A Thousand Naked Strangers - Kevin Hazzard Page 0,46

attention, please? There has been a jailbreak. I repeat, there has been a jailbreak.”

For a few seconds nothing happens. There’s no panic. No stampede. No sign at all that anyone has heard us. And then, across the street, a door opens. A skinny little hipster bolts out onto his porch. At first I don’t pay him any mind. It’s eight in the morning, we’re in a bad neighborhood, and this guy’s got a pirate flag hanging from his house. I don’t see him as the type who wants to be taken seriously. I’m wrong.

He darts down the steps and stomps barefoot across the street. We pretend not to see him even as we watch him march over. “He headed our way?” I ask, mouth barely moving. My partner nods, turns off the PA. This should be fun. The guy stomps up to the driver’s-side window and starts yelling. No hello, no nothing. Yelling. My partner, God bless him, smiles through the glass. He holds a hand to his ear and says, “I can’t hear you.”

This infuriates the little guy. “Unroll it, then!”

My partner reaches up and presses the window button, slowly lowering the window with a loud, rubbery squuuueeeeaaaaakkkk. He smiles. “What’s up?”

The guy rails on for five minutes, mostly about us waking him up at eight on a Sunday morning but with a heavy emphasis on the fact that people live here. He says he’s heard everything we’ve said, every word, from his house across the street. I ask, because I can’t help myself, which house is his. “The one with the pirate flag?”

His hair catches fire.

He opens his mouth, then stops. He turns and marches off, and right about then my partner and I decide it’s a good time to leave. We don’t make it half a block before we catch a call. We flick on the lights and head over, and almost immediately, we forget about the hipster, the PA, even the jailbreak. But the hipster remembers us. Before we leave the scene of our call, a white supervisor’s truck pulls up. The supervisor gets out and walks over. He asks if we had an argument with a resident. I nod. “Yeah, some guy over by the prison. Why?”

“Did you say something about a jailbreak?”

It occurs to me, for the first time and clearly too late, that while sitting in an official-looking vehicle, I’d announced there’d been a jailbreak. Over a PA system. A block from the federal penitentiary. This was probably a bad idea.

The supervisor pulls his keys from his pocket. “After you guys drop that patient off,” he says, hopping into his truck, “go ahead and come by my office. We need to talk.”

It’s a very long transport.

As soon as we walk through the door, our supervisor drops it on us. “He wants to press charges.”

I’ve been standing, but once this is said, I sink down into a chair. While we were out running that last call, the hipster went ape shit and called every number he could find, all the way up to the CEO of the hospital. Thankfully, it’s a Sunday, and the only person he could get is the supervisor sitting before us. Not that he’s terribly happy with us at the moment.

“Reckless endangerment.” The supervisor slips his glasses on, reads from a notepad. “He thinks what you said, coming from a city truck, near the pen, was official enough to make it like yelling fire in a crowded theater.”

I’m in disbelief. “Is he serious?”

“He wants you arrested.”

“That’s pretty serious.”

“I’d say so.”

“What now?”

The supervisor shrugs. Says for us to go about the rest of our day like nothing’s happened. “What’ll happen tomorrow, when everyone returns, I don’t know.”

That’s the story, and what happens now, on Monday, is what I’m here to find out. The director of EMS operations is silent. I clear my throat.

“Look, this was my fault. My partner, he was there, but I said it.” I rock back on my heels. “If anyone’s getting fired, it should be me.”

She nods, which, when you think about it, could mean a lot of things. She closes her eyes, and we settle into an awkward silence. Then, almost imperceptibly, the bottom corner of her mouth twitches. That’s followed by another twitch, then another, and soon her entire mouth breaks out into a huge grin. She tries to regain her composure, to look serious, but it’s too late. At last she laughs. I laugh. She cocks her head. I shut up. A deep breath