Special Operations (Badge of Honor 2)

“If you think you have to.”

“You’re a scamp,” she said. “Okay. I won’t tell him. How’s the apartment?”

“I can’t get used to the quiet,” he said.

He had, two weeks before, moved into an attic apartment in a refurbished pre-Civil War building on Rittenhouse Square. His previous legal residence had been a fraternity house on Walnut Street near the University of Pennsylvania campus. Irene Craig knew that he knew his father had “found” the apartment for him, in a building owned by Rittenhouse Properties, Inc., the lower three floors of which were on long-term lease to the Delaware Valley Cancer Society. She wondered if he knew that eighty percent of the stock of Rittenhouse Properties, Inc., was owned by Brewster Cortland Payne II. Now that she thought of it, she decided he didn’t.

“Maybe what you need is the patter of little feet to break the quiet,” Irene Craig said.

“Don’t even think things like that!” Matt protested.

When the Xerox machine finally finished, Irene Craig gave him thick rubber bands to bind the four copies together, and then, impulsively, kissed him on the cheek.

“Take care of yourself, sport,” she said.

When Matt returned to the Highway Patrol building at Bustleton and Bowler, he stopped first at his car, double-parking the Fury to do so, and put his service revolver and shoulder holster under the driver’s seat of his Porsche. Then he drove the Fury into the parking lot.

He gave

the keys to Sergeant Frizell, who apparently had had a word with Inspector Wohl about Officer Payne’s place in the pecking order of Special Operations.

Frizell handed him a cardboard box full of multipart forms.

“The Inspector said do as many of these as you can today,” Frizell sad. “There’s a typewriter on a desk in there.”

“What are they?” Matt asked.

“The requisition and transfer forms for the cars, and for the extra radios,” Frizell explained. “On top is one already filled out; just fill out the others the same way.”

They were, Matt soon saw, the “paperwork” without which Good Old Ernie in the radio garage had been, at first, unwilling to do any work. Plus the paperwork for the cars themselves, the ones they had already taken from the motor pool, and blank forms, with the specific data for the particular car to be later filled in, for cars yet to be drawn, as they were actually taken from the motor pool.

The only word to describe the typewriter was “wretched.” It was an ancient Underwood. The keys stuck. The platen was so worn that the keys made deep indentations in, or actually punched through, the upper layers of paper and carbon, and whatever the mechanism that controlled the paper feeding was called, that was so worn that Matt had to manually align each line as he typed.

He completed two forms and decided the situation was absurd. He looked at his watch. It was quarter to five.

He went into the other room.

“Sergeant,” he said. “I think I know where I can get a better typewriter. Would it be all right if I left now and did these forms there?”

“You mean, at home?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I don’t give a damn where you type them, Payne, just that they get typed.”

“Good night, then.”

“Yeah.”

Matt took the carton of blank forms and carried it to the Porsche. At this time of day, he decided, he would do better going over to I-95 and taking that downtown, rather than going down Roosevelt Boulevard to North Broad Street. He could, he decided, make better time on I-95. There was not much fun driving a car capable of speeds well over one hundred if you couldn’t go any faster than thirty-five.

Two miles down I-95, he glanced in the mirror to see if it was clear to pass a U-Haul van, towing a trailer. It was not. There was a car in the lane beside him. It was painted blue-and-white, and there was a chrome-plated device on its roof containing flashing lights. They were flashing.

He dropped his eyes to the speedometer and saw that he was exceeding the speed limit by fifteen miles per hour. The police car, a Highway Patrol car, he realized with horror, pulled abreast of him, and the Highway Patrolman in the passenger seat gestured with his finger for Matt to pull to the side of the superhighway.

“Oh, Jesus!” Matt muttered, as he looked in the mirror and turned on his signal.

He had a flash of insight, of wisdom.