First Avenue by Lowen Clausen Read Free Book Online

arresting officer with a hand that moved slowly as though it had been lifting a heavy weight and could not adjust to minute requirements.
    Back on the third floor she washed her hands in the women’s room before touching her clothes. Then she took off her gun belt and pushed her shirt neatly back into her pants. She washed her face, blew her nose, and washed her hands again. Her right breast hurt where she had been kicked, but she wouldn’t mention that in the report. Nor would she mention the one threat that seemed to bring temporary lucidity to that crazy man.
    Before this job she had never hit anyone except her sister. Now she had hit with her fists, which had little authority, and with her flashlight and nightstick, which had more. She had hit and been hit and could not scream—although she wanted to scream at the insanity of it all.
    What if he had snapped when she held the gun on him? She stood for a moment before the mirror, pondering that question and looking to herself for the answer. She remembered how she felt as she had told him to drop the knife. Hate. Was it really hate? She remembered the look on his face, the sound of the knife as it hit the floor, her lack of relief that he had complied, her indifference almost to his compliance. For the first time that night, that day, she smiled. It was a quick, odd, insufficient smile, but a smile nonetheless.
    Mike was strangely quiet the rest of the night as they went about their work.
Katherine
expected him to make some joke about what she had said. If the bartender had heard her, he would have heard, too. He said nothing, and when it was time to eat, he asked her if she was ready. For the first time she understood that he would wait if she was not. His testicles had not been threatened, but he almost acted as if they had.
    At the end of her shift her six days were over. And on the seventh day she would rest, although she had made nothing better and doubted that she left anything better than it had been before.

Chapter 3
     
    J esus Christ Made Seattle Under Protest was the irreverent method all cops in the academy used to learn the downtown streets north of Yesler—Jefferson and James, Cherry and Columbia, Marion and Madison, Spring and Seneca, University and Union, Pike and Pine.
Sam
’s district began at University Street , although he considered all of First Avenue from Yesler north to Denny his territory.
    Beneath the pergola in a small triangle park at First Avenue and Yesler Street , a man lay stretched out on a bench with his feet sticking through the open end of the steel armrest. He was either asleep or dead. Asleep, most likely. At Madison Street , a drunken man struggled out the door of Pennyland and waved with a ridiculously proper movement at the policeman who passed slowly up the street in the blue car.
Sam
returned the proper wave. A young man with dyed blond hair, black pants, and blank hopeless eyes stood at the door of a porno shop between Union and Pike on the east side of First Avenue and watched him pass.
Sam
watched him, too. The Donut Shop at the corner of Pike was dark, and the parking lot behind it was empty.
Sam
glanced to the west where Pike Street became cobblestones and ran into the Pike Place Market, or simply the Market as everyone on the street called it. Two blocks more and he passed Stewart Street , the northern border of his district, the smallest patrol district in the city. Two blocks beyond
Stewart
was the Donald Hotel .
    He pulled over to the curb and braked. A light shone in the hotel stairway. He picked out Alberta ’s room on the fourth floor, the top floor, three windows from the end. The windows were still open.
    He removed his foot from the brake pedal and idled back into the street. He continued his slow journey north. A block from Denny Way , he made a U-turn and retraced his path south on First Avenue . The man with yellow hair was gone, but there would soon be another to replace him. There was always another. The