Special Operations (Badge of Honor 2)

The prisoner was on his feet, his hands cuffed behi

nd him, leaning on the victim’s car and apparently resigned to his fate. Even, to judge by the look on his face, a little smug about it.

The victim, having been informed that her two packages had become evidence, and could not be returned to her until released by proper authority, was engaged in a heated conversation with Officer McFadden, telling him that she had to have the shopping bags, at least the one from John Wanamaker & Sons which contained a formal dress shirt for her husband, a shirt he absolutely had to have for a dinner party that night.

“Ma’am, if you’ll just go the West Detectives, at Fifty-fifth and Pine, and sign the Property Receipt, they’ll give you your stuff right back.”

“What I don’t understand is why I can’t sign whatever it is I have to sign right here,” she said.

“I don’t have the form, lady; you have to do it at West Detectives,” Charley McFadden said. “That’s the rules.”

That was not the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. But it had been Officer McFadden’s experience that if he gave the victim back her property here and now, that would be the last he, or more importantly, the criminal justice system, would ever see of her. It had been his experience that the ordinary citizen’s interest in law enforcement ended when they had to make their own contribution, like showing up in court and swearing under oath that the stuff the critter had stolen belonged to her.

The chances of her showing up in court, and thus perhaps aiding in sending Mr. Sims off to jail, would be aided if she got the idea, by signing a Property Receipt, that she was already involved and had to show up in court.

“And what if I refuse to press charges?” the victim said, finally, in desperate exasperation.

“Lady, I’m pressing charges,” Charley McFadden said, equally exasperated. “Or Hay-zus is. The city is. We caught him stealing that stuff from your car.”

“Well, we’ll see about that, young man,” the victim said. “We’ll just see about that. My brother-in-law just happens to be a very prominent attorney.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Charley McFadden said. He turned to the two wagon cops. “You can take him,” he said.

“And I’m going to get on the telephone right now and tell him about this,” the victim said. “This is simply outrageous.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Charley McFadden said.

Clarence Sims was led to the wagon, helped inside, and driven to the West Detectives District at Fifty-fifth and Pine Streets, where his glowing ember of hope that he was going to walk was extinguished by a detective who began their discussion by explaining his rights under Miranda.

Lieutenant Ed Michleson, the Day Watch commander at the Twelfth District, was not at all surprised to get the telephone call from Sergeant Willoughby of Chief Inspector Coughlin’s office informing him that he was about to lose the services of Officers Jesus Martinez and Charles McFadden.

When they had been assigned to the Twelfth District, it had been with the understanding that it was only temporary, that they would be reassigned. The District Commander had told him that he had gotten it from Chief Coughlin himself that their assignment was only until he could find a good job for them.

They had been previously working plainclothes in Narcotics, a good, but not unusual assignment for young cops who showed promise and whose faces were not yet known on the street, and who, if they let their hair grow and dressed like bums could sort of melt into the drug culture.

When their faces became known, which was inevitable, the next step was usually back into uniform. But McFadden and Martinez had, on their own, staked out the Bridge & Pratt Street terminal of the subway, and there found the junkie who had shot Captain Dutch Moffitt, of Highway Patrol, to death. McFadden had chased Gerald Vincent Gallagher down the tracks where Gallagher had fallen against the third rail and then gotten himself run over by a subway train.

In the movies, or in a cop-and-robbers program on TV, with the mayor and assorted big shots beaming in the background, the Commissioner would have handed them detectives’ badges, and congratulations for a job well done. But this was real life, and promotions to detective in the Philadelphia Police Department came only after you had taken, and passed, the civil service examination. Martinez had taken the exam and flunked it, and McFadden hadn’t been a cop long enough to be eligible to even take it.

But it was good police work, and Chief Inspector Coughlin, who was a good guy, didn’t want to put them back into uniform—which young cops working plainclothes considered a demotion—even though with their pictures on the front page of every newspaper in Philadelphia, and on TV, their effectiveness as undercover Narcs was destroyed.

So he’d loaned them to Twelfth District, which was understrength, and had a problem with thieves working shopping mall parking lots, until he could find someplace to assign them permanently. And now he had.

Lieutenant Michleson got up and walked into the Operations Room and asked the corporal where Mutt and Jeff were. They looked like Mutt and Jeff. McFadden was a great big kid, large boned, tall and heavy. Martinez was a little Latin type, wiry and just over Department minimums for height and weight.

“They’re on their way in,” the corporal said. “They just arrested a guy robbing a car in the parking lot at Penrose Plaza. That makes five they caught since they been here.”

“When they finish up the paperwork, send them in to me,” Michleson said. “We’re going to lose them.”

“Where they going?”

“Highway.”

“Highway?” the corporal replied, surprised, then laughed. “Those two?”

“That’s not kind, Charley,” Michleson said, smiling at the mental image of Mutt and Jeff all decked out in Highway Patrol regalia.

“I don’t think Hay-zus is big enough to straddle a Harley,” the corporal said.