"I appreciate you meeting me like this, Inspector," Sabara said.
"I know why you're calling me 'Inspector,' Mike," Wohl said, smiling, "so I'll have to reply, 'My pleasure,Captain Sabara.' Congratulations, Mike, it's well deserved, and how come I wasn't invited to your promotion party?"
Wohl immediately sensed that what he had intended as humor had fallen flat. Sabara gave him a confused, even wary, look.
"The Commissioner called me at home last night," Sabara said. "He said to come to work today wearing captain's bars."
Which you just happened to have lying around,Wohl thought, and was immediately ashamed of the unkind thought. He himself had bought a set of lieutenant's bars the day the examination scores had come out, even though he had known it would be long months before the promotion actually came through.
"So it's official then?" Wohl said. "Well, congratulations. I can't think of anybody better qualified."
Wohl saw that, too, produced a reaction in Sabara different from what he expected. More confusion, more wariness.
The waitress reappeared.
"Get you something?"
"Iced tea, please," Captain Sabara said. The waitress looked at him strangely. Sabara, Wohl thought, was not the iced tea type.
"Can I get right to it, Inspector?" Sabara asked, when the waitress had left.
"Sure."
"If it's at all possible," Sabara said, "I'd like Highway Patrol."
Sabara had, Wohl sensed, rehearsed that simple statement.
"I'm not sure what you mean, Mike."
"I mean, I'd really like to take over Highway," Sabara said, and there was more uncertainty in his eyes. "I mean, Christ, no one knows it better than I do. And I know I could do a good job."
What the hell is he driving at?
"You want me to put in a good word for you? Is that it, Mike? Sure. You tell me to who, and I'll do it."
There was a pause before Sabara replied. "You don't know, do you?" he said, finally.
"Know what?"
"About Highway and Special Operations."
"No," Wohl said, and searched his memory. "The last I heard about Special Operations was that it was an idea whose time had not yet come."
"It's time has come," Sabara said, "and Highway's going under it."
"And who's getting Special Operations?"
"You are," Sabara said.
Jesus H. Christ!
"Where did you get that?" Wohl asked.
Sabara looked uncomfortable.
"I heard," he said.
"I'd check out that source pretty carefully, Mike," Wohl said. "This is the first I've heard anything like that."
"You're getting Special Operations and David Pekach is getting Highway," Sabara said. "I thought Pekach was your idea, and maybe I could talk you out of it."
"Did your source say what's in mind for you?" Wohl asked.
"Your deputy."
"Where the hell did you get this?"
"I can't tell you," Sabara said. "But I believe it."
And now I'm beginning to. Sabara has heard something he believes. Jesus, is this why Chief Coughlin sent for me?
Why me?
"I'm beginning to," Wohl said. "Chief Coughlin wants to see me at half-past three. Maybe this is why."
"Now I'm on the spot," Sabara said. "I'd appreciate it if you didn' t-"
"Tell him we talked? No, of course not, Mike. And I really hope you' re wrong."
From the look in Sabara's eyes, Wohl could tell he didn't think there was much chance he was wrong. That meant his source was as good as he said it was. And that meant it had come from way up high in the police department hierarchy, a Chief Inspector, or more likely one of the Deputy Commissioners.
Someone important, who didn't like the idea of Special Operations, of Peter Wohl being given command of Special Operations, of David Pekach being given command of Highway over Mike Sabara. Or all of the above.
"Peter," Mike Sabara said. It was the first time he had used Wohl's Christian name. "You understand… there's nothing personal in this? You're a hell of a good cop. I'd be happy to work for you anywhere. But-"
"You think you're the man to run Highway?" Wohl interrupted him. " Hell, Mike, so do I. And I don't think I'm the man to run Special Operations. I don't even know what the hell it's supposed to do."
There was something about Police Recruit Matthew M. Payne that Sergeant Richard B. Stennis, Firearms Instructor and Assistant Range Officer of the Police Academy of the City of Philadelphia, did not like, although he could not precisely pin it down.
He knew when it had begun, virtually the first time he had ever laid eyes on Payne. Dick Stennis, whose philosophyvis-a-vis firearms, police or anyone else's, was"You never need a gun until you need one badly," took his responsibility to teach rookies about firearms very seriously.
Sergeant Stennis-a stocky, but not fat, balding man of forty-was aware that statistically the odds were about twenty to one that his current class of rookies would go through their entire careers without once having drawn and fired their service weapon in the line of duty. He suspected that, the way things were going, the odds might change a little, maybe down to ten to one that these kids would never have to use their service revolvers; but the flip side of even those percentages was that one in ten of themwould have to use a gun in a situation where his life, or the life of another police officer, or a civilian, would depend on how well he could use it.
Some of Dick Stennis's attitude toward firearms came, and he was aware of this, from the United States Marine Corps. Like many police officers, Stennis had come to the department after a tour in the military. He had enlisted in the Corps at eighteen, a week after graduating from Frankford High School in June of 1950. He had arrived in Korea just in time to miss the Inchon Invasion, but in plenty of time to make the Bug Out from the Yalu and the withdrawal from Hamhung on Christmas Eve of the same year.
He was back from Korea in less than a year, wearing corporal's chevrons and a Silver Star and two Purple Hearts, the reason for the second of which had kept him in the Philadelphia Navy Hospital for four months. When he was restored to duty, the Corps sent him back to Parris Island, and made him a firearms instructor, which was something, but not entirely, like being a drill instructor.
When his three-year enlistment was over and he went back to Philadelphia, he joined the Police Department. Two years after that, about the time he was assigned to the Police Academy, he had gotten married and joined the Marine Corps Reserve because he needed the money.
One weekend a month and two weeks each summer Sergeant Stennis of the Police Department became Master Gunnery Sergeant Stennis of the United States Marine Corps Reserve. He had been called up for the Vietnam War, fully expecting to be sent to Southeast Asia, but the Corps, reasoning that a Philadelphia cop called up from the Reserve was just the guy to fill the billet of Noncommissioned Officer in Charge of the Armed Forces Military Police Detachment in Philadelphia, had sent him back to Philly two weeks after he reported in at Camp LeJeune.
Practically, it had been a good deal. He had done his two years of active duty living at home. The Marine Corps had paid him an allowance in lieu of rations, and an allowance, in lieu of housing, that was greater than the mortgage payment on his house on Leonard Street in Mayfair. And he had been building double-time. His seniority with the Police Department had continued to build while he was "off" in the Corps, and he had added two years of active duty time to his Marine Corps longevity. When he turned sixty, there would be a pension check from the Corps to go with his police pension and, when he turned sixty-five, his Social Security.
When he went on inactive duty again, the Corps gave him a Reserve billet with the Navy Yard, as an investigator on the staff of the Provost Marshal. He generally managed to pick up two or three days of "active duty" a month, sometimes more, in addition to the one weekend, which meant that much more in his Reserve paycheck every three months. It also meant that his Corps pension, when he got to it, would be that much larger.