New Shift. Old Shift. Night Shift.

I opened the trunk of my Lawmaster and began rummaging around inside to begin sorting things out; shotgun shells from straw, manuals from coat hangers, plastic bags from bundles of lawsuits…it was hell.

I was in the midst of separating one life from another, all inside the same life. The transition would have a few payoffs in the way of hours and pay, but it pushed me through 9 years of memories in a matter of minutes. It was now that I saw my first “Home Invasion/Aggravated Burglary” case, my first ironic DUI’s, Domestic’s, Shoplifters, Embezzlers, PI’s, --everything. It made me reflect on the cases since then, and the four year pause between them. It was kind of awful, but the night was unusually nice so I thought I’d take an apple-scented cigar and crawl out on the roof. I did.

I no longer had the papers in my hand, but I began thinking about my cases. A teacher of 20 years who had a clean record, but had pushed his wife away from him against a wall when she began berating him face to face for twenty minutes about his lack of intimacy. A woman who had stabbed her boyfriend in the back after twenty years of physical abuse. A Public Works worker with no ID who had been driving a car without tail lights who happened to have an open container of brandy between his legs at the time. An off-duty fireman caught driving drunk after being clocked at 97 MPH in a 45 MPH zone. A man who had duct-taped his girlfriends five year old son to a tree and sodomized him after having drown him the night before in the community pool where he worked, the boy surviving only after having been resuscitated by his antagonizer…

…I was quiet. But I finished.

I drove to work, the first time as a Sergeant, and did so past a city Lane where I also happened to take my first suicide call. It was a street where I pulled up, alone, and found a father opening up the door to a truck where his son sat, hunting rifle in hand, head disassembled, and watched the father crumple back onto the ground like a rag doll as the Inevitable swallowed him hole, and where I later told the victim’s mother, pregnant wife, and daughter that Daddy would “not be getting better”.
It was a warm summer night in May, and I recalled the only relief I achieved being twofold: One, leaving the pregnant wife and young daughter after delivering the news only to find the father in the back yard and letting him bawl on my shoulder, and Two, the battery in my flashlight going dead as I stared into the victims left-cranial hemisphere observing with fascination where the school books left off. It was amazing.

I arrived at the Mothership (our central headquarters now being such after spawning three Precincts) still thinking of this when I met my new crew.

They had known my name, but not what to expect. They were politely quiet, and took what little I had to say, after my expecting having had so much to say, and I’ll be damned—they went to Work.

Just as I had done after my first line-up, and all the others before me.

Maybe this new Chapter wouldn’t be so bad.

Maybe, it wouldn’t be so different.

But then…why should it? How many times had this happened before? And then…there it Was:


I had just seen the beginning of a New Circle.

Same as the Olde.

___


Good Luck, Kids.

Dennis Leary Called Me Again.

Dennis Leary woke me up with a late night phone call; 4:37am by the clock on my cell phone. I had long since abandoned night side time pieces in a futile attempt to combat insomnia and it hadn’t worked since Clinton’s second term, but it was a habit I never could shake.

Dennis was desperate, and it disgusted me. He wouldn’t be specific, but he said he was in Chicago, and that the charges were 'Cocaine related'. I had already been calculating how far down his Friends and Peers list I was on to have gotten this call, and this explained a great deal. The mathematics didn’t necessarily stop, but their relevance was definitely cast aside.

“Jesus man, I wouldn’t be calling you if it weren’t important. I’m totally fucked, and you're giving me shit.”

“I know”, I said, “but what can I do from here?”

“Do you have a thousand bucks?” he replied.

“Of course not. I’m a cop, you tit. Besides, I’m on probation at work. Are you bent or something? What the fuck have you gotten yourself into?!”

He fell silent. Shame; such a brutal, basal emotion.


We had become friends in my last dream after striking up a conversation after a local gig at the Comedy Catch, and I see now that he was no better than a dozen other celebrity acquaintances I had made in the last few years. What a shit-bag.

I told him I’d make a few calls, and hung up the phone so I could decide what I’d really do, and that was about the time I’d woken up. My left shoulder was as numb as a divorce attorney, and I had to reposition. What the hell was today’s date?