The Squad Room Read Online Free

British use them. He’d already pissed off everyone else there, so they just let him walk across the stage like that; and when the PC asked him if he’d switched departments and the room erupted in laughter, he’d just glared at everyone, like they were the ones who had it wrong.
    Detective Medveded broke the silence. “What’re you thinking about, Cap?” he asked.
    Morrison smiled grimly out at the traffic ahead. “Oh, you know—just some no-good, backpack and boat shoe–wearing son of a bitch,” he said quietly.
    “Ha! Right,” Medveded said. There was only one man Morrison could be referring to, and Medveded definitely had no love for him, either.
    Morrison laughed again. “Hey, you remember when we were out drinking that night, and you said—?” he began.
    “How could I forget?” Medveded said. “I still think we should’ve done it.”
    “If not for the vodka, huh?” Morrison looked over at him. “God, you were so pissed at him.”
    “How could I not be? The asshole wanted to transfer me to Staten Island!”
    “I remember.”
    Boy, did Morrison remember. It was hard not to look back on it with a little regret, even.
    He and Medveded been drinking together, and getting pretty heated about Arndt’s treatment of the latter, who was only recently back on the job after a pretty haunting experience in the Bronx that had almost gotten him killed. Arndt had been the 44 th Precinct desk officer at the time of the incident, when Medveded—then an officer on the Street Crime unit—and his partner Tommy Davis had responded to a call that a woman was being held at gunpoint in her apartment. At the scene they’d heard a woman crying inside and rushed in, thinking they had the element of surprise. They were wrong. The perp, in a classic “suicide-by-cop” plan, had gotten his ex-girlfriend to call another friend over to the apartment, then tied them both to chairs, called 911 on himself and told the women to cry out when the cops showed up, and waited with his gun pointing at the door. When Medveded and Davis had burst in, he’d opened fire on them, hitting Davis in the chest and Medveded in the abdomen before Medveded was able to put him down with returning fire. Davis had died that night. But Desk Officer Arndt, as it turned out, cared less about two cops shot, than about the ton of paperwork he had to do because of it; and attempted to have Medveded transferred to Staten Island, claiming he’d violated department policy.
    So Morrison and Medveded had ended up pretty well sauced at the bar by the precinct, and Medveded had made a startling suggestion: Let’s rob him. Morrison, naturally, had assumed he was joking; but Medveded had gone on: Come on, Bill, it’ll be easy. We mask up, follow him when he goes to his car—that prick never parks near the house, he knows someone would slash his tires. And everyone knows he never carries his gun.
    Morrison had realized then that Medveded was only half-joking. It was exactly the sort of idea the Crazy Russian—as some of his fellow officers had since taken to calling him—would take seriously. Yet ascrazy as the idea was, he’d been distinctly intrigued by it. He’d thought about how gratifying it would be to pull out that fucking Nantucket belt with the whales (a piece of Arndt’s wardrobe he was never without) and wrap it around the guy’s neck. He’d smiled to imagine seeing Arndt on the ground, his pants around his ankles, weeping—as he was known to do whenever he was under stress. It all sounded good—but he also knew it wasn’t worth losing his pension over. There were too many cameras around nowadays; and besides, he had to believe that guys like Arndt always got their just deserts. Thankfully, the vodka had taken its toll on both of them, and they’d fallen asleep in their car outside the precinct.
    Morrison and Medveded arrived at the precinct, having made the decision to pass on the bar tonight as they parked the car. It’d be an early