<< Chapter 1 Table Of Contents Home Page Chapter 3 >>
Patrol Officer Scott Caldwell turned his head slowly to an upright position and tried to focus his drowsy eyes beyond the styrofoam coffee cup resting on the dashboard. For the past four hours the police officer had been seated in his patrol car, which was parked on Division Avenue, just south and across Main Street from the Heritage County Medical Center. Throughout several similar nighttime watches during the past month, Officer Caldwell had discovered to his great displeasure that no amount of caffeine provided a sufficient stimulus to his nervous system to keep him alert for the duration of this mind-numbing 2:00 am to 6:00 am vigil—a surveillance of a building which, quite ironically, had become anything but sedating to the civic nervous system of Heritage County.
Caldwell squirmed uncomfortably in his seat, stretching his legs out as far as the floorboard would allow, then bending them at the knees several times to relieve the stiffness. He arched his spine away from the back of the seat and reached behind himself with one hand to massage the vertebrae in his lumbar area. At six-foot-two and two hundred twenty pounds, he cursed the engineers in Detroit for their one-size-fits-all mentality. After a minute or so the ache in his lower back let up a bit, and he resettled himself in his seat. He picked the styrofoam cup off the dashboard and finished the last of the cold coffee it held, swallowing hard to force the stale liquid down his throat. He sighed aloud as he tossed the empty cup onto the floor on the passenger's side of the car.
As he stared again at the antiseptic exterior of the glass and concrete structure across the street, he tried for perhaps the hundredth time to figure out what all the fuss was about, and for perhaps the hundredth time he could not do so. It was inconceivable to him that people could spend so much time and energy fighting over such a place.
There were many things about the medical clinic and the roiling controversy it provoked that irritated Caldwell. It was loud. It was obnoxious. It caused him and his fellow officers no end of extra grief and paperwork. The constant bickering between the two sides, the repetitious arrests of the same people on the same charges, the endless court appearances at which he was called to testify, rehashing virtually the same events over and over again.
In your opinion, Officer Caldwell, which party was responsible for starting the altercation you witnessed?
I have no idea, sir. When I arrived, both sides were fully engaged in the fight. I just broke them up and arrested everyone involved.
Motion to dismiss the charges, Your Honor, on the grounds that my client was simply defending herself against an assault by the other party.
It was all an enormous aggravation to him, and it was all for naught. That was what galled him the most about the whole argument—the pointlessness of it. No answers to any deep, weighty questions were going to be found out here on the street, and he knew it. And he felt that, deep down, the people who were engaged in this public pettiness knew it too, or at least they should have known it, but their childish natures wouldn't let such polite considerations stop them. They all had something to say, damn it, and by God they were going to have their say, no matter what level of annoyance their shoving and shouting might impose on others. And he was forced, by virtue of the badge he wore on his uniform, to occupy a front-row seat at this petulant show.
Caldwell had no personal stake in the fight. He could not have cared less which side might prevail in the end, and that neutrality made the contest all the more tiresome for him to endure. He thought about the types of people who made the most noise on the subject. Politicians. Activists. Those who clamored, angrily and self-righteously, for "innocent life" or "women's rights" or some other such nonsense. People who seemed genetically programmed to tell others how to live their lives. A smirk of derision crossed his face. God, the arrogance of some people.
It came from both sides equally, as Caldwell saw it. The lifers thought they had a mandate from the Almighty. They were convinced it was a war of divine morality. A commandment from God, they said. Thou Shalt Not Kill. Yeah, right. Too bad God didn't give Moses some other commandments while He was at it. How about "Thou Shalt Mind Thy Own Business." Or, better yet, "Thou Shalt Not Act Like A Pompous Ass." Didn't these crusaders have any real problems to deal with in their own lives? Were they so perfect that they had all this extra energy to devote to making everyone else feel guilty of some crime?
The choice crowd wasn't any better in Caldwell's opinion. A dozen different methods of birth control and they still came to clinics in record numbers. Couldn't these people take on just a little responsibility and think ahead? Was it really so hard to keep a condom handy? And how much effort does it require to take a pill once a day? He would bet that they'd be a lot more responsible if it wasn't such an easy option. It probably wouldn't be such a "necessary" procedure then. And for Christ's sake, half the people defending the clinic were well past their childbearing years anyway. Why didn't they march for higher Social Security payments or lower taxes or something else that actually affected them?
No, Caldwell thought with disgust, they had to pick a fight with each other over this. This was the issue. This was the reason that he and his thermos of coffee were stuck in a stationary police cruiser for half the night. Everybody in town who gave a damn about the issue—everybody—got a good night's sleep tonight, he thought. Infanticide and injustice could be debated in the light of day. The great conflict between right and wrong, between good and evil, could wait until the combatants had gotten a long, restful sleep in their warm, comfortable beds. Murder may be committed around the clock, but the public only cared to discuss it during their normal business hours.
Murder? Caldwell had to chuckle. The vocabulary of this debate had gotten so far beyond reality that it gave the issue its only humorous aspect. Most people had no idea what murder really was—what it looked like up close. Let them live my life, he thought, then let's see how much emotion they would have left over for this issue.
Caldwell knew, he told himself, what violence and murder and death were all about. He had seen them up close, not simply imagined them through a magazine article or a television show. He had completed a four-year stint in the Army before joining the Bazelton police force. During that time he had served a tour of duty as a corporal in a mechanized division during the Persian Gulf War, and in the process he had received a most inglorious introduction to the visceral results of violent death. Despite all their training for combat, his unit's chief role in that conflict did not involve even a single hostile engagement with the enemy. The American Armed Forces proved themselves too efficient for that. Instead, Caldwell's unit was tasked mostly to clean up what remained of the hundreds of Iraqi tanks and trucks which had already been hunted down by American aircraft. For several days in a row during that short war, U.S. planes and helicopters mercilessly pounded every enemy vehicle they could find. Caldwell's unit pursued these engagements from place to place on the ground, moving as quickly as they could from one point of engagement to the next. By the time Caldwell's unit arrived at each site, however, there was never any more fighting to be done. Destroyed hours earlier by ordnance launched from aircraft more than a mile overhead, scores of enemy tanks had become nothing more than steel death traps for their unfortunate occupants. After the brief battles were over, the Americans' only remaining task, which fell to the ground soldiers, was to secure the area immediately surrounding the destroyed vehicles, take prisoner any Iraqis who managed to survive the attacks, and pack up the bodies of the others for return to whatever locals came forward to claim them.
The work of picking through the charred and fragmented remains of the enemy soldiers provided a blunt and surreal introduction for the young enlistee to the world of the involuntary mortician. The job, in its simplest terms, was to remove all remains of the dead from the environs of the living. Theoretically speaking, the idea was to place the remains of each dead soldier into a separate body bag for transportation and later identification. But practicality has a way of interfering with even the simplest of tasks, and so it was in this endeavor. As Caldwell and his compatriots were soon to discover, the human body does not well retain its wholeness in the presence of exploding ordnance. An Iraqi tank usually carried four men into battle. After the American missiles were finished with them, however, the typical four-man crew had been reduced to a seared and scattered collection of eight arms, eight legs, four heads and four torsos. The ground soldiers routinely found these limbs and torsos separated and tossed about at random within the confines of those mangled metal chambers. To properly reunite legs and arms with heads and torsos proved to be a challenge for which the young GI's were neither fully qualified nor particularly motivated. It seemed sufficient at the time to simply insure that each body bag contained no more than two arms, two legs, one torso and one head, or whatever portions of such body parts remained at the time of gathering. If a few bags received two right arms or two left legs, well, the young morticians made some half-hearted efforts to avoid those irregularities, but that concern was not their highest priority.
Let the Iraqis sort this mess out; at least they'll get to do it in the shade somewhere. God, it's got to be a hundred and twenty degrees inside this sorry excuse for a tank. And hell, it's not like these dead guys' relatives are actually going to recognize what we put inside these bags. I wouldn't be able to identify my own brother if he were in this guy's condition. Christ, Scottie, would you look at that? What the hell is that thing hanging out right there below his ribcage? Who cares, Junior. Stop gawking and just hand me another bag. We've got five more tanks to empty before we're done here.
Even if a greater effort had been made to reunite body parts correctly, all of the pieces to each puzzle were not always available. Although no precise inventory was kept, each GI knew that, unless the Iraqi army was in the habit of conscripting a large number of amputees, a considerable number of body parts had been completely incinerated by the inferno which engulfed each tank after a direct hit. Many bags were hauled away from those vehicles with less than a full corpse inside.
It was during his days on those desert sands that Scott Caldwell first learned that some deaths should not be questioned. It took him only about two hours—two hot, smelly, morbid, mind-sharpening, philosophy-crystallizing hours—to reach this conclusion—a conclusion that some might spend their entire lives questioning, denying, fighting. To challenge the reality that those deaths were necessary was to become lost in a never-ending regress of the same questions repeated over and over again, and Caldwell had traced that regress many times with his fellow soldiers.
Why did this guy, whose left arm I can't find, have to die?
Because he was shooting at us.
Why was he shooting at us?
Because those were his orders.
Why was he given those orders?
Why this? Because that.
Why, why, why?
Just BECAUSE, okay? Because that's the way it is, and because I'm too sick and tired of stuffing black body parts into rubber bags under this god-awful Arabian sun to give a damn anymore, all right?
Caldwell shook his head to cast off the memories. He knew that he had grabbed onto the easiest answers he could find, but that thought did not much bother him. He had seen the effect that too much conscience had on other soldiers in the field. He remembered more than one soldier breaking down under the stress of battle or, more commonly, its aftermath. Caldwell knew that most soldiers who suffered anxiety problems after serving in combat might have received their wounds, psychological or otherwise, on the battlefield, but the scars were formed elsewhere. The lasting damage occurred not in the midst of the fight, but in the days or weeks or months afterward, while the soldier lies quietly in his bunk, staring straight up at the ceiling for hours on end, reliving the experience in his mind and trying to resolve the questions. Which questions? It didn't really matter. All the questions. Why ... why not ... when ... how ... what if. Trying to solve the riddles of relations between men, of war and its causes, was a sure road to psychological oblivion. One's sanity was protected only by devoting one's attentions to the daily task of doing what was necessary and leaving the rationalizations to those who didn't really know any better. Caldwell had emerged from his time in the Army unwounded, and he believed that he had little more than dumb luck to thank for that.
Four years of post-military life had not changed Caldwell's thinking in the least. On the contrary, his experiences as a police officer had only served to reinforce his opinions. Few people, he had come to believe, knew more about the reality of violent death, of the utterly dispensable nature of living things, than a police officer. As a profession, police officers took first place in the violent death sweepstakes. Medical staff—doctors and nurses—might see death in greater quantities, but not in greater magnitude. The quiet expirations of a hundred elderly patients from cancer or heart failure or stroke could not equal the psychological punch of a single teenage boy found lying in the gutter with a bullet through his brain, or a single woman stabbed in the chest with a pair of scissors by a jealous, drunken boyfriend. At least for the first few cases anyway. After a while it all became part of the routine. For those, that is, who could let it become routine.
But this current issue, this triviality—this type of thing really got to him. It had gotten so out of hand lately. It was no longer just a philosophical debate about morality and privacy. Yes, it was in essence a struggle for the hearts and minds of the public, but it was no longer fought strictly within the confines of the voting booth and the courtroom, those places specifically designated for the resolution of such conflicts. It was not even confined to the television channels and the radio airwaves, which, arguably, were supposed to carry on this type of endless debate. No, Caldwell thought, the battle had broken its containment. It had spilled out onto the streets, onto his territory. The public was now being bombarded with this crap from all sides. Ordinary people on their way to work—insurance salesmen and computer programmers and automobile mechanics, all minding their own business and all merely trying to get through their day—were set upon by activists distributing leaflets which decried the "violation of privacy" being perpetrated by the right wing. The other side, not willing to be outdone in the harassment contest, organized mobs of "concerned citizens" around the entrance to the medical clinic, demanding to know the intentions of every woman arriving at the facility for a mammogram or a PAP smear.
The clinic had become ground zero in the struggle. It was the high ground which each side wished to claim exclusively for themselves. Control of this place, the power to dictate what could and could not happen within those walls, was the ultimate goal. It was uncanny in a sense, Caldwell thought. The issue never seemed to exist prior to the day that the Heritage County Medical Clinic opened its doors. The issue which consumed so much energy in other places had seemed nonexistent in this town. But that was before the clinic was built, before the walls went up, before the latest annex to the medical center was completed. Now that a building stood there, the battleground was clearly and inescapably defined. Now there was something—someplace—to fight over.
And fight they did. They marched in front of the building. They carried placards on their chests and flyers in their hands. They held megaphones to their mouths. They chanted and shouted and sang songs. They encouraged reporters from newspapers and television and radio to record their activities and to broadcast their words to the public. And the public, in turn, did their best to avoid it all. Pedestrians crossed to the other side of the street in order to avoid the tumult. Drivers detoured around the block. Newspaper readers turned the page. Television viewers and radio listeners turned the channels. The whole argument quickly deteriorated into an incestuous squabble in which each side became the entire audience for the other—each the only people who were the least bit interested in what the other side had to say on any given day.
When, after a time, the two sides realized that they had lost the attention of the public, they became frustrated and angry. Then their anger and frustration spilled over into ominous precursors to violence. One side threw vials of red liquid at the other. The next day's response was a volley of bleach bottles and wire coat hangers in the other direction. On the morning that a brick was found thrown through the clinic's front window with a threatening note attached, the police chief decided that he had seen enough. His force would stand watch over the clinic grounds twenty-four hours a day, he decided, to protect the clinic and to keep the two groups at a safe distance from one another. Caldwell and his fellow officers drew the assignment.
"Unbelievable," Caldwell had muttered under his breath when the new Containment Policy, as it was officially titled, was explained to the patrol officers: round-the-clock surveillance of the clinic in four-hour shifts, worked into the normal eight-hour daytime, evening and overnight duty schedules. Caldwell and the other officers had taken to calling it the Nanny Brigade. Absolutely incredible, they all thought, that so many of the force's patrol hours were going to be taken up by this problem. Caldwell had wanted to track down every person who was engaged in this argument, grab them by the scruff of the collar and say to them through gritted teeth, "We do have real crimes to work on in this town, you moron. I do not have the time or the patience to play baby sitter for you and your kindergarten classmates!"
This turn of events goaded Caldwell more than any other. He could have withstood hearing the verbal exchange of insults between the two camps every day. He would have been content to go on turning the newspaper pages and flipping the television channels and walking on the other side of the street. He would have been immune to the strife as long as he could have ignored it. But he could not ignore it any longer. It was now his job to referee this spat.
The overnight watch did have one advantage, Caldwell reminded himself. At least the noisy brats were not out at this hour. The second half of the shift consisted primarily of watching the building, drinking coffee and trying to stay awake. Not exactly the most interesting type of work, but it sure beat having to listen to an all-day shoutfest about the power of the Supreme Court or repeatedly having to get out of the car to enforce the boundaries of the thirty-yard buffer zone which the police had marked off to keep the two sides separated and to allow patients and staff to peaceably enter and leave the building.
But the graveyard shift had its downside as well, and boredom was its name. Aching boredom. For the greater part of these shifts Caldwell prayed for so much as a stray dog to wander by or a good, crackling thunderstorm to roll through. Anything to draw his attention away from the front of that goddamned building. Many times he had been tempted to leave his post for half an hour or so, just to take a slow drive to the other side of town and back, something to break the monotony. But the chief had been adamant. Twenty-four hour surveillance; no breaks, no exceptions. Each officer was required to remain at his post until relieved by another officer. Caldwell had once thought that he had left such strictness of command behind him when he was discharged from the Army. No such luck, he now thought. Just one more bad memory come back to torment him.
And so it was that now, in the early post-dawn hour of a late September morning, Officer Scott Caldwell wrestled himself awake in his patrol car on Division Avenue, just off Main, and gave up trying to make sense of it all.
Caldwell looked at his watch. 5:52. The stiffness in his neck and spine urged him to step outside the car and stretch each joint and tendon in his body back into limber consciousness, but the growing pain in his bladder told him to wait until the morning officer arrived, for Caldwell knew that the five cups of coffee he had consumed in the past four hours, with no pause for relief, would overwhelm his prostate gland if he were to assume a standing position.
"Come on, come on, come on," the officer muttered rapidly to himself over and over again. I swear to Christ, he thought, if that cherry-ass Gardner is ten seconds late, I'm going to piss in his face till he drowns.
Impatience was not a new disposition for Caldwell, and he recognized the feeling immediately. It overcame him all too easily these days, but it grew especially bad toward the end of these graveyard shifts. He knew that his demeanor was a source of friction between himself and others, and, quite frankly, he didn't really care. To look at him for the first time now, one would not recognize the young man who nine years earlier had turned down a college baseball scholarship to join the Army straight out of high school. He had been a proud kid back then, all toughness and full of himself, as many of the athletes in his school had been. Six varsity letters—three in baseball and three in track and field—were carried in every pace of his stride as he strutted his way to his classes down those long corridors. Baseball was his greatest talent and his abiding passion, and he had the other awards to prove it. Two county-wide homerun titles; two consecutive nominations to the All-State team, second string in his junior year and first string as a senior. He would have loved to have played ball at the college level, too, but he had been a poor student and his SAT scores were his downfall. They were so abysmal that he could not even bring himself to submit an application to a major college. When the junior college that offered him a scholarship told him that he would have to take a semester of remedial courses before he could join the team, Caldwell took their offer letter out to his backyard, passed it over the top of a butane lighter, and dropped the flaming pages into an empty garbage can.
Looking back on that time now, and considering his current circumstances, Caldwell felt the pangs of regret usually reserved for men twice his age. What could have possessed him to choose this kind of work for a career? Didn't he know it was a stone-cold guarantee that he would wind up a stiff-necked, bladder-swollen, bleary-eyed slug sitting alone in a squad car for hours on end, staring at the unchanging facade of an empty building and waiting for some well-rested preppie boy to relieve him at the crack of dawn? He was better than this, he told himself. Better than this car; better than that building; better than that empty coffee cup staring back up at him from the floor. Life owed him more than this.
Perhaps, he thought to himself now, he had been too proud for his own good. What had he really done to earn any sense of accomplishment in his life? What excuse did he have for his pride? Excuse? Well, none, of course. That was the true definition of pride, wasn't it? To feel that you have achieved things significantly greater than the average lot of your peers. Perhaps, also, to have achieved those things with the seemingly effortless grace of those who have been blessed with some God-given talent that few others could ever claim.
He was talented, he told himself. What he lacked in book smarts he made up for in street smarts. He knew things that no college professor could ever teach him. He was intelligent and hard-working and honest and fair. He had all the qualities that made a good cop, and a good cop he was. But what bothered him now, what ate at his gut during these lonely hours on watch when he had nothing to do but to think his own thoughts, was the feeling that he was being cheated. That he deserved more out of life than he was getting and that something—somebody—was responsible. Like the man who confidently goes all in with a full house and then watches the lesser player across the table rake in the pot with four of a kind, Caldwell could do nothing but slink away from his youth empty-handed, grousing to himself as he went that by all rights it should not have turned out this way. Life, like poker, was a zero-sum game to him, and others who crossed his path, even with charitable intent, often felt the rancor of his defeat.
Caldwell's relations with his fellow police officers were not immune from the strain. Most of his coworkers had learned to put up with his moodiness in the name of professional tolerance, but few of them would go out of their way to do him a favor, and fewer still had ever sought his friendship outside of work. In his four years with the Bazelton police department he had become close friends with only one other officer, and that officer was no longer on the force. A nasty lawsuit over an incident of alleged police brutality had resulted in his friend's dismissal from the force and had earned Caldwell an official letter of reprimand. No other member of the force would agree to testify in their defense, and the district attorney had been forced to settle the case before trial, at great expense to the department. Kenny was now pouring concrete for a construction company when they had work for him, and Caldwell had been docked two years' seniority. Officers six years younger than him would now make sergeant before he would. Caldwell tried to contain his bitterness as best he could, but sometimes the feelings of betrayal still got to him. And the fact that that little punk deserved everything he got only served to sharpen the sting. Occasionally he gave thought to the idea of resigning from the force and trying his hand at some other line of work, but he could never bring himself to act on those impulses. The pay was decent, he reminded himself, even without those two years of seniority, and the benefits were good. What other kind of work might he be qualified for? He couldn't think of any. In spite of all the aggravations it entailed, Caldwell had to admit that he still enjoyed police work for the most part. He liked carrying a gun on the job. He liked being able to wield a nightstick when it was necessary. He liked the clean clicking sound that his handcuffs made when they ratcheted securely down around the wrists of a freshly captured suspect. He related very well to the tools of his trade. He just didn't like dealing with people very much.
He inspected his watch again. 6:02. Time for the nightly philosophizing to end. "Where the hell is that asshole?" Caldwell said aloud. He pinched his legs tightly together and gritted his teeth, wondering how much longer his bladder could go on accumulating urine without rupturing.
* * *
Officer Matthew Gardner rolled up in his squad car at 6:05, looking, as expected, well rested. Freshly shaved, his short blond hair still damp from the morning's showering, Gardner made the left turn from Main onto Division, drove about fifty feet past Caldwell, then made a sharp U-turn and swung his cruiser in behind Caldwell's. Gardner opened his door and began to step outside, but his feet had not even touched the street before Caldwell threw his already running car into drive and peeled away from the curb. He pulled a U-turn even tighter than Gardner's and accelerated past the younger officer. The rookie patrolman stood frozen by the side of his car and watched with equal amounts of surprise and puzzlement as the older officer sped by him, pointing emphatically at his watch.
Caldwell, spurred on by the call of nature, drove directly to the nearest public restroom, which was located in the convenience store two blocks east on Division. Barely acknowledging the presence of the store clerk or the few customers browsing in the aisles, he walked quickly to the men's room at the rear of the store and was pleased to find it unoccupied. As he stood in front of the urinal and took his relief, Caldwell released all of his pent-up aggressions. For the first time in several hours he allowed his entire self, body and spirit, to relax. He closed his eyes, leaned his head back and drew in several deep breaths. He let his frustrations ebb and his anger dissipate. The tensions of his overnight shift, the bitterness that had welled up from within him during the dark, depressing hours, receded in his mind like the twilight receded with the dawn.
Caldwell recognized clearly the transformation that was taking place within him. It was a frequent experience. The everyday pressures of life, the multitude of daily burdens that each person must bear, could not be carried without pause. A release valve was required. Some paid thousands of dollars to psychologists and psychics and other assorted analysts to find relief from their angst. Others took solace in alcohol or drugs or in the act of beating something weaker than themselves. Caldwell found all the relief he needed in the men's room of the local 7-Eleven. If he could somehow distill into a pill the regenerative process he was now experiencing, he thought, he could retire a happy man. But that, of course, was nonsense. Spiritual regeneration was not a process of adding something to yourself, of putting something more into yourself. It was, rather, a process by which some part of you, some caustic byproduct of your true being, some contaminant that found its way into your soul, was screened out, separated, and purged. That process of separation, of filtering out the poisons, was what kept him sane. After a couple of minutes had passed, after he had purged his daily demons, Caldwell flushed them from his world, washed his hands, and emerged from the restroom a new man.
As he walked to the front of the store at a newly relaxed pace, the officer noticed a woman making a purchase at the counter. She was dressed rather casually in a light overcoat, tan khaki slacks and white leather walking shoes. Caldwell guessed that she was probably in her mid-fifties, although she gave the appearance of being slightly younger. Her sandy blond hair, touched with shades of gray, was styled smartly in a subtle wave, cut cleanly above her ears, and tapered in the back well above the nape of her neck. She wore small studded earrings of emerald green, just a trace of makeup, and no perfume. Her appearance, in its entirety, was crisp, hygienic and professional. Caldwell placed her immediately as a medical professional, probably a doctor. Street smarts, he told himself. Although he had been keeping watch over the clinic for almost a month now and believed that he knew the face of every employee, he did not recognize this woman. He wandered slowly up to the magazine rack next to the counter and pawed casually through the periodicals.
"Well, good luck with the new job," said the clerk, an elderly gentleman with a grandfatherly manner, to the woman.
"Thank you so much," the woman replied. "I'm really looking forward to it."
"That's a nice hospital they have there," the clerk said with a smile. "Very nice. I've been in there a few times on account of my diabetes. Everyone there is real nice. All the nurses there know me by name. They say I'm their favorite patient."
"That's good to hear," replied the woman. "I've worked in other hospitals where it's not that way. A lot of places treat their patients like parts on an assembly line. I hope to get to know all of my new patients by name as well."
The clerk placed the woman's order into a white plastic bag and handed it across the counter to her.
"Well, you'll probably see me in there from time to time," he said. "Who knows? Maybe you'll wind up having me for a patient someday."
The woman smiled and hesitated briefly. She knew that she would not be having any elderly gentlemen show up on her roster of patients, but she didn't feel the need to explain. "Perhaps," she said, still retaining a slight smile. "Well, have a nice day, Mr. Miller," she added, stepping away from the counter towards the door.
"Same to you, Doctor," the clerk replied. "Nice meeting you."
Caldwell turned his head slightly and followed the woman from the corner of his eye, trying to catch another glimpse of her as she headed out of the store. The woman caught his glance and stopped just before exiting.
"Good morning, officer," she said in a pleasant tone.
Caldwell was caught slightly off guard by her quick and unexpected greeting, but he managed to maintain his composure. "Morning, ma'am," he replied, striking the air of formality which he always used with strangers while on duty, even though his shift was now over.
"Are you one of the officers patrolling down by the clinic?" the woman inquired.
"Yes, ma'am."
"Well then, I should introduce myself. My name is Sally Wheelan," she said, extending her hand. "I'm the newest member of the medical staff at the clinic."
"Nice to meet you," the officer replied as he grasped her hand and delivered a quick one-pump handshake.
"Nice to meet you as well," the doctor said. "I was told about the situation down there. You know, about the protests and all. I just wanted to say that I appreciate your work in keeping things under control."
"That's what I get paid for, ma'am," said Caldwell. "Just doing my job."
"Well it's an important job," she said with great sincerity, "and I really appreciate your efforts. I just hope things don't get out of hand."
"I wouldn't worry about it, ma'am. We've been able to handle things without too much difficulty up until now. I don't expect things to get any worse, but if they do, we'll be ready to handle whatever comes up."
"That's very nice to know. I've got so many things to worry about, what with the new job and everything. It's good to know I don't have to worry about unruly protesters harassing me or my patients."
Caldwell nodded at her. "Like I said, ma'am, just doing my job."
"Yes, I know," the woman said, somewhat awkwardly. There was a brief lull in the conversation as each waited for the other to make the next remark. After a moment the woman said, "Well, thank you again, officer." She smiled at Caldwell and turned again towards the door.
Caldwell managed another quick nod of his head as the woman placed her hand on the door and started to push it open. Suddenly she stopped, hesitated for a moment, then turned back to the officer.
"Can I ask you a question, officer ... ahh ... Caldwell, is it?" she asked, as she looked at the nameplate pinned to the officer's shirt.
"Yes, ma'am."
"I hate to ask a stupid question," she said, "but I'm on my way to work right now, and, well, this is my first day on the job, so I'm not quite so sure of myself just yet. And I was wondering if you think it's safe for me to use the front entrance to the clinic. Or do you think perhaps I should go around to one of the back entrances?"
"Oh, I'm sure it's safe to walk right in the front door at this hour of the morning, ma'am," Caldwell said. "The troublemakers usually don't show up much before nine. But if you see anything suspicious, you can report it to Officer Gardner. He's on watch down there right now. You'll walk by his cruiser about two blocks down on your way to the clinic."
"Okay," the woman said with relief. "Thank you, officer. I hate to be a bother, but I've learned that you can't be too careful in these situations."
"No ma'am," Caldwell replied.
"Well, have a nice day, officer," the woman said, as she turned and walked out the door.
No ma'am, no trouble at all, Caldwell thought sarcastically. He watched the woman through the glass door as she disappeared down the sidewalk in the direction of the hospital.
The officer then turned away and walked over to the counter by the cash register where the clerk stood. He bent over at the waist, leaned on the countertop with both elbows and yawned powerfully.
"Long night, Scott?" the clerk said.
"The longest, Walter," Caldwell replied, after his lower jaw had relaxed. "Absolutely the longest." As he said this he reached his arms across the counter, wrapped his fingers around the far edge and leaned his upper body even further forward. Placing his cheek against the cool surface of the countertop, he used the leverage of his position to stretch the muscles in his back and shoulders.
The clerk recognized the officer's normal morning routine. Caldwell often reminded him of an athlete limbering up before a game when he came into the store. "I guess it gets pretty dull sitting in your car all night watching over that place," he said.
"It's the very definition of dull, Walt," Caldwell said. "The worst. I thought night shift duty was dull even before this Nanny Brigade crap. But now? Ha!" He expelled a short, sharp laugh. "I swear there are times when I'd give anything to be able to spend the night shift just hanging around in this store watching the high school kids try to pass fake IDs. I tell you, my whole body feels like a rusty hinge by the time six o'clock rolls around."
The clerk gave a short grunt of sympathy, then he leaned forward with his palms on the countertop and looked directly down at the officer, who was still stretched across the counter from the other side.
"Hey, speaking of kids," the clerk said, "have you guys come up with any leads yet on that kid who held me up last month?"
Caldwell closed his eyes and held his breath for a moment as a grimace crossed his face, then he exhaled.
"No, Walt. I'm sorry, we haven't," he said in a defeated tone. "We were hoping the kid would talk, you know. Maybe brag about it to his friends or something. But nobody has come forward with any information. And we've posted his picture all over the place."
"Isn't there anything else you can do?" the clerk asked plaintively. "I don't mean you in particular; I mean the whole police department. Can't somebody check with the other departments nearby? Maybe he doesn't live right around here, you know? Maybe he's hit other places, like over in Rockfield or Chesterton. Maybe somebody over there would recognize him."
Caldwell felt his gut start to tighten. The old man was right, he thought; it was an amateurish crime. Some teenager robs a seventy-three-year-old convenience store clerk at gunpoint. The security camera caught the whole thing. No mask, no disguise at all, except for a pair of sunglasses. The kid got away on a bicycle for Christ's sake. And we can't find him. Why? Because we're not cops—we're nannies.
"We're doing the best we can, Walt," Caldwell said with resignation, "given our priorities."
The clerk straightened up noticeably. "Well, I know I may not be the most important citizen in this town," the old man said with a huff, stabbing an index finger into the counter top, "but I sure would feel a lot safer if I knew that kid was off the streets."
"Yeah," Caldwell said in disgust. "I know how you feel."
The clerk sat down irritably on a stool behind the counter and folded his arms across his chest. He turned his head and stared out the window at the traffic as it moved past the front of the store. "All I can say is I hope you find him soon," he said. "Otherwise I may have to quit this job. My wife is already worried sick about me working here, but we've got bills to pay, you know?"
With great fatigue Caldwell pushed himself up from the counter. He turned to his left and walked stiffly a few paces to a coffee counter, where he picked a large styrofoam cup off the top of a tall stack.
"I know how you feel, Walt," he said again, as he lifted a round Pyrex pot of steaming black coffee and carefully filled his cup. "I know how you feel."