me an application.

  “Think about it,” he said. “Pasadena is growing like mad, you could make sergeant in two years easy.”

  I was twenty-one, barely old enough to be considered for the job. I knew thirty dollars was an outstanding amount of tips for a Saturday night. I knew frivolous evenings with friends who, like me, were biding time, studying this or that and waiting for something to happen. And I knew I’d been almost good enough, in high school, almost fast enough, to go somewhere as a runner. I’d had good form going over the hurdles. But no matter how hard I worked, how much I practiced, I couldn’t shave that last essential two-tenths of a second off my time. I won frequently, almost constantly, until the big Invitational Open at the Astrodome. And two-tenths of a second can look like forty miles when you’ve just cleared that last hurdle and there’s an Olympic contender in front of you leaning toward the tape.

  Alton kept on pitching and made it sound good, like my life would suddenly have purpose. I would be doing something that made a difference, and could stop serving chocolate sundaes and singing “Happy Birthday.”

  * * *

  I met Jim the day I was hired. Alton escorted me past a row of cubicles filled with secretaries who couldn’t have been much older than I was. He pointed into an office and left me there, sitting next to a wall covered with certificates of merit from every civic group I’d ever heard of and some I hadn’t.

  A few minutes later Jim Raynor walked in. He didn’t look at all like any cop I had ever seen. He was tall and of medium build, wearing a tailored olive-green suit. His hair was black and wavy, reaching almost to his shoulders. And his deep-set eyes were of such a pale hue that they appeared almost white around the pupils, the irises rimmed with a kind of gray-blue ring and flecked with amber green.

  When he reached across the desk to shake hands, his jacket fell open to reveal a shoulder holster. He seemed intense even while he was only standing there smiling, and when I felt his warm, dry palm press against mine, I knew. He was a captain, in charge of the Criminal Investigation Division, and his confidence astonished me. He moved with a matter-of-factness that made me believe he knew what was happening and it was all under control.

  The job he had in mind for me was undercover narcotics. Pasadena, Texas, with not quite a hundred thousand residents, had a drug problem. The police department was supposed to be doing something about it. Wedged tight against the eastern limits of Houston, dragging a slender tail of land from its own southeast corner all the way to the edge of Galveston Bay, Pasadena was more small city than suburb.

  I was not known on the streets. I was ignorant of police procedure and jargon. And I was female. I was just what they were looking for. A natural, Jim said. Made for it.

  I didn’t know if I could handle it, but I knew for certain that I was sick to death of selling ice cream and tired of sitting in classrooms listening to professors who were bored with their own lectures. I wanted to try.

  I looked like just what I was: a woman jock. I had inherited my mother’s blond hair and green eyes, and my father’s cleft chin. Though it didn’t show, I was physically very strong. I still ran daily and could bench-press my own weight, which hovered around one twenty-five. I looked younger than I was, so much so that on those few occasions when I bought beer, I always got carded.

  I like the quivering knot of apprehension that grew inside me while Jim warned me that the job could be dangerous. I knew that somewhere there were things happening that could give me back the feeling I had when I knelt at the starting line, ready to race, ready to explode. I wanted risk. I wanted excitement. And even though Pasadena wasn’t Houston or New York, it was there, and I could start in two weeks.

  I was too naïve to stop and think it through, too young to consider consequences. My eagerness was pathetic. Yes, I said, let me do this. Like a fool I said it. Like the ignorant, unthinking, and ridiculously sanguine little optimist that I was. I wanted the job.

  Jim drove me to the shooting range so that I could be qualified to carry a weapon. I’d never even touched a gun before that muggy April afternoon, but he was a good teacher. Of the hundred rounds I fired, I missed the black only four times, and then only by centimeters. When I’d finished shooting, Jim pulled the target sheet down and looked at the holes clustered evenly in the midsection of the human-shaped silhouette.

  “You’re steady,” he said. “You’ve got a great pattern. You don’t pull to one side like most beginners I’ve seen.”

  He rolled the paper into a cylinder as we walked to his Plymouth, and when I reached for the door, he slipped his hand past mine and grabbed the handle.

  “I’ve got every confidence in you,” he said. “You’ll make a good cop. All the same, when you’re with me, I hope you’ll p
ermit me to be a gentleman.” He opened the car door and stood holding it until I was seated, and then shut it carefully. I watched in the rearview mirror as he walked back to lock my target sheet in the trunk, and found myself thinking that the dates I’d been on in high school and college had all been with boys.

  He came around and leaned in the driver’s side window.

  “So,” he said, “what was that bullshit on your application, about a couple of joints in high school?”

  “I tried it a few times,” I said. “Everyone did.”

  “We’re talking just between us now. You and me. Out front.”

  “That’s it,” I said. “Three or four times.”

  He popped open the door and slipped behind the wheel, and then leaned across me to open the glove box. He pulled out a palm-sized pistol and handed it to me. I was surprised by its weight.

  “Twenty-five automatic,” he said. “Easy to stash.”

  “It looks like a toy.”

  “You get hit and one of those suckers will bounce around inside you until it finds something solid enough to stop it. Friend of mine, ex-state agent by the name of Denny Dennison, got damn near blinded by one of those. Still carrying fragments in his head. It’ll do damage, all right.”

  I slipped the pistol into my purse, trying to seem calm.

  “I hope you don’t have plans for this evening,” he said. “We’ll drive into Houston. We’ve got plenty to talk about, and we might as well do it over dinner.”