Malone, still twitching and joggling his knee, settled back and watched our driver. You better start thinking what we've done to piss off the top brass." "They only send a car for you when they know you'll be too fucked up to drive home afterward. The toddler catch had gotten my wife, Siobhan, on the phone for a week, bragging to all her friends, telling them to watch the news, patting my head and saying she was proud of me like I was some kind of heroic dog.īut today wasn't about the kid. Ribbing about how tubby you look in the YouTube footage. It was a good get, the kind of thing that wins you cheers when you walk into the station the next day. Turned out the mother had been so damned tired from working two jobs that she fell asleep with the baby on the couch, the balcony doors open and a pot of peas cooking dry on the stove. Malone and I both went in and snared him in a tangle of arms about two feet off the ground while the people around us hollered and screamed. There was no time to decide who would catch the kid. While some guys went in to try to break down her apartment door, Malone and I watched, pulling out our own hair, while the toddler crawled along the ledge and then, wobbling, stood up. A crowd gathered, and it was quickly established that the mother was inside but wasn't answering the door or her phone. She was standing in the street pointing at a balcony five floors above, where a toddler was sitting on the concrete ledge, having the time of his life. The week before, Malone and I had been walking out at the end of a shift when a woman outside a café two doors from the station started screaming like she was on fire. We're getting a medal for the baby last week." We were in the back of the cruiser, Malone looking out the window, joggling his knee and picking his teeth. We felt the thump of the first blast under our feet a second or two later. On the morning of the marathon bombing, we'd been a mile up Boylston Street doing crowd control and I told Malone I felt hot and weird, like I had a fever. Malone always made fun of me for thinking I had Boston's pulse, a sense about approaching trouble in the city. A Boston cop knows that being called to the commissioner's office is a bad, bad thing. When my partner Malone and I got a call to go to the commissioner's office downtown, I knew we were in for it. It was an unexpected and dizzying heat, surreal against the snow on the ground outside the car. I could feel what was about to happen in the air. You know that in a few years, some of those cops and some of those kids will end up killing each other. Every Christmas, you gather up some young wide-eyed uniforms to take poor kids from East Boston and Hyde Park into the toy stores, try to show the new cops and the kids that they can get along. The hammering of footsteps out of Back Bay Station for the morning rat race wakes you up, and the wail of sirens in the old Combat Zone at night puts you to sleep. You know the smell of the salt in the harbor like the scent of the back of your wife's neck, and it's just as precious, reassuring. You know how the city feels, because its streets are your veins and the voices of its people come through your lips when you talk. There are things you know as a cop in Boston.
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