You’re good to go then. I’ll forward my recommendations to your bosses.”
Good. Well, I think it’s a good thing. Actually, I’m not sure.
“Glad to see you back on board,” Mark booms, pumping my hand and nodding toward a chair. My boss is handsome, fifty-eight years old, trim, with dark hair sprinkled gray. He’s been my lieutenant for the three years I’ve worked in detectives, but we’ve been friends much longer. He’s twenty-three years my senior so sometimes our friendship is a tad father/son, and I’m okay with that. As a boss, I consider him one of the good guys, a leader unaffected by his rank, one who loves his people, and who has never used anyone as a stepping stone to get ahead. That’s rare in the police biz.
“Thanks, Mark,” I say, plopping into the chair at the front of the desk. “Sort of glad to be back.”
Laughter erupts outside the glass-enclosed office where the night shift dicks are slipping on their jackets and exchanging barbs with the day shift crew as they remove theirs. I’ve missed the camaraderie.
“So,” Mark says in a between-you-and-me tone as he moves around behind his desk. He doesn’t sit. “You’re ready to do it?”
“I am. I think.”
“Tiff okay with it?”
Tiff and I enjoyed a few dinners with Mark and his squeeze, David. Mark’s gay, no biggee to me, though I’m guessing it is with some of the guys in the squad. I’ve seen the occasional smirks and eyebrow bobbing, but I’ve never heard anyone trash talk him, probably because he’s one of the best lieutenants around.
“We had our weekly last night. That part was fine, but it’s pretty clear it’s not happening.”
“Too bad.” He said once that we make a beautiful couple and that Tiff could turn a gay man straight. Asking me about her is his way of asking how we’re doing. He doesn’t say it, but I know he thinks we’re just having a bump in the road, that we’ll work through it. He knows a lot about our relationship, but he doesn’t know everything.
“Not really.” I sigh. I’m tired of thinking about Tiff. “So what do you got me doing?”
Two months earlier, I was working the Burglary Unit and returning to the office after interviewing a witness, when radio sounded the hot-call warning beeps, followed by dispatch announcing an armed robbery in progress at a second-hand store at the intersection of Southeast Fifteenth and Taylor. As fate would have it, the address was right outside my car window where I was waiting at a stop light. Half a minute later, the hold-up man was taking a non-stop to Hell, and the old man and I were enjoying breathing.
Mark moves around to the front of his desk and sits on its edge. He looks down at me. “The doc ask you the question?”
“Can I drop the hammer again? She did and I said, yes.”
“Let’s just pray that you never have to. But no one will work with someone who can’t.”
I nod at my friend. “I know the drill, Mark.”
“I know you do and you know I got to ask it. Okay, enough of this shit. You got your gun back from the Evidence Property Room, right?”
I pull my jacket flap back and reveal my Glock. “A couple weeks after the Shooting Board gave me their stamp of approval.”
“You’re back in the Burglary Unit and I’ve teamed you up with Tommy for a few days. He’s on his second day off and will be back tomorrow. Why don’t you set up your desk or something, and then take off early. But come back mañana raring to roll.”
“Can I work these short hours everyday?”
“No.”
By noon I’ve cleaned everyone’s lunch remnants off my desk, made sure my computer was working, talked with several of the dicks, and had coffee with a uniform friend. Now I’m taking a stroll along Water Front Park which parallels the Willamette River to soak up a little spring sun and watch the first sailboats of the season skim over the water. I think it’s still too chilly for sailing but in rainy Portland any brief sun break brings out the shorts and water toys.
It feels good to be back at work, better than I imagined considering that I’d been having second thoughts about police work even before the shooting. I joined the PD for the classic reasons, security, and to help others, but I quickly found out that most of the time crime fighting is tantamount to trying to lower the ocean by removing one glass of water at a time. Liberal judges release dangerous predators out onto the street, the media criticizes the PD’s every move, new laws and restrictions make it ever more difficult to protect and serve and, with the exception of Mark, too many in command positions use the backs of those under them for knife plunging practice.
I knew about these things before I took the long battery of tests to join fifteen years ago but, in my naiveté, I was convinced I could handle the challenge. Now I’m starting to question if I want to. Do I want to do this for the rest of my working life? Is it satisfying enough? Do I want to spend the next fifteen years dealing with all the politics and the monstrous negativity? If I’m growing weary at the half way point in my career, at a time when I can resign and move somewhat easily into another job, how weary will I be ten years from now when I’ll no longer be as marketable to employers? I don’t know the answer.
Then there’s the shooting.
The uniform officer I had coffee with summed up his shooting this way. “I went to work, met a man, and I killed him.” That’s it stripped of all its fat. Problem is, it’s the fat that rips and chews the soul. I’ve been dealing with it, though, with hard training, a half dozen visits with Kari and my love shack meetings with Tiff. I might be feeling better, but the bottom line is that I didn’t sign on to kill people. SWAT guys have a saying: “The man deserved killin’.” That was the case with the tweaker, but that’s not why I want to work in law enforcement. Damn, I’m thinking in circles. I’ve been doing that a lot lately. Monkey brain.
There is one place I can clear my mind: my dojo. A few hundred punches will organize my thinking. Besides, I got a new private coming in this afternoon at four.
I wait for a blue Toyota Corolla to pass and jog over to my car.
*
Although I’ve thrown hundreds of punches and kicks in my private training room for the last forty-five minutes, and I worked the heavy bag last night until I nearly collapsed, my jab and cross punch still rip through the air with authority.
I lash out five more, then spread my feet and bend forward until my chest nearly reaches between my thighs. I hold the stretch for a few seconds, feeling the tightness dissolve in my legs, lower back and in my over-worked shoulders. After a minute, I straighten and begin pulling off my T-shirt as I walk out the door and head to my office to get a dry one. Before I get there, the street door opens at the far end of the room, bringing inside a blare of traffic noise, light, and a slightly silhouetted figure. It belongs to a big man, twenty-something, longish blond hair, neck like a Grecian column and, obvious even from thirty feet away and with harsh backlight, a palpable attitude. He hip bumps the door shut behind him and looks around the room with disdain. His eyes stop on me. He doesn’t smile; he just looks.
“You
