John Finn by Vincent McCaffrey

Author:Vincent McCaffrey
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780989790321
Published: 2019-08-15T04:00:00+00:00

17. Once I knew a cop

Once I knew a cop in Hingham who thought that it was the metal in guns that somehow short circuited the minute electrical impulses of the brain and made people act stupidly. This same guy also ate seaweed, kept a swarm of stray cats he had picked up on the job, and worked out for about three hours every day at the gym. Obviously, he did not have a lot of time to think his theories through. But he had gotten me to think twice about guns.

I didn’t own a gun but Connie loaned me one of his. Lately, I was going to the range every other week to take some target practice. I agreed with Connie that I should know how to use it, even if I didn’t want to carry it. Situations can change. My Army training was over twenty years old and mostly involved an M-16. Besides, practice was paid for—part of the company insurance plan. I had received my license to carry in late October.

The cop in Hingham was half-right, in any case. I wish I could thank him for that. As Mae West knew, having a gun in your pocket did short-circuit your thinking. It was always too easy to stop at that solution rather than work things through a little further.

The cop, Harry Bellows Jr., got himself run over at a construction site on Route 3 a few years ago by an eighty-year-old man in a Buick. Maybe the metal in cars has an effect on some brains as well.

I have wondered more than once if maybe I would have enjoyed being a cop. Not for any intellectual engagement. There’s too much regulation for that. And too much of the job that isn’t paperwork involves sitting around at construction sites. Or, like poor Harry, getting out to stretch your legs.

But I have the ability to cultivate boredom. And I was thinking about Harry.

One Saturday, well after midnight, I was sitting in my car up on Pinckney Street, almost in front of Walsh Higgins’s building because it was the only space I could find and there is no room for double parking up that way. Higgins’s window was dark, but I could not keep an eye on it from that angle. I listened to the radio a while but that was already stale. After an hour or so, I gave up hope that someone else would move and got out of the car to stand in an opening where the continuous line-up of brick fronts and doorways was interrupted for a setback and one of the few old wooden houses that are still sandwiched in up there. It was a remnant of what the whole Hill once looked like before a few fires ravaged the area a couple hundred years ago. Naturally I got to looking at the architecture of the wooden house, illuminated by the gas flame of the street lights the city of Boston keeps burning for the tourists.

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