"Jack L Chalker - - G.o.d. Inc 1 - Labyrinth Of Dreams" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)

so as soon as I graduated I joined the Air Force.
Now, that's not all that dumb. You actually have to volunteer for flying duty,
and I never much liked airplanes, so if you check "nonflying status" you get an
office job or a mechanic's job and you go home at night. In fact, the only
potentially dangerous nonflying job the Air Force has is Security Police, its
own cops. So, naturally, they made me a cop.
I had thought about letting the Air Force send me to college, but when I found
out how much time you owed them for it, I kept putting it off; so I didn't go.
Traffic detail at Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod wasn't exactly bad duty, and
neither was security patrolling at Homestead just south of Miami, but trying to
keep a bunch of crazy anti-American protesters out of Clark in the Philippines
when you're ordered not to use a weapon is something else. After I got out of
the hospital, I started looking somewhere else for a career.
Now, there is a sort of old-boy network among service cops, and I found a job as
a patrolman up in Bristol, New Jersey, that was close enough to home and quiet
enough generally to be comfortable, although they didn't pay beans. They did,
however, underwrite getting a degree, along with my service benefits, but the
degree they wanted was in either criminology or police scienceЧthe liberal arts
of the crime-busting world. That got me bumped up to detective and almost
sixteen grand a year. It might not sound like a great salary now, but it was a
lousy salary then. How I'd settle for it now, though. ...
Anyway, junior detectives always get stuck on Vice, which even in the best of
towns is like working in a human sewer half the day and doing paperwork the
other half. Almost all the officers were on somebody's pad, which is how they
made out on that salary, but the first time you bust a thirteen-year-old hooker,
or try and find the source of a fifteen-year-old with more needle marks in him
than a pincushion, you find it hard to protect the scum behind them. You know,
the guys with the big houses and the twin BMWs. . . .
Not that I'm so morally against corruption that I would never take anything
under the table. I just couldn't bring myself to do it in that world, even
though I knew that world would grow and thrive with or without me. The big
trouble was that if you weren't on the take, your fellow officers couldn't trust
you. I drew the out-of-town leads, the dead-end stakeouts, and the cases
involving competitors to the entrepreneurs who supplied central Jersey who they
wouldn't mind getting taken down a peg or two. I admit I wasn't very diligent at
it; they also would hand you the kind of stuff that could get you killed real
quick. It wasn't real comfortable, but it was more of an education than Temple
ever gave me.
So there I was, as usual, the outsider, the loner, the misfit. I guess I should
have taken up religion again or something, but while I'm proud of my heritage I
just couldn't take all the social stuff, the insularity, the class divisions,
that came along with it. Besides, I always had to work weekends. I'm no beauty
and I never went in much for the social graces; and the Levittown princesses
didn't want a cop, they wanted a doctor at least. I'm moon-faced, hawk-nosed,
with a potbelly, and I started balding at twenty-five (Thanks, Dad). So long as
I stayed in Bristol I was stuck anyway, and the trouble was, I just had no place
to go. Uncle Max offered me a job selling cars in Harrisburg, but if I wanted to
do that kind of work, it was easierЧand paid betterЧto just go on the pad.
So, anyway, they stuck me on this kiddie-porn case that involved liaison with
the Camden police, a bunch of guys with bigger payoffs and an even more jaded