Good Cop/Bad Cop. Rebecca Cofer - Dartt

      By now Tony was always looking for a quick hit for cash. Sometimes he got grandiose about it. He talked of ripping off a money-rich drug dealer or a Mafia bookie. Then he wouldn’t have to worry about cops. He hated cops. He told Joanna he wouldn’t go back in-he”d shoot it out first. His dream was to wear a bulletproof vest and goggles and ride a motorcycle with a headset in the helmet, so he could track police movements on scanners. Sometimes he dressed in his black Ninja costume and practiced sneaking around the neighborhood, just to see if he could creep around and not be detected.

      Tony couldn’t stand the feeling of being controlled by other people. That’s why he couldn’t hold down a job for long. He thought he was smarter than every body else, so he decided the only way to get what he wanted was to operate outside the system. He had formed a fantasy world where he could control others (the women in his life who did his bidding) and exert a kind of power that made him feel powerful. To keep control, he made sure his women knew that violence or the threat of it was close at hand. Tony had been a student of violence for years.

      His favorite movies were packed with violence. He never tired of watching “Lethal Weapon.” He dreamed about owning a Berreta because that was the weapon of choice Clint Eastwood had made so famous. He read paperback accounts of vigilante heroes, like The Executioner series, where the hero takes the law in his own hands and guns down drug dealers with powerful weapons. Books like Improvised Weapons of the American Underground gave him ideas for his workshop. He bought hard-core pornographic magazines, especially ones that covered bizarre and violent sex.

      Although her father still refused to see her, Joanne reestablished contact with her mother after the birth of her son. Two months earlier Joanna had told her mother she wanted to move out. Tony was depressed, couldn’t sleep, had migraine headaches and he exploded in anger at the slightest thing; she was walking a tightrope with him.

      It was nervous energy and worry about her son that kept Joanna going. She raced around all day before leaving for work at the nursing home, and on the job she kept going with few breaks. Being able to smoke was one of the advantages of working the night shift. Because of anxiety she chain-smoked. She couldn’t go long without a cigarette. Thelma Thomas the aide who shared the midnight shift with her, a grandmotherly older woman, noticed how thin Joanna was getting and said, “Just look at you, you’d better slow down and eat more.”

      Joanna nodded but hadn’t replied.

      As for Tony, even smoking pot didn’t relieve his jitters for long now. He was hooked on grass and no matter how strapped he was for funds, he found enough to buy a nickel bag, often borrowing from his mother Shirley or grandmother. He tried to grow marijuana plants in the apartment, but gave up when their electric bills nearly doubled. It had been a while since Tony used acid. The local supply fluctuated and when it was scarce, the dealer marked the drug up to the point Tony thought it wasn’t worth it. Drug busts were on the increase in the area.

      Because Joanna was alarmed by Tony’s behavior, she frequently left the baby with Tony’s grandmother Sallie Reese when she went to work at night. Mrs. Reese, an independent woman had few attachments. The reason she took care of Tony’s child had more to do with her own daughter Shirley than her interest in the baby. She was committed to her daughter and did anything to help her. Sallie had decided to retire and moved from Newark, New Jersey, where she had lived most of her life, and bought an old farmhouse on a two and a half acre property for $13,500 in Cayuga County. She wanted to escape the city’s noise and crime and live an easy life. But she discovered it was expensive living in an old country house. To make ends meet she had to go back to work as a live-in nanny and housekeeper with an Ithaca family. She sold the property two years later and moved closer to her daughter.

      Now that she was finally retired, her biggest pleasure was watching television in peace and quiet. She made sure baby-sitting her great-grandson didn’t get in the way of that. The baby slept or played in the crib in the bedroom next to hers while she reclined in bed and looked at television movies and her favorite programs.

      Meanwhile things for Tony and Joanna went from bad to worse. They were behind in their rent and hadn’t paid gas and electric bills for two months. The landlady had just served them their third eviction notice. Finally Joanna asked her mother if she and Jimmy could stay with her for a little while. The situation had to be pretty bad, because Joanna would rather walk through fire than ask for help from her family. She hated to admit she couldn’t go it alone. Her mother said no, it wouldn’t work out at their house because her husband (Joanna’s new stepfather) couldn’t stand the noise that babies made. She gave Joanna four hundred dollars to pay the rent.

      On the Friday afternoon of December 22 Tony and Joanna took their son over to Tony’s mother and grandmother who lived on the other side of the duplex. Hie house they shared was on the dirt and gravel stretch of Etna Road that ran close to Tompkins County Airport and parallel to Route 13. the north-south highway out of Ithaca. They liked the isolation of the place. The few scattered houses were situated among thick woods on both sides of the road. A ranch house and a collapsing bam were cross from them and around the comer on the other side were two more frame duplexes of the same design, also owned by Mary Tilley.

      Farther down the road was an old logging trail. A stripped-down, yellow flatbed truck sat on cinder blocks in their front yard. The mixture of well-kept and shabby properties on one road was common in the area, where zoning laws either didn’t exist or weren’t enforced. The location fit their unsociable lives and their shaky finances; although on rare occasions a friend of Tony’s stopped by, the women never had company. They let Tony’s lifestyle set the tone for all of them.

      The duplex looked cheap and rundown. It was made with gray, vertical board and baton siding, a flat roof, aluminum storm doors, and no windows on either side of the building. Each apartment in the duplex had three bedrooms upstairs with two rooms and a kitchen downstairs. But with so little square footage to each room, the place seemed crowded.

      Walking outside they couldn’t help but notice the bad weather. Neither said anything about it. Joanna had to get to work and Tony was intent on leaving as quickly as possible and didn’t care about ice and snow.

      Joanna got in the driver’s seat of the 1977 blue Ford pickup while Tony put a bicycle in the back. A few months before, he had gone downtown and had come home with the black Nasbar. Joanna didn’t ask him what had happened. She knew he’d say it wasn’t any of her business, and she really didn’t want to know anyway.

      Then Tony told Joanna to drive to Turkey Hill Road. He didn’t say what his destination was. She took his silence for granted. He was in one of his dark moods and that meant the only talking he did was when he barked out orders and she did as she was told. She had to drive slowly, because of the snow buildup on the road. They took back roads as they generally did. Tony insisted they stay off the main highways when he was in the truck or in his mother’s car. There was less chance of meeting cops on secondary roads.

      They passed a few houses and long stretches of cut-down cornfields frozen to the ground. When they reached the bottom of Turkey Hill, he told her to turn left. She didn’t know the name of the road. They went a few miles and turned