The 99^th Name

1.

We had spent so much energy trying to not get busted by the cops it made sense that one of us finally crossed over and joined the Man. We were proud that Wayne was doing his duty, keeping New Orleans protected and served. The Fuzz had always seemed like an alien species to us, enigmas wrapped in sky blue. Some were corrupt, some were cool, some were racist, some weren’t. We had all gotten for busted at one time or another for public urination, trespassing, no driver’s license, speeding, etc. Actually, all of that had only happened to me. I was by far the most incorrigible of my friends but by the time Wayne joined the force I was living out of town or even out of the state. I didn’t warrant his protection if he would have even offered it to me, which is doubtful. I was still the same old chucklehead but Wayne had changed. He’d taken on all the trappings of adulthood that I was avoiding. He had a wife and a steady career. He was raising her daughter from another marriage and they had their own baby in the oven.

The NOPD took him out of the squad car and put him behind a desk, not because he was inept but because he was one of the few officers who could handle all the paperwork. Wayne had failed out of Ben Franklin high school because he couldn’t or wouldn’t keep up with the work but now he was the man of letters for the boys in blue. But friends said he craved the action of patrolling and thus it was natural for Wayne to volunteer for extra duty if it got him out of the station and on the streets. He loved New Orleans the way a man loves his mother. She may be an old bitch with tons of problems but she raised you and loved you and no true son would just sit back and watch her go under, drowning in her own crime and filth and disease. I had never felt that way, though I loved the city too. Perhaps I had just fucked up so many times that I couldn’t ride the streets without passing numerous sites of my disrepute. Wayne put all that behind him and so there he was one night, training a rookie cop on the graveyard shift when they got a call from the dispatcher. Armed robbery at a bar in the 9^th Ward. Wayne and his partner were the first to arrive. As they pulled up alongside the bar, the robbers burst out a side door and opened fire on the squad car. The rookie, who was riding shotgun, ducked as the bullets passed over her into Wayne’s neck and head.

Wayne’s wife was staying at her mother’s house in Pass Christian, Mississippi. At 4 a.m. she received a phone call from the New Orleans Police Department. Something had happened to Wayne but they could provide no further details. In any event, she needed to get to New Orleans ASAP. The cops put in a call to the Mississippi State Troopers who gave an escort to the state line. There she was met by a pair of equally stoic and silent officers who proceeded to escort her all the way to Charity Hospital. With a trooper in front and a trooper behind they whipped through the darkness pushing what little traffic there was to the side. She had carte blanche to drive as fast as she wanted but she had borrowed her mother’s truck and there was a governor on the motor that prevented the truck from exceeding 100 miles an hour. Crying and praying and pounding the steering wheel, her foot mashing the pedal to the floor, knowing nothing but her own worst fears she stared at the green 99 shining out of the dashboard like a beacon of hope in a storm tossed sea. She raced time itself to get to her husband and our friend before he expired from this plane but she never had a chance. Wayne was DOA at Charity and all that was left to do was make funeral arrangements and begin tracking down his killers.

All of that would happen. The cops would catch one guy that night and three more the next day and within a year or so all were on death row in Angola State Penitentiary. Wayne’s face was all over the front page on the Times-Picayune, more famous than any of us had ever been. He looked the same as he had in high school, the thin hair and uncertain smile, the tragically handsome and pockmarked face, the look in his eyes that said you could ask him for anything and no matter how assed out you were, he’d say yes. He’d drive you places, lend you money, forgive your excesses, indulge with you, outdrink you, try a new drug, go along with any hare-brained or criminal idea. That was Wayne and there he was in his blue uniform under a headline that screamed ‘Officer Slain.’

I missed the funeral, but I understood that no eye remained dry. Friends tried to talk about him and failed. No one could tell the story of Wayne because no one really knew who he was. Father, friend, husband, policeman, high school and college graduate, once a sinner, now born again, but who was Wayne? The NOPD had an answer. They put Wayne’s name on the list of officers killed in the line of duty. There’s a plaque with that ever growing list down at City Hall. Wayne Russell is the 99^th name.