[Detective Thursdays] For Sale
#8 of Detective Thursdays
I was packing for the trip, wandering around my apartment picking things up, putting them down. As my paws rested on a picture of my academy class I turned and sat down with it. My mind going back to my first night as a real police officer.
The van I was sitting in was covered in grime, made to look like it had been abandoned. Inside, my newly assigned mentor and I sat at a pair on consoles while we watched a bugged safe house on the other side of the street. His name was James Greene and he was a bloodhound. I had been told he had been on the case for almost a month now, that we were close to having enough to bust the mob boss who was cloistered in the building we were staking out. I expected the bust would happen tonight. Instead, we sat in that van for hours, speaking little. It wasn't what I'd had in mind when I signed up. After sitting for another fifteen minutes I told Greene so.
"Well, what did you expect? Car chases? gun battles? Back alley trades for information that can only be bought with blood? You young ones are all the same."
"That's..."
"Look, kid-"
"Tanu, my name is Ikura Tanu."
"Right...Look, Tanu, policing is slow careful work. You have to makes sure all the 't's are crossed and 'I's are dotted. You can't just expect things to just fall into your -"
Just then two hyenas entered the room on the video screen. Each had a briefcase in his hand. They set the cases on the table and opened them up. Inside were what looked like white blocks.
The radio crackled as the left one spoke, "So Mr. Surgei, this is a sample of the product."
The lion we'd been watching leaned forward and picked up one of the bricks. "Cocaine?"
"Indeed. Interested?"
"In buying? No."
"Not buying, investing. You just let us use your shipping lane and in exchange millions will go into your pocket. No effort on your part is required."
"Well I'll be damned..." Greene said under his breath. "Who'd think that tonight of all the nights." Turning to me, he smiled with a glint in his eyes. "You know what? I like you kid."
That night was arrested over twenty men on drug trafficking. As we stood outside of the safe house, bathed in the flashing blue and white, Greene looked at me. "You know what I said earlier? About how this isn't all blazes of glory? Perhaps I'd been stuck doing shifts like that van for too long that I'd forgotten what it really means to be a police officer."
He extended a paw to me "What do you say? Partners?"
I took his paw in my own. "Sure, Jim."
Setting the picture down I stood up and got back to packing, only twelve hours until the plane left for Moscow.
Sept 9 response to Poetigress' thursday prompt on FA. Theme was 'for sale'