Sons of the City Read Online Free Page B

covered every one of the car’s windows with big orange stickers that said “TOW.” The stickers were the kind we slapped on a windshield to let the Parking Authority know we wanted a car towed. You only needed one sticker—they were pretty big—and these guys had used about two hundred. It wasn’t hard to figure out what was going on.
    I pulled up next to the other cars and got out. “Who’s inside?” I asked.
    Steve put his finger to his mouth to shush me. He had a mischievous smile on his face, and his blue eyes were glittering with excitement, like a kid on Christmas morning.
    “It’s Little Napoleon,” he said, keeping his voice low. “Sleeping like a baby.”
    “You got a captain in there?” I was impressed. Little Napoleon was what everyone called Casimir Razowski, a short little dickhead who actually did look like Napoleon, or at least the pictures of him in the liquor ads. He was in night command, one of the people who was supposed to keep an eye on things when the regular captains went home. Except that the only thing Little Napoleon ever kept an eye on was his watch.
    I walked up to his car, a standard city-issue Plymouth. Buster and Nick were covering up the last little gaps on the back window. If Little Napoleon woke up now, he’d be in complete darkness, he wouldn’t know where the hell he was.
    “He’s been coming here every night this week,” said Steve. “He just sleeps for the whole shift. I have the feeling this is going to be his last night.”
    “What he means, Sarge,” explained Buster, “is that he wants Little Napoleon gone so
he
can come here to sleep.”
    “Wait, I thought both you guys came here to sleep,” I said.
    Buster got an indignant look. “You kidding? I always go behind the old Pepsi plant.”
    Buster was a big, likable guy, always chomping on his gum and grinning his lopsided grin. He seemed less like a cop than a big-league ballplayer just off the bus from Kansas or someplace.
    He also had the loudest mouth in the squad, which he actually put to good use when he was driving 20-17 car. Nothing in that trash heap worked—not the siren, not the horn, not even the red-and-blue emergency lights on top. Other guys driving it couldn’t figure out how to make a car-stop. They’d see someone run a red light, and just let them go. But Buster would stick his head out the window and yell, “YO, PULL OVER!” And they would.
    I noticed the silver nameplate on Buster’s chest. Instead of “BROWN,” it said “KIRK.” I looked at Steve’s name-plate, then Nick’s. They were both “KIRK.”
    “Where’d you get those?” I laughed. Kirk was the name of our captain, Oliver Kirk. I knew the idea was that if Little Napoleon woke up and read one of the nametags, he’d call up headquarters and yell he wanted the ass of some cop named Kirk.
    Steve’s eyes glittered again. “Place up on Castor Avenue, they’re the same ones who supply ‘em to the city. I got a friend who works there.”
    He reached in his front pants pocket and pulled out a whole handful of nameplates. They all said “KIRK.”
    “Want one?” he asked.
    I laughed and shook my head no. I liked Steve, it didn’t really bother me that he was the class clown of the 20th. Here he was the Commissioner’s son, and he was forever coming up with stuff like this. What made it strange was that he had the potential to be a great cop. Steve had wonderful instincts—he could look at three guys standing on a corner, and say, the one in the middle is carrying a gun. And he was always right.
    But he never seemed to take the job seriously, he was always screwing around. Maybe that’s what happens when your father’s the Commissioner. It couldn’t have been easy—any success would be attributed to the father, any failure would show that the son just couldn’t measure up. Maybe Steve, in a weird way, was just trying to be his own man.
    He looked at me warily. “This OK with you, what we’re