One Foot Off the Gutter Read Free Page B

he jerked his thumb toward the back door without saying a word.
    Â 
    I trudged down the antiseptic smelling corridor, as I had done five times already that day, heading towards the parking lot. I passed a dozen offices on the way. In every single yellow sandstone brick-lined room, cops were busy on the job. Some were poring over road maps; others were cleaning their weapons, wiping them down with solvent. A few were interrogating petty criminals scooped up from Mission Street earlier that morning. In the parochial atmosphere of the cop shop, every police officer, even the arrogant rookies, looked like angels to me. Everything was strictly business, nothing personal.
    I reached the end of the corridor, braced the release handle and pushed open the back door. Bellamy saw me and sang out:
    â€œCoddy! Come join the festivities!”
    Bellamy waved his arm toward the fire he was standing
near. In between two squad cars and the captain’s mobile home command vehicle, a waist high pile of shoes was being licked to death by orange, pink and red flames.
    Gladdened by Bellamy’s invitation, I waddled over to the scene. I was self-conscious like a model on the runway, heeding the rookies’ eyes as they rested on my gun belt and waistline. I wiped away a few cinders from my chin and grimaced, “What is this?”
    Bellamy, ever sensitive to my changing moods, was chewing on a licorice stick to curb his appetite for tobacco. He gave me a candid, vulpine glance. A thoughtful, keen stare that was part wild animal and partly the reflection of a kid who’d graduated from a Catholic orphanage. Most of the rookies were silently watching him talk to me.
    â€œRemember that dealer we busted on Treat Street?”
    â€œYou’re burning his shoes?” I was modestly incredulous, forehead wrinkling deeply. “That should keep you busy for a while.”
    It hadn’t occurred to Bellamy that he was doing anything wrong; he didn’t know what to say. My accusatory tone of voice dampened him. Both of us froze inside of ourselves. When one of us wasn’t happy, the misery just oozed out of him in a dribble of frustration and the other was quick to feel it.
    I contented myself by staring at the fire. Sooner or later, Bellamy would snap out of it. Unlike me, he was the forgiving kind. The rookies were having a good time joking and throwing shoes at each other. A random shoe rocketed into the air a few feet above the burning pile, propelled by some mysterious combustion of leather and
oxygen. The shoe sailed up into the fire’s smoke; the cops whooped and pointed their fingers at it.
    The smoke daubed the parking lot with a tint of blue that made the sun and Mission Street seem removed, beyond the horizon. I knew Bellamy wanted to get the silence between him and me over with. In deference to my greater age and wisdom, he had to let me take my own time to say whatever it was that had brought me out into the parking lot in the first place.
    Finally, I said, in a voice that did not belong to me, “You heard about that guy who got gunned down the other day?”
    I said it with a flip, I-don’t-care tone. Pleased as he was that I was speaking my mind, I could see by the expression on his face Bellamy didn’t want to talk about people getting shot. He’d been the target of select bullets during the course of his career as a police officer, and so had I. Every cop in the Mission had been shot at except Gilbert.
    â€œWhen I heard about it, I didn’t know what to do,” I admitted.
    The timidity in my voice camouflaged the loathing I was feeling. I wasn’t willing to say the victim had been a fellow police officer.
    â€œDon’t let it touch you, Coddy,” Bellamy advised.
    Catsup stains and smeared black cigarette ash begrimed my combat blouse. My heavy Sam Browne belt hung low on my hips under the bulge of my belly, weighed down by a gigantic, nickel plated forty-five caliber