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“I’m working,” Tiny said, and gestured toward the car parked in the drive.
“How can you be working and here?”
“My orders, Lieutenant, sir, are to stay close to the radio, in case I’m needed.”
“You needn’t be sarcastic, Foster, it was a reasonable question.”
“Inspector Wohl told me to give Matt Payne some company,” Tiny said. “I wasn’t needed.”
“What a tragedy!” Lieutenant Lewis said.
“I thought I’d come see Mom,” Tiny said.
“Since I would not be here, you mean?”
“Pop, every time I see you, you jump all over me.”
“I wasn’t aware of that.”
“Just now,” Tiny said. “The implication that I’m screwing off being here.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“That’s what you meant.”
“You are driving a departmental vehicle, presumably on duty, visiting your family.”
“I’m doing what I’m ordered to do. Pop, I’m a pretty good cop! Inspector Wohl expects me to be available if he needs me. I don’t think he expected me to just sit in the car and wait for the radio to go off.”
“You believe that, don’t you?”
“Believe what?”
“That you’re a pretty good cop.”
“I’m not as good a cop as you are, but yeah, I’m a pretty good cop.”
“I’m sure you will take offense when I say this, but you don’t know what being a police officer really means.”
“You mean, I never worked in a district?”
“Exactly.”
“Come on, Pop. If Inspector Wohl thought I would learn anything riding around in a car, walking a beat, that’s what he’d have me doing.”
“That sort of thing is beneath you, right?”
“I think we better stop this before either one of us says something we’ll be sorry for,” Tiny said.
Lieutenant Lewis looked at his son for a moment before replying.
“I’m not saying that what you’re doing is not important, or that you don’t do it well.”
“It is important—we’re going to put a dirty captain and a dirty lieutenant away—and I helped. Wohl and Washington wouldn’t have let me get close to that job if they didn’t think I could handle it.”
“All I’m saying, Foster,” Lieutenant Lewis said, “is that I am concerned that you have no experience as a police officer on the street. You don’t even have any friends who are common, ordinary policemen, do you?”
“I guess not,” Tiny said.
