Mitchell Smith Read Online Free

entrance to a burning building, cheek blackly bruised, blond hair (smoke smudged) floating loose about her shoulders, and bleeding hands clutching to her blue-flowered breast (where her bright badge hung) a weeping little child.
    And so appeared on the front page of the Daily News, the third page of The New York Times, and, very briefly, in newspapers and on television across the country.
    “An absolute godsend, sugar,” as Lieutenant Eastmangay as a jay, but tolerated for his quick wit as assistant to the assistant head of Departmental Public Affairs represented it to his chief, a civilian, a lady, and an ex-reporter. She agreed.
    Ellie-made Queen of Metropolitan Hospital-was visited there, briefly, by both the Mayor and Commissioner, on separate visits. People took her picture with each man, Ellie being something of a picture herself, thanks to Lieutenant Eastman-her swollen cheek carefully powdered, her pate eyes lined and shadowed by the Lieutenant himself, her pretty hair down and fanned white-gold against the pillow. And a patrolman’s cap hung artfully off a chair-back beside her bed.
    So, she tasted the odd wine of celebrity, a very small glass and quickly swallowed, but vintage nonetheless.
    The attention, noise, and visitors-the hope, a humiliation still, that Nate Klein would at last be sorry, and might possibly come to the hospital one night, get some way past the nurses to lay his sleek and handsome head down on the bed sheet to weep and beg her pardon these events and imaginings excited and exhausted her, so that she found herself half dreaming in daytime, acting for every visitor the part they’d come to see.
    She considered this foolishness one evening, flushed with shame-the Departmental surgeon had held her hospitalized for several extra days as photo opportunity (on orders and against his will, it should be said).
    This had been reported to Ellie by the night nurse, an angelically naive young girl from Nebraska, perpetually agog at the doings in New York.
    Ellie, while mulling over this embarrassment, found she had to get up and pee. There, in the bathroom’s cramped and dizzying white, she sat and found some comfort in the coolness of the toilet seat.
    The side of her face still hurt her; the cuts on her hands and knees hardly hurt at all. “Expect some sinus trouble later on, with this,” a specialist had told her, pressing with his cold and furry hands across her cheek as she winced away.
    Now, in the bathroom, relaxing, sorting out, discarding the later fuss, she considered the saving of the child. She thought she had done that pretty well, and might do as well again, if she had to. She thought that for once she had not made a fool of herself.
    On release from the hospital, Ellie received a promotion to detective third-grade, a medal from the Mayor-awarded at Gracie Mansion-a letter from the Governor that he had signed himself, and, after some delay, an appointment to the Commissioner’s Squad. -This last she assumed, as did a few other innocents on the Force, to be a signal honor.
    This was not to say the Commissioner’s Squad was not composed of competent police officers, eleven detectives in all. It was. And the Squad was effective in its chores: minor bodyguarding of minor VIP’s, errand-running for the Chief of the Department’s office, following up a few long-term investigations the regular divisional squads had filed as unproductive-and, their most demanding duty, keeping a rather feeble surveilling eye on Internal Affairs, monitoring the activities of these unpopular shooflies in various divisions, to keep the cop-watchers aware that they, also, were watched.
    To compensate for these less than demanding (or rewarding) duties, the Squad found recompense in the close company of the great-the Department’s administrative Offices only one flight up-and in an unusually gentle work schedule (mimicking the brass they served) consisting of regular day shifts, one-or two-man night watches, and