The Given Day by Dennis Lehane Read Free Book Online Page B

only one that matters."
    Police Commissioner Stephen O'Meara's bedrock belief was that a policeman's post was the highest of all civic posts and therefore demanded both the outward and inward reflection of honor. When he'd taken over the BPD, each precinct had been a fiefdom, the private reserve of whichever ward boss or city councilman got his snout into the trough faster and deeper than his competition. The men looked like shit, dressed like shit, and didn't give shit.
    O'Meara purged a lot of that. Not all of it, Lord knows, but he'd fired some deadwood and worked to indict the most egregious of the ward bosses and councilmen. He'd set the rotted system back on its heels and then pushed, in hopes it would fall over. Didn't happen, but it teetered on occasion. Enough so he could send a good number of the police back out into their communities to get to know the people they served. And that's what you did in O'Meara's BPD if you were a smart patrolman (with limited contacts)--you served the people. Not the ward bosses or the midget czars with the gold bars. You looked like a cop and you carried yourself like a cop and you stepped aside for no man and you never bent the basic principle: you were the law.
    But even O'Meara, apparently, couldn't bend City Hall to his will in the latest fight for a raise. They hadn't had one in six years, and that raise, pushed through by O'Meara himself, had come after eight years of stalemate. So Danny and all the other men on the force were paid the fair wage of 1905. And in his last meeting with the BSC, the mayor had said that was the best they could look forward to for a while.
    Twenty-nine cents an hour for a seventy-three-hour week. No overtime. And that was for day patrolmen like Danny and Steve Coyle, the plum assignment. The poor night guys were paid a flat two bits an hour and worked eighty-three hours a week. Danny would have thought it outrageous if it hadn't been steeped in a truth he'd accepted since he could first walk: the system fucked the workingman. The only realistic decision a man had to make was if he was going to buck the system and starve, or play it with so much pluck and guts that none of its inequities applied to him.
    "O'Meara," Steve said, "sure. I love the old man, too, I do. Love him, Dan. But he's not giving us what we were promised."
    Danny said, "Maybe they really don't have the money."
    "That's what they said last year. Said wait till the war's over and we'll reward your loyalty." Steve held his hands out. "I'm looking, and I don't see no reward."
    "The war isn't over."
    Steve Coyle made a face. "For all intents and purposes."
    "So, fine, reopen negotiations."
    "We did. And they turned us down again last week. And cost of living has been climbing since June. We're fucking starving, Dan. You'd know it if you had kids."
    "You don't have kids."
    "My brother's widow, God rest him, she's got two. I might as well be married. Wench thinks I'm Gilchrist's on store- credit day."
    Danny knew Steve had been putting it to the Widow Coyle since a month or two after his brother's body had entered the grave. Rory Coyle's femoral artery had been sliced by a cattle shear at the Brighton stockyards, and he'd bled out on the floor amid some stunned workers and oblivious cows. When the stockyard refused to pay even a minimal death benefit to his family, the workers had used Rory Coyle's death as a rallying cry to unionize, but their strike had only lasted three days before the Brighton PD, the Pinkertons, and some out-of-town bat swingers had pushed back and turned Rory Joseph Coyle right quick into Rory Fucking Who.
    Across the street, a man with an anarchist's requisite watch cap and handlebar mustache set up his wood crate under a street pole and consulted the notebook under his arm. He climbed up on the crate. For a moment Danny felt an odd sympathy for the man. He wondered if he had children, a wife.
    "The AF of L is national," he said again. "The department will