Part V
Dance On A Volcano
Alan Burnett walked out of the Assistant Chief's office and headed down the dingy hallway towards the Patrol Division briefing room. He stopped at the worn out old water fountain recessed in the hallway and pushed the little round button on top - it's chrome had worn away ages ago and was now just a shiny brass knob that seemed little more than an echo of another time - and as it had for almost fifteen years the old gray box rattled when he pushed the knob and sent an icy stream of water straight up his nose. Burnett cursed as he always did and stepped back, then slurped down the water before it turned warm. He stood and wiped the remains off his mouth with his hand and threw the errant drops to the floor with a careless flick of his wrist, then he looked around, took his bearings, and continued on his way to the briefing room - lost in a cascade of furious emotion and feeling more than a little disoriented.
An hour before shift change and already the room was filling with cops, mainly over-eager rookies wanting to impress their new shift sergeant, but on this, his 'Friday', Burnett could not have cared less. He didn't impress easily anymore these days, not even on a good day, though he could remember wanting to impress any and everyone when he had been a rookie. Those days were long gone; now, most days he felt like he'd seen it all, done it all, and these new kids looked nauseatingly naive to him, just as he must have looked those many years ago to the watch commander who sat at this very same desk.
And while the world had changed in the intervening years - changed in ways that it hurt to think about - the work hadn't. People still needed Cops as much as they hated them. Houses continued to be broken into, businesses robbed at gunpoint, women raped, kids beaten. Cars kept running red lights and killing people, speeders lost control of their cars and ran off the road and into a tree, kids in trucks tried to beat speeding trains, and occasionally airplanes fell from the sky. Burnett had seen all these things, and more. His soul was numb from all the hate and fear that filled this world, from all the suspicion that met his arrival at the latest outburst of man's inhumanity to man. And this was the world all these rookies wanted to change. They were all - to a person - dedicated to the proposition that they could and would make a difference.
All these rookies had just come from nine months of Academy, learning - hopefully - everything a kid might possibly need to learn in order to survive long enough on the streets to really begin understanding the real rules of the game. Most did. It was his job to spot the ones who couldn't - and get rid of them, fast. He looked out over the sea of expectant faces, at all the lonely idealism that hovered in the air, apparent to no one but himself and the memories that held him together on days like this . . . and he seemed to . . . drift away . . .
As he drifted in the tidal streams of memory, surrounded by the echoes of another life very much like his own, he suddenly thought of his father, and the incongruity of the thought jolted Burnett. As he sat looking at the sea of tables and chairs peppered with navy blue uniforms, out of the blue he could just make out his father's voice. All the dedicated young faces arrayed before him reminded him of something his father had once told him, and the need to hear his father's voice now startled him. He had forgotten something. Something vital. Something he had forgotten from time to time, only to have it drilled back into his head like a bullet. It was something his father had wanted him to remember, needed him to remember.
Burnett's old man had flown fighters for the Navy in the Second World War and had gone on to fly for American before a heart attack nailed him in his early fifties, and yet to his last day Burnett's father had lived and breathed flying. Flying not simply as a passion, not simply a metaphor, but rather - it had been a calling. He'd trained more than his fair share of pilots - mainly 'Jet-Jocks' transitioning from the military into the more sedate reality of hauling cattle from sea to shining sea - but even with these prima-donnas his father's one true maxim held. And even though Burnett's old man had been gone now for more than ten years, he could still hear that clear voice bouncing around in the shaded vaults of memory.
"Remember this, and remember it well, Alan. There is nothing as dangerous in this world as a pilot with two hundred hours of flight time."
It was a simple lesson, yet a hard one to grasp.
Their was, his father had told him, no one so dangerous as one just out of training, as one who thinks he or she knows everything. These miscreants get cocky, they get over confident, and they fuck up big-time when they do. They get hurt and occasionally they get killed, and sometimes - when they fly jets - they get a bunch of people killed. Burnett had watched rookies come and go long enough to understand that his father's maxim applied to just about any profession, but it applied to cops with a vengeance.
And, Burnett had found, it applied to marriages as well. Just when you thought you were comfortable in your marriage, just when you got to that place where everything felt good and right, you got cocky and fucked up. You said the wrong thing in a flurry of masculine insensitivity at just the wrong moment, you were slow to compliment when you failed to heed the breaking shoals of feminine insecurity, or you saw a pair of legs that drove you wild - and wouldn't you know it - they just were never your your wife's.
And wouldn't you know it? You chased them.
Again. Every time. You chased them like a dog chases it's tail.
Cops and pilots seemed to fall off their respective wagons with alarming frequency, too, and Burnett understood that simple fact of life now all too well. He was fast becoming a monument to infidelity in all its wayward guises, and he knew his foundation was crumbling, too. But don't all monuments fall in time?
Burnett had tried the marriage thing twice, he thought glumly as he looked out over the room that seemed to fill with old memories as each new face walked in. Three times really, if he counted those strange platinum-laced days with 'Diane'.
There was Debbie of those innocent days now long gone - days and nights filled with furtive kisses and truly awful sex, and then there had been Diane. Diane the dominatrix. Diane the victim, the death-stalked whore in search of redemption. Diane, the dark chalice of soul. Then- after Diane passed away - Jennifer of the short skirt and long legs, Jennifer the flight attendant, Jennifer the nymphomaniac. She'd been everything poor Debbie never could have been, and everything he'd wanted Diane to be, and just when things looked like they couldn't get any better, just when he'd found out she had a thing for girls and groups, he'd found out she was still sleeping around with just about everyone in Seattle. She had left him four weeks ago, and it wasn't too long before he'd heard she'd tested positive to just about every STD known to medicine, including the biggie. He'd sweat bullets until his results came back negative, then he'd drifted through the funk of just what that really meant until the divorce papers had flooded into his life last week on yet another errant tide.
So, once again he was moving from the comfortable and the familiar, once again he would be moving into the shadowlands of uncertainty and the endless parade of lonely nights filled with the novacaine of television, and time would resume its deathly march.
And then came the bombshell the Assistant Chief had just tossed into this well-lubed uncertainty. Life was just one fucked-up adventure after another, Burnett thought. Just one more divorce waiting to happen.
And now this. Spooks. Goddamned spooks. It looked like it was going to happen!
*****************************
He was carrying another box of books up the apartment building's rickety metal stairs when he saw the first one.
Burnett looked across the atrium through the wrought-iron balcony above and saw the pink halter-top and black leather shorts before he noticed anything else, but as he stepped out on the landing he took in the seven-inch spiked silver plastic platform sandals and the sucker in the mouth and he groaned inside. 'Oh crap, not a hooker...' he said under his breath as he smiled at the girl who stood looking at him with insouciant eyes. She was not ten feet away, yet Burnett felt almost repelled by the mere presence of the girl. Surely he couldn't catch anything from her from this distance!
"You the new guy in Two D?" she asked as she tongued her sucker suggestively.
