Sensei by John Donohue Read Free Book Online

rhetorical question: they weren't nosing pedestrians to either side of the path just for fun. They were looking for someone in particular. I nodded.
    "We're looking for some information. Could you come with us, please?"
    I knew I hadn't done anything. But there's something about the Law. I got that feeling in my stomach. Like I had just gotten on an elevator that suddenly lurched down.
    A black guy shot by on some in-line skates. "Hey man," he called, "don't let them roust you without ID. Could be anyone down here, know what I'm saying?" He had turned around to deliver this advice, skating backward. A few bicyclists swerved madly out of his way, and he spun forward and rolled on without giving us another look.
    "I suppose I should ask for some ID." I'm not proud about some things: I took the skater's advice.
    The driver made a show of patting himself absently and muttered, "Hmmm ... badges ... badges."
    His partner chimed in with a really bad Mexican accent. "Badges? Badges? We don't need no stinking badges." I tried to place it. Treasure of the Sierra Madrel I always get those bandits mixed up with the ones from The Magnificent Seven.
    They both chortled. Cop humor. The driver with the mustache flashed a detective's shield.
    '"You want me up front or in the back?" I asked. The sweat was beginning to pop out now that I had stopped running. I was hoping all the crud in the back of the car wouldn't stick to me.
    "You sit next to me, Bruce Lee," the driver said.
    His partner got out, eased the jackets over and settled into the backseat. It was an oddly fastidious motion. The jackets looked clean and pressed. They were the only tidy thing in the vehicle. I got in, bumping my knee on the radio console mounted on the dash, and we rolled slowly down the path until they could exit and we headed back onto the streets. No one said anything. The radio made soft gobbling noises. I asked if I could roll down my window. The driver eyed me and, deciding I wasn't about to make a break for it, rolled it down with the power console on his left. I turned to look over my shoulder at the cop with the white streak.
    "So Mick," I asked, "how's Mom?"
    My brother, with the inevitability of salmon spawning and other inherited urges, was the latest product of the Brooklyn Irish diaspora who had flowed in childhood to Long Island and ebbed back home to the NYPD. He had been a rambunctious kid. He grew into a quiet adult who seemed to smother some deep, unanswerable anger and keep it under control only with a minute by minute exertion of willpower. He's like a lot of cops I know: a basically good guy who has seen too many bad things and is baffled, frustrated, and personally affronted by them and who, at a moment's notice, could go off like a rocket.
    The family is mostly relieved he has found a constructive outlet for his energies. Micky is generous to his friends, an accomplished carpenter in his spare time, and a good husband and father. He also tends to wander off at family parties and stare vacantly into the distance while sucking on a Marlboro, seeing things the rest of us don't. Or don't want to.
    It's a measure of his self-control that he's made detective. Since he essentially gets to wander the city with his partner, Art, tracking down criminals from the mobile trash bin they call a car, and doing it relatively free of supervision, Micky likes his job and is good at it.
    Art Pedersen is a stockier version of Micky. He's also a little less gloomy. Art gets to play Good Cop most of the time, although I imagine that when the two of them begin to really work on an interrogation, it's probably hard for the perp to tell the difference between the Good Cop and the Bad Cop. Art is a movie buff, and after years of traveling together, the two of them have developed this annoying habit of recycling old lines of film dialogue into their conversation. They find it tremendously amusing. Many criminals, not as steeped in cinema, find it totally baffling.
    Now I