The Given Day: A Novel by Dennis Lehane

Author:Dennis Lehane [Lehane, Dennis]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780062190949
Amazon: 0062190946
Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
Published: 2008-01-01T22:00:00+00:00

354DENNIS LEHANE

"What if I can't?"

"Ready it for a new hole."

Danny and Mark Denton met to discuss strategy for their morn ing meeting with Mayor Peters and Commissioner Curtis. They sat at one of the tables in the back of the Blackstone Saloon on Congress Street. It was a dive, a well-known cops' bar where the other men, sensing that Mark and Danny held keys to their fate, left them alone.

"A raise of two hundred a year is no longer enough," Mark said.

"I know," Danny said. Cost of living had risen so dramatically in the last six months that all that prewar figure would do was restore the men to the poverty level. "What if we come in asking for three hundred?"

Mark rubbed his forehead. "It's tricky. They could get to the press before us and say we're greedy. And Montreal definitely hasn't helped our bargaining position."

Danny reached through the stack of papers Denton had fanned across the table. "But the numbers bear us out." He lifted the article he'd clipped from last week's Traveler on the leaps in the prices of coal, oil, milk, and public transportation.

"But if we ask for three hundred when they're still digging in their heels on two?"

Danny sighed and rubbed his own forehead. "Let's just throw it on the table. When they balk, we can come down to two-fifty for veterans, two-ten for new recruits, start building a scale."

Mark took a sip of his beer, the worst in the city, but also the cheapest. He rubbed the foam off his upper lip with the back of his hand and glanced at the Traveler clipping again. "Might work, might work. What if they flat out rebuff us? They say there's no money, none, zip?"

"Then we have to come at them on the company- store issue. Ask if they think it's right that policemen have to pay for their own uniforms and greatcoats and guns and bullets. Ask them how they expect a THE GIVEN DAYfirst-year patrolman working for the 1905 wage and paying for his own equipment to feed his children."

"I like the children." Mark gave him a wry smile. "Be ready to play that up if we meet any reporters on the way out and it hasn't gone our way."

Danny nodded. "Another thing? We've got to bring the average workweek down by ten hours and get time-and-a-half for all special details. The president's coming back through here in a month, right? Getting off the boat from France and parading right through these streets. You know they're going to put every cop on that regardless of what he's already worked that week. Let's demand time-and-a-half starting there."

"We're going to put their backs up with that."

"Exactly. And once their backs are up, we say we'll forgo all these demands if they just give us the raise they promised plus the cost-of-living increase."

Mark stewed on that, sipping his beer, looking out at the snow falling past the graying windows of late afternoon. "We've got to hit them with the health- code violations, too," he said.

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