Lights and Sirens
Part 48 of A Policeman's Tale of the American Riviera
“It is a brave man who is the first to sit down during a standing ovation.”
~Alexander Solzhenitsyn
In Loving Memory
There are dog days in the detective bureau when, for the sake of sanity, for even a momentary liberation of your mind and soul, you’d rather be anywhere else. You’d rather be 23 again, when you were an utterly clueless but happy civilian, fresh from graduate school and blasting down the highways of Arizona with a cowboy hat, packed six-deep in a pickup with bullet holes in the tailgate, chain-smoking Swisher Sweets cigars and jamming with your buddies to a pirated copy of Mike Watt and The Minutemen singing Infected Pastrami—and all while chasing down rodeos to ride the rankest bucking horses you could find. You did that once, and it was an easy way to fall in love with America. But in a police department the reward for good work isn’t a belt buckle and a check, a quick roll in the hay with an air-headed buckle bunny, or even a lasting satisfaction. It’s only a laconic and exhausted nod from your sergeant, some ignorant reporting below the fold in the Newspress on a case you brought down, and more work. And if you are cynical—and there is no way to survive as a detective without adopting dangerous levels of cynicism—you begin to realize that’s all it will ever be—a grim marathon where every mile is filled with human tragedy, and often just stupidity piled on stupidity, and where the finish line keeps getting moved out beyond the horizon.
