Lights and Sirens
Part 53 of A Policeman's Tale of the American Riviera
“Clevinger was a troublemaker and a wise guy. Lieutenant Scheisskopf knew that Clevinger might cause even more trouble if he wasn't watched. Yesterday it was the cadet officers; tomorrow it might be the world. Clevinger had a mind, and Lieutenant Scheisskopf had noticed that people with minds tended to get pretty smart at times. Such men were dangerous, and even the new cadet officers whom Clevinger had helped into office were eager to give damning testimony against him. The case against Clevinger was open and shut. The only thing missing was something to charge him with.”
~Joseph Heller
The Cone of Silence
There were days when you walked on water, tip-toeing over the white caps of Galilee, when the Great Blue God was shining down on you and maybe, just maybe, you were getting measured for wings. Say you won the lottery and drew car 24 at briefing, that beautiful bitch, whose interior looked and smelled like a whelping pen for camels, a warhorse of a Police Interceptor who ran like a patrolman’s dream and whose MDC was always working. Good Lord above, you might have thought, the log book is up to date and she is full of gas, how could it get any better?
Say no one handed you a subpoena for a two-bit case that would wreck your RDOs, and say no one braced you in the hallway with the breaking news that a burglary detective had been popped upskirting girls in the restroom at El Capitan Beach, fled naked, and was finally tackled in the sand by some intrepid State Parks cop. Say you never liked him to begin with, and were overjoyed by the red flag warnings of your intuition, which kept you far removed from his orbit and the blast radius of that very public disaster.
Say you rolled out of the station without a single call holding on your beat and tons of love and sunshine in your heart, and even before you cruised up to the Santa Barbara Roasting Company for an Americano, offered gratis because you chased away the bums in the alcove, you stopped a car near Ortega Park because of that greatest cop instinct of them all: it just didn’t look right. Maybe you ripped off two felony warrants in their mechanical asshole of a car and found a gun under the seat and some glass pipes in the console covered in meth residue. And maybe while you were booking those shitbirds at the County Jail you missed the 8 am wrong-way drunk driver on your beat who ran over some ducks and smashed into three parked cars. Lucky you. You weren’t just walking on water, you were dancing between the rain drops, even if you knew it couldn’t last, that you couldn’t trust a universe that worked too smoothly because appearances were always deceiving, because life behind the shield means one thing above all else: no matter how good it may seem to be, no matter how sweet the honey, you are always—from one minute to the next—standing on a trap door.
