Chicago 11 (Jerry eBooks) by Day Keene

Author:Day Keene [Keene, Day]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jerry eBooks
Published: 2015-01-05T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

The term “police” designates that executive civil force of a state to which is entrusted the duty of maintaining public order and of enforcing regulations for the prevention and detection of crime. In a perfect system of civil administration the function of the police should be to curb the liberty of the subject only when it degenerates into license—and any material variation from the standard is to be deprecated as being arbitrary and tyrannical . . .

ENCYCLOPAEDIA

The call from 196 East Westmore came into the East Chicago Avenue precinct station while Hanson, Ginnis, Meyers, and Brotz, having signed out a few minutes before, were washing up in the lavatory adjoining the squad room.

Hanson, Ginnis, and Meyers were glad to call it a day. But, even after having worked a double tour of duty, Brotz was reluctant to go home. He always was on holidays. As he ran water on his hands and splashed a few drops on his face he reflected, rather grimly, that, as far as he was concerned, washing up was a waste of time.

He might have been maimed or killed during his double tour of duty, but he hadn’t done anything to get dirty. Any one of his half-assed in-laws could have told anyone interested that cops never worked that hard.

Outside of driving around in a nice big squad car, playing pigeon for a lunatic fringe of moronic Sunday drivers, seemingly intent on killing themselves and everyone else on the street, all he had done to earn his pay had been to:

Help wrestle a dozen assorted drunks and beatniks and hopheads into paddy wagons, hold a gun on two parole violators who’d attempted to hold up a filling station, make a half dozen investigations, help settle three domestic quarrels, track down five lost children, help break up an incipient riot at Oak Street Beach, be cursed at several dozen times, help the other boys talk the loaded revolver away from the hysterical and badly wounded little junkie in the love pad not far from the Drake, apply first aid to both her and the man she had shot until the ambulance boys had arrived to take over, and do such other sundry little civic housekeeping tasks which the radio dispatcher had assigned them.

All of it strictly routine. All of it part of a normal day. All of it normal police brutality.

As he dried his hands and face on a paper towel, then dropped it into the metal waste container, Brotz thought glumly that it was the same every holiday.

He couldn’t love Adele more if she were Elizabeth Taylor, Sandra Dee, and Jane Fonda all rolled into one pleasantly plump forty-six-year-old hausfrau. It was her relatives he couldn’t stand. No matter what was being celebrated, from the Fourth of July to Christmas, every one of his loudmouthed in-laws who’d never had, and couldn’t hold, a decent job, but who could walk, or crawl, or bend an elbow, always used the happy occasion as an excuse to put his feet under his table and drink up his liquor supply.

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