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A call comes over about a hit-and-run driver flattening a boy in the middle of 80th Street. Any chance of getting to the scene while the driver is still in the area is killed by a cabbie who ignores the police siren to count out change methodically for a passenger. The steaming cops order the cabbie to follow them over to the scene of the hit-and-run. The victim is a 10-year-old boy, his right leg has been scraped heavily but EMTs on the scene are more concerned with the way he holds his left elbow and grimaces when they attempt to touch it. The boy’s mother, who had been watching him cross the street to her when the car hit him, gives Valentin the plate number and he radios it in. For his part, the cabbie doesn’t know when to keep a low profile and intrudes with some crack about how he’s losing business every second he’s standing around. Whatever business he works up for the rest of the day will carry the surcharge from the summons Altreche serves on him.

Altreche and Valentin wear their blues differently. For the 31-year-old Valentin, the job is still, almost 10 years out of the Academy, “the best thing I ever did.” A native of Paterson, he laughs without embarrassment at the memory of a friend in need of work some years ago. “He was in this stockbroker crowd out on Long Island, so he considered being a cop a step down. But when you come from Paterson, New Jersey, like I do, you consider it a step up.”

Altreche isn’t buying. While he appreciates the opportunity he’s had to work with some good people, the PBA delegate says flatly: “No birthdays, no barbecues, no relationships, no money — that’s what working patrol in the NYPD adds up to. I’d want my kid to do anything but be a cop in New York City.”

Any specific reasons?

“Let’s count the ways. The bosses in the 115 know how to treat people. That shouldn’t be worth saying, that should be a general rule, but it isn’t. All Police Plaza seems interested in is instilling fear in cops. They think fear tactics will get them respect. Can they really be that far out of touch?” He answers his own question. “Of course they are. Take the smallest thing. When to start wearing short-sleeved shirts. They sit around over there figuring out this and that angle while the cops on the street who have to wear the shirts — something most of the great decision-makers never had to do — are suffocating. Like they’ll tell us from their air-conditioned offices how much heat our bodies can take in 100 degrees at the far end of the Bronx or Queens. Then the Great Cargo Pants Caper! How long have we been waiting for them now? I remember all the memos and the announcements, but I haven’t seen the pants yet.”

A call goes out about a 79-year-old suffering from Alzheimer’s who has disappeared from her home. The cops cruise several side streets between Northern Boulevard and Roosevelt Avenue before the dispatcher comes back to say the woman has been found. While looking for the woman, though, something about a Nissan parked off Roosevelt bothers Altreche, so he goes back to the spot off 82nd Street. The car is no longer there, and he shakes off some misgiving. “There were three of them in it,” he says uncertainly. “Maybe I’m just overreacting on this Colombian gang thing.”

At that, both cops admit, there are worse things to be haunted about. For Valentin, it was the night in Brooklyn, before moving to the 115, that he and a sergeant were knocking off, on their way home, when they spotted a suspicious driver. No sooner had Valentin started patting down the suspect than the man grabbed for his gun, pushed him aside, then went for the sergeant’s weapon. After several long minutes, the cops overpowered the suspect, then heard from the dispatcher that the Ford they had stopped belonged to somebody who only a few minutes before had reported being car-jacked. Worse, the suspect had forced the driver to head for a dark area of East Brooklyn with the announced intention of killing him. The driver had escaped by jumping out of his own moving car.

One scene Altreche would prefer forgetting was once being called to a Northern Boulevard apartment where a man had gotten into an argument with his wife, had shot her, had gone into the bedroom to kill a four-year-old, and had been prevented from adding a seven-year-old to the list only because the boy ran down the stairs into the arms of arriving police. “What I’ll never get over seeing,” Altreche says, “is that four-year-old’s body. He was trying to hide under the bed and got only halfway under when the bastard shot him in the back. How could you do something like that and not blow out your own brains?”

... Report of a body lying in the street ...

The dispatcher sends the cops over to 98th Street and Astoria Boulevard, where a body has been reported lying in the street. Sure enough, in the middle of a tree-lined block of two-family homes, a man is stretched out. But he isn’t a body yet, just somebody zonked out; from the lack of an alcohol smell, most likely from drugs.

A woman comes out of a nearby house holding what appears to be a shower curtain over her head to protect herself from the start of a downpour. When Altreche asks if she knows the unconscious man, she quickly shakes her head, but throws in that “it’s so sad to see people in that condition.” While Valentin radios in for some EMS help, the woman approaches warily. Suddenly, she lets go with a shriek: “Oh, my god!”

“What?” Altreche asks. “You know him?”

She is beside herself, running back and forth with the shower curtain above her head as though warming up for a skydive. “Oh, yes! Yes!”

The police officers don’t know what to expect. The woman’s husband? Her brother? Somebody she thought she had murdered 20 years ago? Her abrupt hysteria seems ready to deliver anything.

“Calm down, lady,” Altreche tries again. “Who is he?”

“I don’t know his name,” she finally gets out. “But I think he lives on the next block.”

The two cops look blankly at one another: They had expected a lot more bang for their shrieking than that. “So why you getting so excited?” Valentin asks. “He’s not dead. Just passed out from too much celebrating or something.”

The woman refuses to take comfort in that. On the contrary, it is the final nudge to send her scampering back into her apartment, shower curtain over her head, sobbing desperately that “life is so sad!”

By the time EMS arrives, the man has begun to come around. Unlike the robbery victim outside The Black Door, he has no problem getting on a stretcher and being taken to a hospital. He doesn’t know where he is, what he took to get him into his current condition, and why he’s being packed into a UFO by two white-jacketed aliens while two others in blue keep asking him questions.

The next two calls turn out to be false alarms. At the scene of a reported dispute in front of the Flamingo Club, a topless bar on Roosevelt Avenue, the doorman, who missed his calling as a pillar for a public building, knows from nothing. More shrugs are to be found off 84th Street a few minutes later from a group of teenagers reported as having been “passing a gun around.” The closest thing to a gun found on any of the kids is a pair of pliers one of them has been using to tighten bolts on his bicycle.

	A domestic dispute

A third call, however, turns out to be not so unfounded. Upstairs neighbors on 110th Street have reported a man beating his wife. The officers get to the frame house just as the young wife is desperately trying to flee her apartment into the arms of two women in the hall and being yanked back inside by the seething husband. Altreche grabs the husband, the wife collapses into the arms of one of the women, and the second one identifies herself as having called 911.

The arrest goes the way these things often go. The husband claims it was “nothing serious,” while the wife screams something about “I warned you.” The husband pleads for the wife’s intervention as he is being led off in handcuffs, with the wife having a change of heart and having to be held back by the neighbors from running to the husband. There seems little doubt that the wife will show up at the precinct later in the evening or the following morning to insist nothing out of the ordinary happened.

The scene of the friction, meanwhile, is revealed as being classic Jackson Heights 2003. Seven different doors along a narrow corridor have locks on them — each one undoubtedly a closet-sized space accommodating little more than a cot and a couple of drawers for an illegal. “They won’t be coming back tonight, though,” Valentin says. “They hear about the police cars out front, they’ll wait till tomorrow.”

Getting back into the car, Altreche hears a report of a Nissan with four passengers having been hauled in for license troubles. He knows instinctively it was the same car he saw earlier off 82nd Street and sends in a heads-up to check the plates against cars seen around the robberies pulled off by the Colombian gangs. He has gone only a few blocks before the confirmation comes in: Indeed, the plates match. At least four members of the robbery band have been taken off the street by accident!

“I never said the job had no satisfactions,” Altreche smiles.