Florida Firefight Read Free Page A

widow Hudson, then went for his run. He jogged through the bleak Chicago morning, his breath fogging and disappearing in the soft storm of snowflakes. He passed St. Barbara High School and disappeared into the winter trees of McGuane Park. For the thousandth time he went over the events that had caused him, a second-generation Chicago cop, to resign.
    The police superintendent, committed to Hawker’s suspension if he fired without orders, had followed through—but only after the big-wheel politician involved had whined to the press that it wasn’t his fault the two kids had died. Maybe it was because that trigger-happy cop had opened fire too soon. That was bullshit, of course, but the news people had bought it long enough to make Hawker’s suspension imperative. The headlines had hurt the worst: HERO COP MAY HAVE CAUSED KILLINGS .
    The superintendent had laid it on the line. “Hawker, Captain Chezick says I should be giving you another medal instead of suspending you. But I don’t have much choice. You didn’t play by our rules, so you left all of us wide open to criticism from every bleeding-heart politician and liberal who wants to be quoted in the press. You’re off the force for two weeks, Hawker. And when you come back, you’ll be going on Vice. And you’ll follow orders, and you’ll keep your nose clean, damn it! That’s all.”
    When Hawker hadn’t obediently about-faced and disappeared, the superintendent had looked up from his work. “Anything else?”
    Slowly, deliberately, Hawker had pulled out his billfold and removed his badge. “Yeah,” he had said, “there is something else.” He tossed the spinning badge onto the superintendent’s desk. “This.”

three
    So now what would he do? Hawker jogged on, thinking. He had spent the last two weeks holed up, trying to sort it all out. In one way or another he had lived his whole life preparing to be a cop. He had grown up tough in Bridgeport, the Irish section of Chicago, and he and his father, Ed, had watched with disgust as that section changed from a close-knit community to an area ravaged by interlopers who made their living through violent crime.
    When the crime got so bad that the understaffed police force couldn’t handle it, Ed organized the community into a Neighborhood Watch force—and James Hawker, just a kid, helped. Old Ed had been a master of strategy and was born with the gift of gab. The community rallied behind him. And then a funny thing happened: People who had felt alone in the face of hoods and strong-arm crooks suddenly found strength in their friends and neighbors. People who were terrified of walking the streets at night suddenly found courage in the knowledge of their union.
    Old Ed’s methods were rough—and not always legal. But they worked.
    Crime in the neighborhood was cut to half, and the Neighborhood Watch program spread.
    So Hawker had grown up hating the scum who made the lives of the common workaday citizens miserable. People who lived in fear were not happy people. And Hawker had spent his life fighting the bastards and the bullies, the killers and the crooks who preyed on the innocent. He had become a cop, and a damn good cop. And he had planned to carry on the fight.
    But how can you fight when you’re no longer part of the fighting structure?
    Hawker toyed with the idea of applying to the New York or L.A. police departments for a job—but it would just mean more of the same. More restraint; more innocent people dying because the police department, bowing to political pressure, wouldn’t allow him to Hawk it. Also, more bureaucratic bullshit; more arrests to be thrown out of court on legal technicalities; more scum set free by lawyers who cared nothing for truth or justice, only the big fees and the proliferation of a legal system that favored the criminal and made them rich in the process.
    Hawker, who collected