Thompson's Hobby

　

1.

"If you are going to kill a police officer," Thompson said, "it must be done in cold blood. People who shoot cops are always in a panic or about to be arrested or acting out of mental illness or revenge. So, of course, they always get caught. Killing someone, particularly a cop is as easy as pie if you plan carefully and act on the basis of theory."

"Theory?" Oracio asked.

"Ideology, on the basis of a calm commitment to first principles," Thompson replied.

The small space heater emitted an orange glow insufficient to warm the guard-shack. In the parking lot, a couple of stragglers for second shift scuttled over the ice. Although it was twilight, the lights standing above the cars and parked pickup trucks were not yet illumined.

"But you used to be cop yourself," Oracio said.

Thompson collected his lunch pail and thermos. He had not removed the jacket that he had worn to work under his heavy brown coat. He shrugged himself into the big coat. The late-comers, looking fixedly at the pavement ahead of them, entered the annex to the guard-shack and, then, used their fob-keys to pass through the turnstile.

"Someone should note those guys down," Thompson said. "They’re always late."

"I’m sure the foreman knows," Oracio said.

"No, no ‘supervisor’," Thompson told him. "We have to be politically correct, gender neutral. The word is ‘supervisor’."

The factory rose in tiers behind them, eyeless walls of fluted concrete and steel that sometimes clanked and rattled as if enormous chains were being hauled across cold and unforgiving cement. Evil-smelling vapors rose into the frigid air and formed white, greasy-looking tumors over the plant.

"Well, I got to be going," Thompson said.

Oracio poured some coffee from his thermos into a dirty mug. He scanned the duty-roster on the clipboard at the desk and, then, ran his finger down the list of contractors and other persons scheduled as visitors to the second shift.

"You gotta be joking about this cop-killing stuff," Oracio said.

"Sure," Thompson replied. "It’s just a thought-experiment. And if I was really plotting murder, do you think I would tell you? That’s the problem with even those who have a meticulous inclination – they tend to boast, take trophies, tell the wrong people the wrong stuff. All the planning in the world doesn’t get you anywhere unless you can keep your big mouth shut."

"So why are you talking to me?"

"Didn’t you say you were going to be deployed again, next month?"

"Back to Helmund Province," Oracio said, grinning uncertainly.

"Patriot stuff."

"Yeah, it’s great," Oracio said.

"You gotta be meticulous," Thompson said. "You have to be well-funded. You can’t do this kind of thing on the cheap. And there can’t be any kind of personal motivation. It has to be disinterested."

"So why would you do this?"

"To even out the score. The cops are always killing mentally ill guys and Black kids, Mexicans too, my friend. Someone just needs to even out the score."

"That’s cold," Oracio said. "That’s cold as ice."

"It’s a hobby," Thompson replied. "Like any other. Some people go on cruises or collect classic automobiles or piss away thousands of dollars of their retirement money at the casino or playing golf. The cost of killing one cop is about the price of a trip to Cancun and a week at an all-inclusive. And it’s a helluva lot more thrilling."

"But no one gets away with it," Oracio said.

A jet of steam speared the cold blue air above the plant. Beyond the fence and parking lot gate, city lights twinkled in the frost.

"You go to a peaceful suburb. You target your man. You figure out his routine and catch him on a lonely strip of road away from his prowl. After you kill him, you put some incriminating evidence on him so that the investigators figure that he was a criminal himself. You stroll away and that’s that. The frame is the icing on the cake. You haven’t just offed the dude but you’ve poisoned his reputation. You’ve made him blameworthy. I tell you it takes the edge off the investigation in the dead cop is somehow to blame for what happened."

Oracio said: "You are so full of shit."

"Of course," Thompson said. "I’m just teasing you."

"I’m on the waiting list for a law enforcement job out west," Oracio said. "When I get back from this next deployment, I’ll use my veteran’s preference and get a police job. I’ve already taken my civil service exam."

"Well, I was a cop for 25 years," Thompson said. "You get a great state pension."

"I gotta get through this next deployment," Oracio said, "and, then, I’m home free."

"There’s nothing like police work," Thompson told him. He scooped up his lunch box and thermos and cell-phone, nodded to Oracio, and, then, stepped out of the guard shack onto the rutted ice in the aisles between the parked cars. A threshold of darkness had been passed and, suddenly, the overhead lights flickered, splashing the vehicles with a color, a feeble radiance against the encroaching gloom.

　

2.

Thompson came from a family of cops. An uncle had been killed in the line of duty and other shirt-tail cousins were on disability and workers compensation because of back injuries arising from tussles with people that they had arrested. In High School, Thompson was a good athlete and earned a baseball scholarship to a State University. But he didn’t like college and dropped-out to attend the police academy. He started his career as a beat cop patrolling the streets of a small midwestern city in the State of M-----, working his way up to become a lieutenant and shift supervisor and, finally, detective. When he retired from the force, Thompson wore a business suit to work and spent most of his time at a desk reading reports and confidential informant memoranda and coaching younger officers as to their courtroom demeanor and testimony. Before becoming a manager, Thompson was both grievance steward and a negotiator for his bargaining unit. Although a few dangerous situations required Thompson to draw his service revolver, he had never discharged the weapon in the line of duty. But he was a good shot and,when required to demonstrate proficiency with his weapon at the range for his annual recertification, earned commendations for his marksmanship.

The year before he retired, Thompson attended a party hosted by several of younger police men on the force. His divorce was in its final stages, and so, he came to the gathering by himself. The day was warm and the people at the party were drinking beer and standing around the grill where meat was cooking. Wives and girlfriends sat on the porch under a plastic salmon-colored awning watching small children who were splashing in a plastic wading pool shaped like a turquoise shell. Several dogs trotted in circles around the swimming pool, yapping at the children. Sometimes one of the cops would pick up the garden hose coiled in the grass by the pool, depress the trigger on the nozzle, and shoot a stream of water at the children giggling in the shallow water or the men brooding over the grill or the younger women sitting at the edge of the redwood deck under the awning. A lady cop, who was something of a show-off, had been dowsed with water to the extent that she had removed her blouse to reveal the top of a bikini swimming suit. The woman had a nice figure and the young men cast dejected, sidelong looks in her direction envying her boyfriend whowas an ex-Marine and banker in the town and not worthy of her charms.

When it was time to eat, a couple of the off-duty cops carried trays of bratwurst, hamburgers, and burnt, blistered wieners to a folding table set against the back wall of the house. Some salads and bowls of chips with dip had already been placed on the table. Two of the larger dogs approached the folding table and sat on their haunches a half-dozen feet away staring greedily at the food. Thompson was on the porch with the women. He was an old man as far as the other guests were concerned, a white-collar worker who spent his days sending emails and reading reports on the screen of his computer, and so it seemed natural that he should be with the young mothers and the older wives and the men with grizzled beards and beer bellies who had served in Vietnam.

A child screamed and one of the dogs crept away with tail between legs and ears flattened against the fur on his skull. The little girl’s mother scooped the child up in her arms. The other dogs, innocent but fearing retribution, scattered. The men at the grill turned and glared at the women and the children, upset, it seemed, that their joviality had been so rudely interrupted, but disinclined to do much of anything. Other women encircled the mother and the crying child. The dog had snatched a hot dog from the little girl’s mouth and, in the course of that theft, bit the child’s upper lip. The puncture wound was deep and bled profusely and the child howled so that the dogs were afraid and some of them barked, while the malefactor, a German-shepherd and Labrador mix, nervously paced the perimeter of the lawn.

The men debated the situation. Someone said that the child should be taken to the emergency room so that the wound could be cleansed. But, of course, if that were done, a report would have to be made about the incident and the dog might be condemned as dangerous and everyone had been drinking, more or less heavily since it was fine day with congenial company, and this raised the question about who would drive the little girl to the hospital with the child’s mother, who was herself more than a little tipsy, to answer the inevitable tedious questions. No one was afraid of being stopped or arrested in light of the professional courtesy owed by one cop to another, but, nonetheless, the whole situation could become problematic, particularly if the dog had bit before, something that was rumored and, also, the subject of debate.

One of the men had served in Iraq as a medic and had some civilian EMT training as well and so he looked at the wound and, after some more conversation, pronounced it minor, disinfectant with gauze and a bandaid would suffice as care – "it’s too small to suture anyway," the former medic said, "might as well avoid the ER room bill." After her initial fright, the child’s mother had become apologetic – "we don’t want anything to happen to the dog," she said. The lady officer had put her blouse back over her bikini top, preparing, perhaps, for the party to come to an end, but she relaxed and, then, one of the men took the garden hose and sprayed all the dogs indiscriminately, driving them into a corner where they huddled disconsolate and dripping with water, a miserable disheveled pack shivering in the corner of the backyard.

Thompson said that he didn’t agree with how the incident had been handled. He told the wife of one of the patrol officers that someone should make a report. "You know," he said, "if this had been civilians, one of the cops would probably have shot the dog." "People get trigger-happy," the woman said. "Particularly the young bucks," Thompson replied. The hostess brought the wounded child an ice-cream cone and the little girl smeared the chocolate all over her face and, before long, the incident was forgotten and the lady cop had removed her blouse again and, when she went into the house and emerged with a big pitcher of slush-ice margaritas, the party began again in earnest.

After the weekend, Thompson filed a report about the dog bite and there were some quarrels in the locker-room and exercise facility at the Law Enforcement Center. One of the other officers said that it was fortunate that Thompson was working a desk because the other cops probably would think twice about coming to his aid if he needed help. Thompson filed a report on that remark as well and a couple of union grievances ensued and, after a half dozen months, he decided that it would simplify his life if he simply retired – he had put in his time and earned his pension and there were other things that he wanted to do with the rest of his life.

　

3.

Every cop has a doctor for a friend, someone with whom he plays cards and protects against drunk driving offenses and whose children come under police patronage and, therefore, are exempt from minor drug offenses. In return for these services, the doctor is expected to issue notes to the policeman excusing him from work on medical grounds or confirming disability claims for the purposes of workman’s compensation as well as providing certifications necessary for FMLA leave. Thompson’s physician friend dictated a one page letter qualifying the former policeman for medical leave from his work as a security guard. The doctor was accommodating because Thompson had done several favors for him and so he wrote the letter without wasting time on a physical examination – some years earlier, Thompson had hurt his back when scuffling with a thug in an icy alley and so he had sciatica, subject to periodic exacerbation, that could be used to justify either intermittent FMLA leave or a continuous absence from work.

A week after Oracio deployed to Afghanistan, Thompson submitted forms qualifying him for four weeks FMLA. In the ten days before he took leave, he was careful to hobble around the shack where the security guards were stationed, unsteady on his feet because of his low back, displaying an admirable stoicism about the crippling pain, but, nonetheless, grimacing and swallowing large quantities of what appeared to be Vicodan.

Thompson sent a text-message to his daughter, a single-mother living in another state and said that he planned to drive down for a visit. Thompson’s relationship with his daughter, at least, after his divorce from her mother, was based on the fact that, sometimes, she asked him for money and, sometimes, he gave it to her. "I would like to get to know my granddaughter better," Thompson said. His daughter sent him a text-message saying that she had a new boyfriend and that the man was staying with her so that there would be no place for Thompson to bunk in her small home. Thompson wrote back to her with the message that he had not intended upon imposing upon her hospitality and that he had booked a motel room for the visit.

Thompson went to the Men’s Warehouse and bought a dark blue suit with pinstripes, something appropriate, he thought, for a funeral. He hung the suitbag from a hook in his backseat. In his duffle bag, Thompson packed underwear, toiletries, black dress shoes with a tie neatly rolled up in both the right and left toes, sweat pants, jeans, a few shirts, and a Smith & Wesson K-38 Masterpiece with four-inch barrel together with a box of S&W 38 Special cartridges. Like most police officers, present and former, Thompson owned many firearms, including a half-dozen that he had acquired through irregular channels and, therefore, could use without concern that the weapon would be traced to him. The K-38 had been languishing in an evidence locker, an artifact from some long-forgotten narcotics bust, and Thompson had taken the weapon from a barrel of contraband firearms scheduled to be melted down to slag with miscellaneous knives, saps and shanks intermingled with baggies of marijuana, cocaine, and oxycontin.

A few years earlier, one of Thompson’s buddies had died from cancer. The man’s radiation and chemotherapy had resulted in terrible nausea that the dying man treated with brownies fibrous with marijuana. Thompson had a contact at a medical facility in the next county who provided the weed for the dying man, an orderly and ambulance driver who periodically traveled to Colorado to bring back packages of medical-quality marijuana. Patients scheduled for chemotherapy were told to talk to the orderly, whispered conversations that, although not formally charted, had an aura of medical respectability – nurses as well several of the doctors had recommended transactions with the man and he was known to have good quality dope that was off-limits to law enforcement. Thompson left a message on the orderly’s cell-phone that he needed to talk to him and they met a Burger King just off the freeway on the edge of town.

"I hope it’s not for you," the orderly said. He was a heavy-set man with military haircut and a tattoo of the Virgin of Guadulupe under his chin, on the right side of his throat. "No, not me," Thompson said. "It’s a cop buddy who’s too ashamed to do a deal with you." "What’s to be ashamed of?" the orderly said. "Sooner or later we all get sick." The ambulance driver was on-call and he set his pager on the table between them. After eating, they went into the parking lot and Thompson paid him $500 in one-hundred dollar bills for a package of OG Kush weed. "Don’t let him operate a vehicle on this stuff," the orderly said. "It’s a total couch-lock." Thompson bought a dozen hydrooxycodone tablets as well. They shook hands. "You tell your buddy that my prayers are with him," the orderly said. "I know," Thompson said. "I know."



When Thompson reached his motel, he opened his laptop and accessed the place’s WIFI. He had spent $750 at the Burger King as well another $13.50 for his lunch and the burger with fries the ambulance driver had eaten. Round-trip tickets to Cancun were priced at $1175. With a mechanical pencil that he carried in his breast pocket, Thompson entered the price comparison in his moleskin notebook.

　

4.

The city was surrounded by desert and dry hills. The hills were on the horizon many miles away and the basin was flat without rivers or creek beds or any topography to speak of. A monotonous grid of avenues and streets, absolutely regular and, therefore, predictable spread across the flat land shimmering in the heat. Where freeways intersected, malls rose above hot terraces of parking ramps. The surface boulevards were four lanes wide in both directions and studded with traffic lights placed so that a motorist could see to the next stop-and-go semaphore and the traffic queued there.

Thompson checked into a Knight’s Inn fifteen minutes away from the suburb where his daughter lived in a small house. The area around the Knight’s Inn was zoned light-industrial, vast warehouses and strips of identical, low-slung offices that were so new that most of the tenants announced their presence with hand-lettered cardboard signs. Fast food places glistened at the intersections. Trucks were always coming and going in this sector. Semi-tractors hauling big trailers turned wide at the intersections and Thompson learned to stop some distance away from the crossroads so that he would not have to back up to allow the trucks to pass. The Knight’s Inn was made of concrete blocks and the walls were cold and damp, but, also, soundproof.

Every other day, Thompson drove to his daughter’s house to see his grandchild. Sometimes, he took the little girl to lunch at a local pizza place or walked with her in a drab and cheerless playground with hot gravel between the swings and the slides. As he expected, his daughter was always short of cash and she hinted that Thompson should pay her something for the privilege of visiting his grandchild. So he gave her a couple hundred dollars, bought a tank of gas for her old and unreliable car, and, one night, took the family –his daughter, her boyfriend whom she called her fiancee, and the baby – out to eat at an Olive Garden restaurant. The boyfriend did not allow the little girl to order from the children’s menu but instead asked for another entree with breadsticks, food that the little girl could not eat and that was taken home instead in a styrofoam tray to be eaten as lunch the next day.

In the evening, Thompson drove for a half-hour to another suburb across town. It was a nice place with an village center constructed to resemble a series of Spanish missions aligned around fountains with terra cotta figures of angels and dolpins. Two large golf courses, green and glistening with water irrigating them, occupied opposing corners of the town. The golf courses were lined with big houses sparkling with many windows and boasting three and four car garages. One of the golf courses was entirely surrounded by residences; the other club was built along a drainage ditch, a concrete channel with a spine of sandy silt at its dry center, and an interminable commercial avenue that ran parallel to the desolate canal as frontage to car dealerships, drive-through banks, fast-food places, and bunker-like office buildings. At one end of the avenue there was an airport and planes swooped low over the landscape dragging their huge boomerang-shaped shadows across the spongy-looking golf course and the canal and the businesses lining the roadway. Traffic coursed along the avenue at all hours because the airport was big with planes coming and going all the time and it was anonymous: rental cars, lost tourists, janitors and counter-workers going to work at the terminals on the edge of the desert.

The law enforcement center, together with a municipal courthouse shaped vaguely like the Alamo, was in the part of the town with Spanish-style architecture. At shift change in the late afternoon, lone officers in patrol cars cruised territory assigned to them, following routes that were well-defined and predictable. After a couple nights surveillance, Thompson began to follow a young cop, an aggressive driver who accelerated too fast from stops only to brake impetuously at intersections so that his squad car almost skidded. Sometimes, the patrol officer rolled through red lights if there was no traffic in the vicinity and he had a habit of rousting Mexicans, often people coming from work at the airport, subjecting them to long and intrusive stops along the side of the boulevard that passed the golf course. Perhaps, the cop thought that he was doing some kind of drug interdiction work but it didn’t seem like he found much of anything in the vehicles that he pulled over and, then, probed with the white beam from his big, bludgeon-shaped flashlight.

The young cop worked twelve-hour shifts, six to six, on a schedule staggered three days on-duty, alternating with weeks requiring four days patrol – it was a regime pretty typical for suburban police with which Thompson was familiar. At about 1:30 in the morning, the cop went to a taco truck operating outside a place called the Rodeo Bar. He bought food from the counter-window at the truck, carried it to his car, and, then, drove a quarter-mile to the parking lot between an insurance agency and an orthodontist’s office. Thompson observed this routine for several nights and, even, stood in line behind the policeman as he waited to order his food, a plate of tacos pastor with tortillas wrapped in tin foil and served in a plastic tray next to smear of refried beans. The cop was youthful and an amateur barber, probably his mother or girlfriend, had cut his hair in a way that made his protuberant, pink ears look particularly ungainly. His uniform had been freshly laundered and, despite the odor of cooking meat and cumin, Thompson could smell the cleanness of his clothing, a faint scent of starch and bleach and deodorant.

The next night, Thompson parked his car at the Rodeo Bar and stood among people who had come outside onto the tavern’s patio to smoke. At 1:30, he saw the squad car signal a turn from the boulevard and pull up beside an aluminum picnic table sitting next to the taco truck. As the young cop emerged from his patrol vehicle, Thompson walked along an alleyway toward the orthodontist’s office and the insurance agency. A cyclone fence lined the alley that had been gouged by flash floods and, beyond the wire mesh, there was trailer court, the mobile homes turned with their backs to the commercial avenue and its businesses. A coyote trotted ahead of him and dogs chained to the trailer houses howled mournfully. Thompson reached the orthodontist’s office and saw that it’s side facing the insurance agency was complex with a long zigzagged wheelchair ramp made of new lumber aromatic with creosote. He walked up the ramp to the first switchback and squatted, peering through the palisade of wood enclosing the landing. After a couple of minutes, the squad car appeared, turned into the parking area and, then, spun around in a tight circle so that the vehicle was facing back to scrutinize the divided road that led to the airport. The policeman shut off the motor of his car and unrolled his window and, then, Thompson could see a faint phosphorescence illumining the young man’s jaw and cheeks – he was reading text messages on his phone. The cop ate his tacos, took a couple swigs from an energy drink that he removed from a backpack sitting on the seat next to him, and, then, got out of the car to drop the plastic tray and the wad of aluminum foil in a rubberized garbage bin next to the orthodontist’s office. As he pitched the trash in the bin, Thompson could smell him again, the crisp freshly laundered scent of his uniform. Thompson felt a sudden, awful disappointment, a terrible dismay at how easy it would be to kill the young man.

Thompson predicted that his target would be off-work for a couple days. Although Thompson patrolled the avenue leading to the airport and paced off the distance between the Rodeo Bar parking lot and the orthodontist’s office, he did not expect the young man to be on-duty. He explored the shadows around the insurance agency and discovered that the offices were located in a building that had once held a muffler business. Red transmission fluid stained the concrete pads outside the building. Thompson crossed the boulevard, waiting for red lights in both directions to halt the spurts of traffic on the busy road and explored the drainage ditch. Airplanes with their landing lights blinking descended over the long, pale sluice of concrete channel and on the golf course beyond the ditch big fistfuls of water were flung across the dark fairways by night-sprinklers that made a chugging sound. The canal was a peaceful place and Thompson could lie on his back on the warm sloping panel of concrete and look at the stars and the big planes that moved among them.

He expected the cop to be back on the job after a couple of days and, at midnight, drove back to the airport boulevard where columns of street lamps lit the road bright as day. He drove as far as the airport where the road entered a compound of rental car lots and parking ramps. The boulevard narrowed to a two-lane country road and ran among eroded badlands for a few miles before turning to pass between orchards of pistachio trees. At 1:30 am, Thompson was waiting for his target at the Rodeo Bar, but the patrol car did not appear. At two in the morning, Thompson drove back to the Knight’s Inn. He decided that he would kill the cop the next morning and that, if by some chance, the young man did not appear at the taco truck, he would select another target and initiate different preparations for the murder.

Thompson visited his granddaughter during the day and took her to the zoo. It was very warm and the animals rested in their cages on their bellies panting in the heat. The polar bear and seals hid under the water with only their black noses piercing the shimmering icy-blue flood. In the evening, Thompson took a nap and, then, watched TV listlessly until midnight. He thought about pouring himself some drinks from a bottle of whisky that he had purchased the day before but he wanted to avoid a hangover in the morning and thought sadly that he had reached that age where intoxication is not worth its after-effects. He took a warm shower and dressed carefully in his blue suit, selecting his pale grey silk tie to knot under his chin. He made sure that his underwear was clean. If he were shot, he didn’t want to be hauled to the hospital in dirty underpants.

The taco truck was at its appointed place, overlooking the aluminum picnic table. The smokers stood on the patio in a haze of grey smoke. Four or five people, some of them obviously drunk, were lined-up to buy food from the truck. One of the men, staggering a little, called the truck a "roach coach" – he looked like he was Hispanic himself. Thompson felt a sickness in the pit of his stomach when he saw the squad car rolling down the boulevard and signaling its turn into the The Rodeo Bar’s parking lot.

Thompson walked swiftly from where his car was parked to the trenched alley and followed the cracked and pitted asphalt to the orthodontist’s office. The coyote was nowhere to be seen but some of the dogs tethered behind the cyclone fence caught his scent and barked at him. Thompson went up the wheelchair ramp to the first landing, knelt there and, using his cell-phone for light, checked his revolver to make sure that it was properly loaded. After verifying the condition of the gun, he eased off the safety and set the weapon on the wood planks next to him.

The young policeman drove into the lot between the dark insurance agency and orthodontist’s office. It seemed to Thompson that he took a very long time to eat his tacos. Several times, Thompson saw the young man’s face glowing with the light from his phone. For the first time in all of his nights of surveillance, Thompson noticed that there were beacons and transmission towers on a low hill beyond the golf course – he saw the red lights glistening like rubies among the dull yellowish stars. The police officer finished his meal, opened his car door, and, then, walked toward the garbage bin to discard his white plastic tray and the lump of aluminum foil. Thompson stood up when the man was lifting the plastic lid of the garbage bin. He fired three shots into the cop. The flash from the muzzle reflected off the aluminum foil, a bright spasm like heat lightning. Thompson ran down the ramp, stood over the fallen man, and fired a fourth shot point blank into his face. Then, he took the baggy of marijuana and the hydrocodone vial, together with an envelope of twenty dollar bills from his pocket. He put the drugs and the envelope next to the motionless man, a couple feet from the glimmer that the dead cop’s belt buckle made in the moonlight. Then, Thompson turned and strode along the cyclone fence, walking briskly through the chorus of dogs now barking and howling at him. In a couple of minutes, he had reached the parking lot at The Rodeo.

Thompson started his car and, taking care to signal, edged into the surge of traffic coming away from the airport. The stoplights seemed timed against him and he had to wait at each intersection. It didn’t matter. Although he had rolled down his window and cocked his ear, there was no sound of sirens. At the fourth intersection, a mile or so from the place where he had killed the policeman, an oncoming car winked at Thompson’s vehicle. The car flashed its lights at him three or four times and the driver, even, tapped the horn lightly. Thompson ignored the car facing across the intersection toward him and, taking care not to speed, drove forward, accelerating quickly when the light changed to green. After another five minutes, he reached the ramp leading to the freeway, signaled his turn, and descended toward the stream of cars and trucks whistling by. Again, a car flashed its headlights at him. Thompson swore under his breath and merged with the traffic on the freeway. It was only after he had driven another two or three miles that he discovered that he had forgotten to flip on his headlights – the boulevard was bright with overhead lamps as was the busy freeway and, in the torrent of traffic, he been a black, dangerous shadow, an unlit car among the procession of headlights.

　

5.

Bag pipes squealed on the dusty knoll. Waves of blue surged down the avenue, badges and clips on utility belts glittering. Some of the police squadrons marched in orderly groups, paramilitaries moving silently in lock-step toward the church. Other groups were rude, noisy, undisciplined, like a mob streaming from a football stadium after a particularly humiliating defeat. Near the church, the crowd slowed and thickened and Thompson saw the rooftops lined with cops in dress uniforms, ranks of police in dark sunglasses posed against the sky like snipers. Because he was retired, Thompson wore his business suit and a bright red tie to celebrate his triumph. On his lapel, Thompson had pinned crossed flags, an American flag and a thin blue line banner. His red silk tie was held in place by a thin blue line tie-tack.

Thompson knew that it would be suffocating in the church and so he found a bench shaded by a tree. Two other older cops, squeezed into blue uniforms a couple sizes too small for their beer guts, sat beside him on the bench. The cops were old Irishmen and they had been drinking and Thompson saw that their eyes were wet and red. "It’s a terrible thing," Thompson said to the old men sitting on the bench next to him. "A terrible thing, indeed," one of them replied.

The gangs of police moved with the peculiar swagger and authority of armed men. And, Thompson noticed that the sea of blue uniforms was almost entirely male, indeed, belligerently masculine. Only a few female officers were in evidence and they seemed to be protected by husbands or fathers, also blue-clad. Thompson thought that the columns of armed men were like an army and, in fact, an army that proclaims itself victorious and that has entered the city as a conquering force. But, then, it occurred to him that the simile was inexact because an army always knows that there is another enemy force, equally armed and powerful and poised to inflict casualties on it, whereas this great gathering of men, even in its ostensible grief, imagined itself invincible.

When the ceremony began in the church and the TV monitors like great stiff flags showed the priest and the grief-stricken widow with her pale, earnest children and the city dignitaries, the two old cops beside Thompson stood up and, indeed, climbed up to stand on the seat of the bench so that they could see better, teetering over him. "You can stand too if you like," one of the old cops said to Thompson. "Oh no," he replied, "I have a bum knee. If I get up there I will fall." "Suit yourself," the other cop said. "I can hear what’s going on from down here, just fine," Thompson said.

To Thompson’s surprise, the mayor blamed the shooting on certain newspaper articles criticizing police tactics in a recent hostage stand-off. Then, a local congressman said that the shooting was caused by an African-American radio-host, a drive-time DJ who had recently condemned the police for racism. The people in the throng agreed and when the DJ’s name was spoken, a deep, long growl emerged from the crowd. Then, the president of the police union took the podium and mentioned recent contract negotiations and said that the killing should be considered when determining whether law enforcement salaries should be adjusted upward above a simple cost-of-living increase. The cops outside the church screamed their approval of the union official’s words.

Four or five people rose to speak about the dead officer and they delivered their eulogies in a husky stammer, their speech interrupted by weeping. The young man who had died was characterized as a hero, kind and generous to all and courageous. He was said to be wholly incorruptible. Thompson felt the blood rising to his cheeks. A dull, maddening rage filled him and he thought that his heart might explode in his chest. The young cop had died only a foot from drug contraband, a flutter of twenty dollar bills falling onto the gaping wounds in his chest and head; he was crooked, a thief and an extortionist. Didn’t anyone know the truth about how the cop had died? Was there a cover-up under way? It wasn’t enough, Thompson thought, to have assassinated the young man – his memory had to be murdered as well; he had to go to his grave under the emblem of cowardly corruption. But not a word was said about the circumstances of the murder or the drugs that surely had been found by his body. The speeches continued, a low, stuttering drone against the heat of the morning, and, in the distance, squad cars brought to intersections to block them in honor of the cortege wailed mournfully. Thompson thought that he was going to faint. The two old men standing on the bench towered over him and they wept and their tears fell and spattered Thompson and it was like standing in a bath of acid.

After the funeral, Thompson made his way to a tavern frequented by local police in the shadow of the city’s football dome. Patrol cars were illegally parked all around the stadium, big fleets of them haphazardly double- and triple-parked and blocking the streets. Thompson sat at the corner of the bar, surrounded by men in blue uniforms, glumly drinking a beer. A bitter taste rose in this throat and half-choked him.

The bartender was pouring whisky and tequila shots on the house and proposing toasts to the dead cop and his wife and the man’s two little boys. "To a great hero!" the bartender said, his face greasy with the sweat and exertion of serving so many hard-drinking men.

Thompson couldn’t contain himself and he nudged the big man sitting next to him. The man had sad eyes and his face drooped and his service revolver was hung from his gut in a slovenly manner. "Do you want to know the truth?" Thompson asked. "I don’t know," the big cop said. "Well, here’s the truth," Thompson told him, "that cop who was gunned down – he was crooked; he was found with high-grade marijuana and hydrocodone, and cash, cash too."

With the word "cash," the sad-eyed cop sat up and looked interesting. "They found cash with him?" he asked. "That’s what I heard," Thompson said.

"How much?" the cop asked.

"I don’t know," Thompson said. "Not that much, maybe $200."

"He was probably funding a buy or something, you know, vice work," the sad-eyed cop said.

"From his prowl car, in full uniform?" Thompson said. "What do you think?"

"It doesn’t matter anyway," the cop said. "He was murdered because people hate cops, everyone is told to hate cops. The TV and the radio tell you to hate cops. You can’t hate minorities, you can’t hate fags or trannies, but you can hate cops."

"I guess that’s true," Thompson replied.

"So how do you know so much about this?" the fat cop asked.

"I saw the report," Thompson said.

"There isn’t any report yet. I got buddies downtown. No report’s been released yet."

"I saw a draft report," Thompson said.

"That’s bullshit," the fat, sad-eyed cop said. "You’re just making things up to be contrary."

"I am not," Thompson said. "I know for a fact that the kid that died was a bad cop. A disgrace to his uniform."

The fat cop slowly stood up from his bar stool and looked at Thompson sorrowfully. "Why do you have to say things like that?"

"It’s true," Thompson replied.

"You can’t know that," the fat cop said. "I don’t want to have to fight you. But you just can’t know the bullshit that your talking."

"He’s real know-it-all," another voice added, "he thinks he knows everything." A heavy hand thudded against Thompson’s shoulder.

Thompson turned around to see a cop from his home-town, a malcontent with whom he had clashed before leaving the force.

"What are you doing here?" Thompson asked.

"Paying my respects," the man said. "Not like you, I guess."

"I’m just surprised to see you here," Thompson said.

"This bastard hates all cops," the man from Thompson’s home-town said. He spoke the proclamation loudly. "He’s a traitor."

It was momentarily very quiet in the bar.

The fat cop added: "He claims that the kid was dealing dope or something when he was shot."

Thompson stood up and said that he understood that his presence was unwelcome and that it was time for him to leave the bar. The bartender put his hand across the bar and held Thompson by the wrist. "You’re not leaving until you pay for the two shots you just downed," the bartender said.

"That’s bullshit," Thompson said. "I thought the drinks were on the house."

"On the house for everyone who supports the police force, the thin blue line, god bless them!" the bartender said.

Thompson shrugged. As he searched his wallet for cash, someone lunged at him. He dodged the punch but walked into another blow that broke his nose. There was a brawl and people were punched accidentally who didn’t know what the fighting was about and so the riot spilled out onto the street, among the parked squad cars.

Arrests would have been made except that there was no one on-duty to make the arrests or process the paper-work.

Thompson wiped the blood off his fists and face and, then, limped several blocks to his parked car. He visited his granddaughter for a couple hours in the afternoon and, then, went to the motel, checked-out, and began the drive home.