Special Operations (Badge of Honor 2)

“Yes, sir.”

“You, too, McFadden?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Okay, go look for him,” Wohl said.

“Yes, sir,” they said in unison, pleased.

“Sir, the best time to deal with people like that is at night, say from nine o’clock on, until the wee hours,” McFadden said.

“You’re talking about overtime?” Wohl asked, looking at Matt Payne as he spoke.

“Yes, sir,” McFadden said.

“Put in as much overtime as you think is necessary,” Wohl said. “I want you to take Officer Payne along with you, to give him a chance to see how you work.”

“Yes, sir,” McFadden said, immediately.

“Inspector, that might be a little awkward,” Martinez said.

“That wasn’t a suggestion,” Wohl said.

“Yes, sir,” Martinez said.

“Can we keep the car we’ve been driving, sir?” McFadden asked.

“If you mean, do you have to turn it in when you go off duty, the answer is no, not for the time being. I don’t care which one of you keeps it overnight, but I don’t want to hear that somebody stole the radios, or the tires, or ran a key down the side to show his affection for the police.”

“I’ll take good care of it, sir,” Martinez said.

“For right now, for the rest of the afternoon, I want you to keep drawing cars and taking them for radios and bringing them here. Take Payne with you. He’s doing an errand for me, and he’ll need a car to do it.”

“Yes, sir,” McFadden said.

“That’s all,” Wohl said. He looked at Payne. “Get that Xeroxed, and then come back here.”

“Yes, sir,” Payne said.

“I have every confidence that in the morning, Mr. Williams will be in the hands of the law, and that I can call the Commissioner and tell him that not only has justice been done, but that Miss Peebles is more than satisfied with her police support.”

Martinez and McFadden flashed smiles that were not entirely confident, and got up. As Payne started to follow them out of the office Wohl said, softly, “Keep your eyes open and your mouth shut tonight, Matt.”

THIRTEEN

Matt Payne turned off Seventh Street into the parking lot behind the Roundhouse at the wheel of an almost new Plymouth Fury. Forty-five minutes before, he had picked it up at the Radio garage, and it was equipped with the full complement of radios prescribed for Special Operations by Staff Inspector Peter Wohl.

He knew the radio worked, because he had tried it.

“W-William Two Oh Nine,” he had called on the Highway Band. “Out of service at Colosimo’s Gun Store in the nine-hundred block of Spring Garden.”

And Radio had called back, “W-William Two Oh Nine, is that the nine-hundred block on Spring Garden?”

The Radio Dispatcher was Mrs. Catherine Wosniski, a plump, gray-haired lady of sixty-two who had been, it was said, a dispatcher since Police Dispatch had been a couple of guys blowing whistles from atop City Hall, long before Marconi had even thought of radio.

Mrs. Wosniski had been around long enough to know, for example, that:

Special units—and Special Operations was certainly a Special Unit—did not have to report themselves out of service as did the RPCs in the Districts. The whole idea of reporting out of (or back in) service was to keep the dispatchers aware of what cars were or were not available to be sent somewhere by the dispatchers. Dispatchers did not dispatch special unit vehicles.