He looked at the heavens as he awaited instruction. The sky before him was in a reluctant black of the end of the night. He studied the new purples of pre-dawn as if in delirium. He wondered why art canvases were muslin off-white. He had several tubes of yellow paint but hadn’t opened them yet. They were still in the art shop bag in his barren apartment, but he’d gone through an awful lot of black and purple and the thickest blues. There was a faint rim of dawn on the very tips of the trees far to the east. He didn’t know what to do with bright colours, where they fit into anything. Silver stars winked and faded, imperceptibly dead. The dying moon was glittering somewhere out of his sight. The Maglites, now separated, gave him two shadows growing apart from each other and he wondered if this might mean something profound. Duality of man, maybe.
“I’m an armed detective, on duty,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Ankle holster, right leg. Intelligence. Four-niner-four-sixer. Tate, Ray.”
“Right, you’re on dog patrol,” the shotgun said, “and we’ve come to get you.”
“Sir,” the wheelman said, “we’ve come to get you, sir.”
The shotgun said, “No, Brian. You don’t sir a sergeant.” He called to the man, “Right? Am I right or am I right?”
Ray Tate said, “Yes, sir.”
The shotgun laughed easily. “You can pull in your wings. We know you won’t fly away from us.”
The wheelman said, “If you did, we wanted, we could take you down on the wing anyway.”
Ray Tate lowered his arms slowly and turned. They weren’t wearing their caps and they held their flashlights away from their torsos. Both had shaven heads in the strobing ghoster lights, an annual police rite to raise money for cancer kids in the state hospital. Ray Tate had been shaven six times in six years, but not lately. His hair hid his ears, curled at the nape of his neck.
The shotgun stepped into the cone of the wheelman’s light. “We’ve come to get you, sarge. Bring you home.” He looked around. “You got anything here you want to take?”
Ray Tate looked at his blanket and bindle bundle. He bent and sorted through the rubble and picked up his rover. The battery was long dead. Nobody ever had to reach out for an alley rat. There were two used tubes of After Bite and a small sketchpad he carried for moments of inspiration, of which there’d been none. He hefted the rover in his hand and put it into his billowing, filthy German surplus greatcoat. He kicked the sketchpad, the blanket, and the bindle down the hill into the ravine.
“Nothing, just the radio.” He fired mucus from his nose. He was suddenly cold and he wrapped himself deeply in the coat. His guts twisted audibly in hunger. “The rest is shit.”
* * *
Brian the wheelman took the car to the car wash and the shotgun delivered Ray Tate to the central desk sergeant. There were crossed flags behind the desk sergeant’s table and a list of officers’ family members who’d died in combat from the Civil War to Iraq. The police force had given a lot of sons and daughters to war and there were signed photographs of a half dozen former presidents. Obama was framed but still on the floor, leaning against the wall.
The desk sergeant welcomed Ray Tate and shook his hand: “You done good, Ray. Fuck what they say.” The shotgun went to get fresh coffee. The desk sergeant looked after him as he headed to the day room. “Good guys, those guys. About the only two I got. One gets a toothache and the other has to go to the dentist. Partners.”
“What’s it about, Bob? That they came out to the wilderness?”
The desk sergeant shrugged. “Fucked if. A beam from Planet Chan. You hear? They crossed the holy water on his forehead the other day. He’s blessed.” He twisted his mouth. “Cocksucker. Now there’s a real plague on the kingdom.”
The shotgun brought out coffees and gave one to Tate. He told the sergeant he was going to walk over to the car wash. “Brian fucks it up, sarge. Lets them get inside and they see all the blood on the backseat.” He shuffled and turned to Ray Tate. “I just wanna say you something, I’m not outta line.” But he didn’t say anything.
After a moment the desk sergeant said, “He knows, Larry.”
The shotgun shook Ray Tate’s hand. “Fuck ’em, right?” He didn’t mind the grime and refused to wipe his palm afterwards on his trousers.
“Without doubt.”
Larry nodded solemnly. “If it gets real bad for you, remember you always got a home in Central ’04. Brian don’t drive too good, I can always use a wheelman, even a drooling old fuck that falls asleep a lot.”
Ray Tate laughed. The desk sergeant told Larry, “Get back out there, you dumb fuck.”
“So, how’s things up there, Ray? Intelligence?”
Ray Tate shook his head in wonder and sipped his coffee. “Fucking paradise, Bob. Overtime out the ass, clerks with big tits. Cappuccino machine in the day room.”
“Ah, fuck off.”
“No shit. Would I stand in front of your table and lie right to your fucking face?”
“Lots of overtime? Like, how much?”
“Well, I got an accountant now, head off any problems later with the IRS.”
“Jesus, Ray. If I had your money, I’d burn mine.”
Ray Tate was safe at home. Drinking coffee and bullshitting over the table, a stream of uniforms hustling handcuffed prisoners behind him, the rumble of voices. He heard a couple of voices murmur his name and some of the chargers found pretext to cross by the table for a look at the double gunner.
Someone said, “That poor fucker. That’s what they do to you, you go the distance for them. You go there twice and then they really fucking hate you.”
Someone else said, “Fuckin’ bum, looking for the guy poisoning dogs in the ravine, that’s all he’s good for.”
Someone else, a woman, said, “Fuck you, Foley, you dumb dildo.”
There was a sudden burst of struggle and Bob the desk sergeant launched himself around the desk. “Shirley. For fuck sakes.”
* * *
Ray Tate showered in the locker room. He waited in the steam until the day crew finished banging their lockers and bullshitting about Shirley taking out Foley with a hoof to the nuts. He loved the echo of the rooms in the stations, the jocking and jilling of the troops as they prepared for work. The thumping boots and songs and whistles. The camaraderie of the ultimate outsiders: not white or black or yellow or brown. Just blue. Not liberal or conservative or unionist. Just blue. That famous blue fog that was really a world of grey.
When the last charger had slammed out of the room Tate turned off the shower and in the steaming silence worked a towel into his hair and beard. Bob, the desk sergeant, came in with a pile of neatly folded clothes: two thick blue union sweatshirts, a worn khaki windbreaker, baggy grey track pants, and a pair of woollen socks.
“Jesus, Ray.” He was looking at the mass of insect bites up and down Tate’s legs, crossed with red gouges where his fingernails had involuntarily ripped at the stinging itch. “Ah, man. Fuck. We got some shit in the kit. Stand by.”
When he came back he had a handful of tubes and sprays and an Iraq vet’s mug with a