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Officer Poux watched him go, then turned back to me and just stared. She didn’t seem to blink, and she looked like she could wait as long as she had to. That turned out to be not very long, since I was already winding down. After only a few more seconds, I managed to grab the reins away from whatever strange spirit had driven me into paroxysms of cackling glee. I took a deep breath, smiled reassuringly at Officer Poux, and said, “I’m sorry. It’s just…It’s a little hard to explain.”
She kept staring for a few more seconds, and then said, like nothing at all had happened, “Can you think of anyone that, in your opinion, might want to kill you?”
“Yes, I can,” I said, fighting back a tiny tickle of resurgent hilarity. “In fact, it’s a very long list.”
“Can you give me a couple of names, sir?”
“Well, well, well” came a voice from behind me. It was unfortunately a very familiar voice, with a tone that held a perpetual sneer and quite clearly said brainless bully to those who know about such things, and it was a voice that I really did not want to hear behind me under any circumstance, much less when my car had just blown up.
“Actually,” I told her, “here comes one of them now.”
Officer Poux glanced over my shoulder and came to a sort of stiff, half-at-attention pose, and the owner of the aforementioned voice stepped into view.
“Detective Anderson,” I said. “Wonderful to see you again. But isn’t it past your bedtime?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t miss this for anything,” he said. He looked at me with an expression that can only be described as a gloating glare, and without taking his eyes off mine, he said to Poux, “Cuff him. And it doesn’t have to be gentle.”
“On what charge, sir?” Officer Poux said.
Anderson spun on her. “On a charge of Because I Say So,” he sneered at her. “Do it.”
Poux stood motionless for just a moment longer, and it may be that she would have done what Anderson said eventually, but he didn’t give her the chance. “Fuck it,” he snarled. He leaned over and grabbed her handcuffs. “This goes in my report,” he told her, already turning on me.
“Yes, sir,” she said. “Mine too.”
He didn’t hesitate for a second. He just grabbed me by the shoulders, spun me around, and yanked my hands halfway up my back. “I knew you’d pull something,” he growled as he put the cuffs on me, much too tight. “Never should’ve let you back on the street.” He gave a final, brutal tug, and then stepped back to sneer at me where I could see it. “You just can’t keep away from trouble, can you, asshole?”
“Why bother?” I said. “You’d just make something up and tag me with it anyway.” I smiled. “Like now. How many reports will you have to forge to make this stick, Detective? And when are you going to learn to disguise your handwriting?”
He just glared at me for a moment. And then he stepped forward and gave me an openhanded slap to the face, hard. It hurt. It was hard enough to turn the world dim and make me stagger back a step, and I’m pretty sure it loosened a molar, too. But I just straightened up, smiled again, and said, “I notice you didn’t hit me until after the cuffs were on.”
His face turned darker and he clenched his fists and his teeth and I thought I might have gone too far. But before he could do anything more Officer Poux stepped between us. “Sir! That’s enough!” she said.
“It’s not half enough,” Anderson said. “Get outa my way.”
“No, sir,” she said. And then she turned to face him. “And this goes in my report, too.” She glared at him for several seconds and then added, “Sir.” It didn’t sound respectful in the least.
“You put this in your report,” Anderson said through clenched teeth, “and you’ll be a meter maid by morning.”
“Better than this,” she said. “Meter maids got too much balls to whup on a man in cuffs.”
They stood toe-to-toe and glared for a moment, and then, just as Anderson opened his mouth—probably to threaten her some more—one of the other uniforms called out, “Hey, Detective? Bomb guys are here.” Anderson twitched a couple of times, as if he was being tugged in two directions by two equally rotten impulses. But he just told Poux, “Put him in my car,” spun around, and walked off to talk to the bomb guys.
Officer Poux watched him go, and when he was at a safe distance, with his back turned to us, she unlocked the cuffs, took them off my wrists, and said, “Your hands are blue. Shake ’em around; get the circulation going.”
The hands in question were kind of blue, which was no surprise, since they’d already gone numb. I shook them, flexed them, and then raised an eyebrow at Officer Poux.
She shook her head. “Hold ’em out,” she said. I did, and she snapped the cuffs back on again—but in front of me this time, and a great deal looser.
“Thank you,” I said politely.
“Just doing my job,” she said, and since that was quite true I said no more. But just before she put me carefully into the backseat of Anderson’s motor-pool car, she leaned close to my ear. “When it’s a bomb, like this?” she said softly, “it’s also my job to call the feds.”
I looked at her with some surprise. “Did you?” I asked.
She gave me a very brief, nearly invisible smile. “I did,” she whispered. And then resuming her role as a tough-as-nails, hypereffective cop, she returned to her normal voice and said, “Duck your head, sir,” and she pushed me into the car and shut the door.
I watched her go with a certain amount of admiration. In today’s paranoid post-9/11 world, it was indeed part of the job to alert as many federal authorities as possible when something happened that had even the faintest whiff of terrorism—and of course, a bomb always qualifies. But I had seen cases where Homeland Security, the FBI, and ATF were all fighting for jurisdiction with Miami-Dade, FDLE, and representatives of other government
