Because it was a holiday weekend and people with seniority were taking days, there was yet another watch commander on duty, making it three in three nights. Lieutenant Sandro Puig kept a modulated tone when he told Ballard to respond to an address on Hobart Avenue to investigate a home invasion and assault. She asked if there were any Thai officers on duty and he responded that 6-A 79 — the designation for the patrol unit assigned to the Thai Town area — included an officer who could translate.
It took Ballard five minutes to wind her way down and out of the Dell and then another five to get to the address, which was a 1950s two-level apartment building with parking underneath. It looked like the last time anyone had taken a run at painting the place was the previous century. She parked behind a patrol car. She saw no EMT wagon yet, even though the call was billed as an assault.
The entrances to the apartments were along an outside walkway. As she headed up the steps toward apartment 22, a shirtless man with a bloody eye suddenly appeared on the upper landing, saw Ballard coming up, and charged down the stairs toward her.
At the same moment, she heard a woman’s shrill voice yell, “Hey! Stop!”
Muscle memory took over. Ballard took a sideways step into the middle of the concrete staircase and brought her arms and hands up to take on the body charging at her from an upper angle. The man hit her with all of his weight. He was small but the impact was solid and she was propelled backward and down. She landed butt-first on the lower landing with the man’s weight coming down on top of her. After impact, he immediately started to roll off her. She tried to grab him, but without a shirt, there was no purchase on his sweat-slick body. As fast as the collision had occurred he was up and gone. Ballard could see a female officer coming down the steps toward her. The officer hit the landing, jumped over Ballard’s sprawled body, and continued the chase, yelling something that sounded like “Yood, yood, yood!”
Ballard realized she had hit her head on the concrete. She wanted to get up and join the chase but the world was beginning to spin. She turned onto her side and then her stomach and then finally raised herself onto her hands and knees.
“Ballard, are you all right?”
She turned her head toward the stairs and saw another officer coming down. Soon she felt a hand on her arm as someone tried to help her up.
“Wait,” Ballard said. “Give me a second.”
She paused and then looked up at the second officer. It was Victor Rodriguez, her translator from the night of Raffa’s killing.
“V-Rod,” Ballard said. “Who the fuck was that?”
“That was our goddamn victim,” Rodriguez said. “He suddenly jumped up and took off.”
“Go after your partner. I’m all right.”
“You sure?”
“Go.”
Rodriguez hurried off, and Ballard, grabbing the staircase rail, climbed up into a standing position. She was hit with vertigo and held on to the railing for support. Her head finally cleared and she tentatively let go of the railing. After taking a few steps to see if everything was working, she swung her hand up under her jacket to the small of her back to check for blood or other damage but found nothing. She touched the back of her head. There was no blood but she felt a bump swelling at the impact point.
“Shit.”
Soon she heard a helicopter cutting across the sky above and knew the officers had called out an airship to help find the running man.
But it was not to be. Rodriguez was soon back with the other officer, Chara Paithoon. Both were huffing from the unsuccessful foot pursuit.
“He got away,” Rodriguez said.
“You okay, Renée?” Paithoon asked.
“I hit my head,” Ballard said.
Paithoon was one of the few Thai-born officers in the department. She was short and compactly built and wore a short haircut with shaved sidewalls and a waxed front wave. Ballard knew that plenty of female officers adopted utility hairstyles to ward off the unwanted attention of male officers.
“Can I see?” Paithoon said. “Let me check your eyes.”
Paithoon snapped on a flashlight. She held the light so the outer edge of its beam touched lightly on Ballard’s face. Paithoon was standing in close, looking up at her eyes.
“You’ve got some dilation,” she said. “You should have the EMTs check it.”
“Yeah, where are they?” Ballard asked. “I thought this was an assault.”
Paithoon stepped back and put away her light.
“We called them but I guess they’re tied up,” Rodriguez said.