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Amos Decker sat on the bench, waiting. A sparrow zipped across in front of him, narrowly dodged a passing car before soaring upward, catching a breeze, and drifting away. He noted the make, model, plate number, and physical descriptions of all in the car before it left him. Husband and wife in the front, and a kid in the back in a booster seat. Another one next to him, older. About ten. The rear bumper had a sticker. It read, MY KID IS AN HONOR ROLL STUDENT AT THORNCREST ELEMENTARY. Congrats, you’ve just told a psycho exactly where to snatch your very smart kid.
In his mind progress was always to be measured in inches, especially when you didn’t have yards or even feet of success to show off.
God would hardly be impressed.
Precinct Number 2. It was actually Precinct Number 1, because the old number 1 had burned down. But no one had taken the time to redo the numbers. Probably not in the budget. It was named after Walter James O’Malley, a chief of distinction some forty years ago. He’d dropped dead outside a bar with his mistress clinging to his arm. But that had not stopped them from naming a building after him, which proved conclusively that adultery did not really harm one’s legacy. Even if it killed you.
Results in the real world came from slow, dogged work, compiling facts and building conclusions and deductions based on those facts. And a little luck never hurt either.
He could compartmentalize at an astonishing level. It came from not giving a shit.
Her face held the wonderful enthusiasm of youth as yet unblemished by life. That age was a nice time in anyone’s life. And it was necessary. To get through what was coming in later years. If we all started out cynical, what a shitty world that would be.
Life had coincidences. Serendipity abounded. Wrong place, wrong time. It came as the result of seven billion people jostling each other within the span of a single planet. But there was an unwritten rule in police work: There are no coincidences. All you needed was more in-depth investigation to show that there are no coincidences.
“Of all the partners I could have had, I got Rain Man, only giant size.”
Sunrise. The clouds had gone and with them the rain. So it was a true sunrise, where the colors changed at first subtly and then suddenly transformed the heavens in a way that no other occurrence could. Short of a nuclear bomb and its towering mushroom cloud. Yet both were transformative in their own right. One side of the world was lit, the other enveloped in blackness. The bomb’s kiss was for real. The sun’s movement was a metaphor for either darkness descending or light arising.
