Sons of the City Read Online Free Page A

any crime ever happened there, other than the occasional mob hit.
    As you headed east, toward the skyscrapers of Center City, you went through black West Philadelphia, a succession of poor and working-class neighborhoods. Crime did happen there, plenty of it, but there were a lot of good people, too. It was a shame to see them when they came home from work and found that some crackhead had broken down their door, torn their house apart looking for money, and then taken the VCR on the way out.
    Finally came University City, the area around the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel. Penn liked to call itself a “campus in an urban setting,” which meant that it was a place where rich kids from the suburbs took money out of ATMs in the middle of the night, and then walked away counting the twenties. They were so dumb even I wanted to rob them.
    University City was a collection of student apartment buildings, grungy beer-and-pizza joints, Indian restaurants, and computer stores. A little farther from campus were several neighborhoods with large, leafy houses where the professors lived, along with people like newspaper editors and architects. Plenty of big trees your dog could pee on.
    At the eastern end of the district was the Schuylkill River, the boundary with Center City. About the only time we ever actually went to the river was when some homeless guy decided he just couldn’t take life anymore, and jumped in from the Walnut or Chestnut Street bridge. Neither bridge was really very high, but in West Philadelphia everyone just did the best they could.
    I didn’t calm down from what happened at Lucky’s for hours, and it wasn’t until the next night, as I cruised through the streets of West Philadelphia in my patrol car, that I finally began to relax. Maybe it was because everything was so familiar—the row houses and the stores, even the young black guys on the corners, laughing and drinking their beer from bottles in paper bags. Out here, you knew the rules. You knew whose side everyone was on.
    About nine-thirty that night, I decided to stop by district headquarters to see if Nick was around. I was hoping maybe
    I could take another shot at cheering him up. As usual, Sammy was in the operations room doing paperwork at his battered gray-metal desk. And, as usual, he had tuned the TV to a cop show.
    Sammy was a regular inside guy, one of the cops who sorted through incident reports and dealt with any members of the public who might wander in. He was a towering blond with a thick mustache, and always reminded me of a Minnesota lumberjack who should be eating pancakes. Except that he wore a blue uniform instead of a red flannel shirt, and I never caught him trying to cut down any of the scrawny trees in West Philly.
    “Sammy,” I said. “You seen Nick?”
    “Unbelievable,” he said, pointing to the TV. “This cop stops a stolen car and says to the guy, ‘Could you get out of the car, please?’ He actually said please. And this show’s supposed to be realistic.”
    “Sammy,” I said again. “Nick around?”
    He shrugged. “Must be out on the street. Look, now he’s calling the guy sir.” Sammy looked up at me. “My father’s the only one I call sir.”
    I headed over to the Shop-Now supermarket on the edge of University City, I figured some of the guys would be there. The store closed at 9 p.m., so at night the empty parking lot basically became a cop hangout. If you needed to talk to someone in the squad, that’s where you told Radio to have them meet you. A lot of times we’d sit there in our cars when things were quiet, eating our cheesesteaks and catching up on the latest gossip.
    As I pulled into the darkened lot, I saw two police cars and a brown unmarked car parked together. Something strange was going on, though at first I couldn’t tell what it was. Nick, Steve, and Buster, another one of my cops, seemed to be doing something to the unmarked car.
    When I reached them I had to laugh—they had