"Molly Brown - Community Service" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brown Molly)

He rolled his eyes. "What did you and that guy find to talk about? Was it
love at first sight?"
I shrugged. "What's it matter to you?"
"Oh please don't be like that, baby." He gave me one of his little boy
lost looks. "You know how I feel about you, so how come you always wanna
fight about everything, huh?"
I could never resist him when he looked at me like that. "Let's get outta
here," I said.
Next morning at work, all anyone could talk about was the news that a cop
bar in Northeast had been bombed the previous night. The local branch of
the Spiders had claimed responsibility, saying it was in retaliation for a
police raid in South Central, which they referred to as "an unjustified
massacre of the poor and homeless". The death toll so far was in the
thirties, but expected to rise to at least fifty, which would bring the
number of police killed so far that year to nearly four hundred.
There was a jam building up in my sector. I started to divert a couple of
trucks, and then I stood up.
"Something the matter, babe?" Jimmy asked me.
There was something the matter, all right. My father and my brother had
both been killed by the terror gangs, and this latest atrocity by the
Spiders had brought it all back. I hadn't become a cop so I could sit in a
basement monitoring traffic while terrorist scum were getting away with
murder. "Cover for me, will you?"
I went upstairs to the personnel office and demanded a transfer to patrol.
"I don't belong behind a desk," I told them. "I should be out there on the
streets, where I'm needed."
"Sit down, Officer Kelly," the woman behind the desk said, "and let's have
a little talk."

- II -
I was ordered to report to a room at East Central Headquarters, where a
woman in a Captain's uniform asked a couple of routine questions before
telling me that I was being assigned to Armoured Vehicle Patrol in the
seventeenth sector.
Vehicle patrol! I couldn't wait to tell Jimmy.
The captain pressed a button on her desk. "Send Kopalski in."
There was a knock at the door, then a tall man entered, wearing the blue
and white torso armour of a vehicle cop, his helmet tucked beneath one
arm. He was in his late twenties or early thirties, with pale blonde hair,
cut very short. His face was round and boyish, and his eyes were the
brightest shade of blue I'd ever seen.
"Officer Kopalski," the Captain said, "this is Officer Kelly. I'm
assigning her to be your partner."
Kopalski grabbed hold of my hand and shook it up and down. "Nice to meet
you, partner."
"Officer Kopalski," I said, wincing. The guy had quite a grip. I pulled my
hand away and turned to face the Captain. "When do I start?"
"Tonight. Report to sub-station four at twenty-one hundred hours."
"But I left all my stuff -"
"That's all been taken care of," the Captain interrupted. "Your