The Autobiography of Matthew Scudder by Lawrence Block

Author:Lawrence Block
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lawrence Block
Published: 2023-01-11T00:00:00+00:00

Syosset.

If we were going to move out of Brooklyn, I suppose it was as good a place as any. It’s about thirty miles away, on the North Shore of Long Island, in Nassau County. Drive time to the city depended on traffic, but you didn’t have to drive; the Long Island Rail Road would get you to Penn Station—or to Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues, in Brooklyn.

It was probably a good place for my sons to grow up. The schools were decent.

There were times when I blamed Syosset for the erosion of our marriage—not Syosset specifically, but our having moved away from where we’d been. I’m sure it played a role, but I’m just as sure that the marriage was only following a predetermined route. All the move did was give it a tailwind.

And I suppose the relocation was predictable enough. The way it came about was nothing special. We had a second kid on the way, and our apartment was starting to feel too small. If we had another boy, the two of them could share Mikey’s small room—but this was before prenatal ultrasound, and we didn’t know what we’d be getting, and my mother-in-law was certain Anita was going to have a girl.

Either way, we felt we could use more room. And it would be nice to have a yard where the kids could play, and where we could do the things families did—grill hot dogs over charcoal briquettes, have a car and a garage to keep it in, and mount a backboard over the garage and shoot baskets. And mow the lawn, and curse the crabgrass. And rake leaves in the fall, and shovel snow in the winter.

And so on.

At the time, there was an NYPD regulation that all members of the department had to reside within the five boroughs of New York. The underlying principle was reasonably sound. The idea was that while you were only working for the city during your hours on the clock, you provided a reserve police presence twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

There was an accompanying regulation requiring you to carry your service revolver wherever you went, on or off duty. You might be at D’Agostino’s picking up a loaf of bread, with nothing on your mind but the sandwich you were going to make when you got home, but if some kid with a switchblade decided to hold up the cashier, you were there on the spot to blow his head off.

Or something like that.

I’ll say this, you got used to it. You’d hear someone say that he felt naked without a gun on his hip, and that wasn’t far from the truth, because about the only time you didn’t have that gun on your hip was when your clothes were off. That’s an exaggeration, you weren’t required to carry once you crossed your own threshold, but disarming yourself wasn’t always automatic once you got home. I was pretty good about that, before I did much of anything else

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