“I bought it ten years ago. It was a bad time for real estate. Good for me, though. I couldn’t touch it now.”
“I believe it,” she said.
“The real estate guy said I should tear the house down and build something suitable for the location. He didn’t know it took every penny I had just to make the down payment.”
“Why would you want to tear it down?”
“You should have seen it. There isn’t much left of the original house, but the view hasn’t changed.”
“It’s fantastic,” she said.
“Come on, I’ll show you around.”
He opened the front door and escorted her through the house to the deck in back. They stood at the railing and looked out to the water, which was now smooth in the quiet lazy weather.
“So this is where you bring that kayak,” she said.
“In good weather. When it’s too rough, I go down a little ways where there’s more beach. Those rocks can make a rough landing.”
He pointed to the rocky beach below that reached out to a sliver of sand.
“The water is so calm.”
“There’s no wind. Believe me, it can change. When the tide comes in, there’s hardly any beach here. You can’t get here from anywhere else.” He pointed to a solid rock bluff that rose out of the water to the west. “That rock is our Gibraltar.”
“You can see the buildings downtown, but it seems so far away.”
“That’s why I like it. Sit down,” he said, pointing to the deck chairs. “What can I bring you?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Whatever you have.”
“Whiskey or vodka?”
“Whiskey would be fine.”
“I have beer, too.”
“Whiskey,” she repeated.
In the kitchen, where he kept his liquor, he poured an ample shot over ice for both of them, and then, as an afterthought, added a little more. He carried the glasses out to the deck and handed one to her.
“This will take the hair off your chest.”
He sat down in the chair beside her and took a healthy sip. She took a smaller one and then a deep breath.
“What a night,” she said, her voice nearly flat. “Sometimes I wonder if I’m cut out for this.”
“Nobody is cut out for that. You did a good job.”
“Did I? It seemed to me that you did most of it, and I just hung around in the corners, afraid to look.”
“You did what you were supposed to do.”
She nodded slowly as she looked past him out to the water. “Maybe you’re right. Anyway, what the hell am I worrying about me for? Do you ever wonder what you got yourself into, with this job, I mean?”
“I don’t think about it anymore. That’s what I like about the kayak. I sweat it out of me before I get here. By the time I’m home, I’ve forgotten all about First Avenue. It’s a whole different world, and I don’t belong there.”
“Maybe I should get a kayak.”
“It doesn’t work very well on concrete.”
“I’m not sure it would help anyway. Sometimes I can’t forget things.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll learn how to do it.”
He left unsaid the danger if she did not. He had seen that, too. Better to hold it away, to forget.
He made sure she was comfortable, that she had a fresh glass of whiskey, and then he excused himself to take his shower. He was overdue for that. He shed his clothes, and as he pulled the sweatshirt over his head, the death smell passed by his nose again. It was impossible to get rid of it. He stuffed his clothes into a plastic garbage bag and tied the end into a knot. This time he would not even try to wash them.
When he returned to the deck, she was asleep—the second glass of whiskey half consumed on the table beside her. He sat down carefully in the other chair. She seemed so small curled up on the recliner, so fragile, her wrists and hands hardly bigger than a child’s.
Out in the Sound a tugboat was passing. It pulled an empty barge toward the grain terminals, its diesel engines pounding a war dance rhythm across the water. Seagulls swooped down to the barge and squawked their disappointment when they found it empty.
On his deck a silent guest arrived without invitation. There was no extra chair for her. She sat alone, off to the side, too small to stand. He would not look at her and rubbed his eyes hard with the palms and fingers of both hands. Even so he could not push her away. He squinted into the sun and remembered.
“Olivia. Olivia Sanchez.”
That was the baby’s name. He mouthed the name silently to himself as his fingers drummed the cadence of the diesel engines on the arm of the deck chair, taking him back, taking him to that other world where he did not belong.
Chapter 2
The edge of the western sky was red with sunset, and a penetrating coolness rose from the water at the bottom of the hill. Gone were the clerks and businesspeople and lawyers with their briefcases who filled the sidewalks during the day and waited impatiently for the lights to change. Also gone were the cars and cabs and buses that clogged the streets. Only the stragglers remained.
Katherine stood on the hillside a block up from the station. Her uniform was draped over her arm in a black plastic bag. She watched the blue-and-white police cars darting into and out of the garage like bees from the open end of a hive.
The shift had not begun and she was already tired. She was tempted to turn away. What good would she do if she walked down the hill? She never accomplished anything, and yet there was never an end to what she would not accomplish. Maybe she should go back to her office job and admit that becoming a cop had been a mistake. Nobody would care. Her family would be relieved, and her friends, those still left, would stop thinking she was some kind of circus sideshow.
More than anything else, Katherine was tired of being the woman in the squad. She was tired of them watching her, waiting for her to show fear or weakness or humanness. She was tired of them expecting her to be like them and then rejecting her if she was—these men who treated her like an experiment they knew would fail. If she saw Mike roll his eyes one more time toward the god of maleness when she insisted they go to the station for the bathroom rather than stop at some filthy bar that was good enough for him, she could not be sure she would not hit him with her flashlight.
Down the hillside of concrete there was an unbroken view to the deep gray harbor. At this time of day’s end the buildings on either side of the street rose from long shadows. Her shadow lay far up the hill and dwarfed her. She could easily turn around and follow it.
Numb with reluctance, she moved from her place and, like a highwire performer who dared not look at her feet, continued down the hill and into the garage as she knew she must.
Inside she nodded greetings and forced a smile as she headed for the locker room. She found her locker and dressed in front of it. She did not try to squeeze in front of the one small mirror with the five or six other women who were preparing for work or leaving it, but she appreciated their voices. She wished there were more. She wished there would be so many that their voices would be indistinct and unrecognizable.
At roll call she stood in the third row, farthest from the front, one of three women in the rows of men from the two squads that worked the late rotation. When her name was called, she lied and said “Here” like all the others.
The streetlights were on when Mike drove out of the garage onto Cherry Street, and he reached to the control panel and flipped on the headlights. It was Katherine’s turn to ride shotgun, so she began to fill in the log sheet clamped to her wooden clipboard. With one hand she held her flashlight to illuminate the page and with the other wrote with a light touch accustomed to unexpected bumps. Without being asked, Mike told her the mileage. When she finished, she put her flashlight on the floor between the seat and the door, an automatic reach in the dark. She pulled a blank log report from the bottom of the short pile on the clipboard and folded it in half for scratch paper. She s
tuck it under the clamp and dropped the clipboard onto the bench seat in the empty space between them. Their nightsticks stuck out from the crease between the backrest and bottom of the front seat, hers on her left and Mike’s on his right, like stakes marking boundaries. She reached up for her seat belt and stretched it across her body. Then she sank back in the seat and waited for the show to begin.
Radio rhythmically logged on cars and dispatched the non-emergency calls that had accumulated during shift change. Mike waited until he crossed their district line before logging on, then held the microphone in expectation of a call. When none came, he put the mike back in its metal rack with a self-satisfied smile.
Two weeks earlier the shift began in daylight. It would be nine months before they worked in light again. Soon it would be dark when she left for work, dark while she worked, and dark when she went home. Was that the reason Sam chose the First Watch—to see light, to feel sunshine, to do work that might seem normal? Would any work be normal sitting in this fishbowl?
She looked out the side window as they crisscrossed randomly through their district. Mike talked and she participated to the degree necessary not to listen. First Avenue was opening and coming to life. Kids began to gather on the corners, black and white, Indian and Mexican, standing in groups for company and protection and watching openly as the police car passed. Street prostitutes, serious and sharp-eyed about their business, turned and walked away when they saw the blue-and-white car approaching. Pimps, dopers, and small-time hustlers pretended to ignore them while customers glanced at them uncomfortably and fleetingly.
There were already drunken leaners outside the door of the Seafarers Tavern. A shout rose, hung in the air, and vanished when Mike drove through the parking lot.
When they drove by the Donald Hotel, Katherine felt a sharp pain in her chest. She tugged at her bulletproof vest. The pain burned for a while, then dulled like a wound frequently rubbed.
Dancing girls jiggled in the window booths across the street from the Donut Shop and waved to them as they crept along Pike Street. The Donut Shop was closed. She had hardly noticed it before, but now she looked carefully into the dark windows. Mike waved back to the dancing girls.
An hour into the shift, after their third meaningless call, Mike pulled to the curb in front of their coffee spot and punched the button to release the portable radio. “Coffee?” he asked. It was an announcement rather than a question.
“Sure,” she said, repeating her part flawlessly.
Mike liked to stop early in the shift for coffee. Katherine had no preference herself, and even if she did, it would not have mattered. He was senior to her by five years, as he frequently pointed out, and his wishes on such matters prevailed. When two cops formed a partnership from a mutual interest, there was give-and-take. Not with Mike. There had been no interest from either of them.
He sat across the booth from her in the modest but respectable hotel coffee shop that was popular with the sector cars and looked at his calendar. He kept it in his shirt pocket. After writing the overtime hours from the previous night on his calendar, he added the numbers aloud. He re-added the numbers each night, even if they had not changed, as though somehow they might have disappeared or increased clandestinely. He added four and three-fourths hours from the previous night.
He used the extra money for his toy fund, as he called it, and she imagined he kept it in a can hidden in his garage and took it out and counted it every night when he went home. His wife, who worked part-time in a health insurance office, used her wages for groceries. If there was extra, she could use the surplus as she pleased. It seemed like a strange way for married people to live, but what did she know?
“Eight hours already this period,” Mike said as he put the well-worn calendar back in his pocket. “Not bad, partner.”
He must be feeling good to call her partner. That was held in reserve for the times he felt expansive. They were not really partners, not like some who worked together year after year and knew each other’s habits, weaknesses, strengths, loves, hates, hopes, fears, families, friends, enemies. They had tolerated each other for the past three months, and that was all. She couldn’t go to the sergeant and request a change because she was only eleven months out of the academy. Mike couldn’t because no one else wanted to work with him. It could be worse, she told herself, again and again.
Katherine wondered if Sam would ever come back to the Third Watch. He had not criticized her or laughed at her or rolled his eyes when she could not push her feelings down into some emotionless cavern. He gave her his towel, offered her a drink, let her sleep undisturbed on his deck. When she awakened, she was glad she was not alone. Around him it seemed unnecessary to conceal that she was a woman, although it was difficult to tell when she put on the bulletproof vest that flattened her breasts and the wool pants designed for men and tailored to the point of absurdity.
Since that night a month earlier when Sam had brought in her briefcase and put it on the counter in the report room, Katherine had wondered about him. He dismissed her apologies for overlooking the time and not removing it from the car. He lingered and read the report she was writing. She explained what had happened: a strong-arm robbery where two kids took a wallet from a man visiting First Avenue for the evening and punched him a few extra times for pleasure. “Visiting?” he asked, pointing to the word she placed in quotation marks on her report.
“That’s what he said.”
“I see. Yes, that would be too good to leave out. Maybe you should add, ‘and a good time was had by all.’ They used to say that in my grandparents’ hometown paper when the neighbors visited each other.”
As she sat smiling beside the typewriter wondering what else was in that hometown paper and where such a newspaper could be, he told her he could always tell when she filled out the log because it was so thorough. It took a moment to realize he had given her a compliment. No one before had ever said “good job.” Since that night, she had thought of him when she filled out the log sheet and made sure he received information that might be useful. On the dashboard of their car, she left extra notes of details that could not be included in the official log or that filled in the gaps on the nights Mike had the responsibility.
Katherine found it pleasant to meet Sam in the hallway at the end of the shift. He seemed to acknowledge her as a fellow worker passing on a job that would be passed on and then on again. He accepted the passing from her with unusual courtesy. There were no off-color jokes, no quick sidesteps to make himself seen or to overtake her. There was plenty of that from the other men. His courtesy set him apart. He accepted her without wanting anything extra.
Did she want something extra? Is that why she met him at the water, knowing there would be talk? There would always be talk. She would worry about talk when there was something to talk about.
For her there was nothing to talk about—not since the departure of the graduate student who had been her friend since college. He was put off by the hours she worked, by the work stories she had mistakenly told him, by the blue shirts she kept at the far end of her closet along with her gun, which was hidden, but not well enough. How could she hide everything? He said he didn’t want to make love to somebody who had a gun in the closet and could shoot him afterward like one of those spiders who are killed by the female after they have provided their service. “Shoot you?” she had asked. It was a metaphor of their relationship, he claimed. Clearly it was not love he was talking about, but how could she explain the emptiness she felt when he put the telephone down ahead of her, and she heard the hollow buzz on the line? It was just as well, she thought. A spider, of all things. She wished him spiders forever.
The waitress came for the third time with the coffeepot, and for the second time Katherine placed her hand over her cup to ward off any attempt to refill it. Mike had another cup. He didn’t have to think about the consequences of drinking it. The waitress, whose name was Mildred, managed to pour a good amount of coffee around the cup as
well as into it. She was always careless with the coffee on Mike’s third cup. He scrambled for napkins to catch it before it ran onto his pants. It was a joke, but he didn’t get it. He swore under his breath at what he supposed was her incompetence, while Katherine stifled her laughter and caught Mildred’s sisterhood glance as she strode away with the coffeepot.
Mildred was a good soul. She had seen enough cops that they didn’t intimidate her, and she knew when they should be moving on. There were a few she didn’t mind staying longer, but Mike was not one of them. When it was Katherine’s turn to pay, she always left a generous tip for Mildred.
There was a call waiting for them when they cleared, a continuation of the night’s disturbances. Like troubled waves that broke across the battered wall of civility, these disturbances would build and roll all through the night. Most smelled of alcohol. It continued to amaze Katherine how little it took for people to disagree when they were drunk, and it made her wonder if they should try prohibition again. Occasionally somebody went to jail, but usually it was “you go this way and you go that way,” a concept to solve problems that seemed difficult for some to understand without hand signals and guided directions. It would be cheaper if the city hired tour guides to walk in and out of the bars.
Mike drove across the oncoming traffic and double-parked in front of the Driftwood Tavern. They got out of the car at the same time. Katherine stuck her nightstick into its wire holster so that it dangled from her left hip and held the flashlight in her left hand. She looked up and down the sidewalk. Sometimes the troublemaker was heading down the street. Sometimes he or she was approaching. She went inside the tavern ahead of Mike and stopped close to the doorway to allow her eyes to adjust to the dim light. Mike stopped behind her.
It was clear that something was wrong, something more than the “unwanted customer” that Radio had described. At the middle of the bar one man sat alone, hunched on a stool and protecting his drink like an alley cat with a piece of food. The bartender stood at the far end of the bar. All the other customers, the whole distinguished group, sat at tables as far from the solitary man as possible. Everybody was looking up—everybody except the man at the bar.
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