Special Operations (Badge of Honor 2)

“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 g

etting 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 philosophy vis-à-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 them would 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.