Read The Sniper's Wife for Free Online Page B

meant anyone who wasn’t in management double-parked on the street, pulled up onto the sidewalks, or otherwise caused enough of a problem that the precinct commander was constantly in meetings with irate neighborhood representatives.
    Willy walked past car after haphazardly parked car with special plates thrown onto their dashboards before finally passing through the Seventh Precinct’s front door. He was greeted with a familiar chorus of sights, sounds, and smells he doubted was much different from any one of the other seventy-five houses sprinkled across the city’s five boroughs. The ringing phones, general milling population, and the institutional decor consisting of framed portraits of department leaders and motivational posters all brought him back to the very first day he’d entered this world, feeling awkward in his bulky new uniform. It was early enough in the day, in fact, that the morning patrol shift was still in the muster room across from the long, battered, pressed-wood sergeant’s desk. Willy could see, through its broad doors, the uniformed assemblage facing the duty sergeant at his podium, taking notes as he read from a binder and pointed from time to time at a collection of glassed-in wall maps covered with variously colored pins—crime maps indicating current trends in the precinct.
    “May I help you?” the receptionist asked him from her school-style desk.
    He looked down at her as if she’d interrupted him in mid-dream. “I’m here to see Detective Ogden. My name’s Kunkle.”
    She glanced at his left arm, its hand as usual stuffed into his trousers pocket. “Upstairs, second floor, third door on the right.”
    He glanced over her head at the activity at the long front desk, manned by an oversized, avuncular sergeant and his frazzled-looking aide. These were the precinct’s air traffic controllers. They knew which prisoners were in holding, who was out on patrol and where, what weapons had been logged in for safekeeping, and a multitude of other details that helped keep the place running. They took messages, handled phone calls, assigned tasks throughout the building, and acted as human bulletin boards, all amid a din of colliding human voices. They were the keepers of the Patrol Guide, the bible of the uniformed cop, and knew its contents the way they knew their own family members, dispensing advice whenever called upon. The flow of officers and civilians alike in front of this desk, picking up or dropping off paperwork or just chatting briefly, was nonstop.
    Upstairs, the noise was less of a commingled babble, being segregated into a series of offices extending off to both sides of the landing. He counted three doors on his right, walked past several stacks of old boxed case files, and stepped into an office with a cardboard sign labeled, “Detectives.”
    There he stopped, observing the scene before him. The room was moderately large, with a mismatched scattering of dented and scarred desks. The lighting was fluorescent, accompanied by some daylight through a row of high, smudged windows. The floors were damaged and worn linoleum, the painted cinderblock walls plastered with charts, rows of clipboards, more framed photographs and posters, and multiple bulletin boards, all attempting to hide a paint job of queasy industrial green. The air was filled with ringing phones, general conversation, and, in an almost incongruous throwback to a previous era, the sound of typewriters. As in the hallway outside, there were boxes piled everywhere: along the walls, under the windows, between doors. The place looked like a moving company on a lunch break, except he knew from past experience that few of these boxes had been moved in years.
    There were five men sitting at the odd assortment of desks in the middle of the floor, none of whom paid him any attention.
    “Help you?” a voice asked from his right.
    He turned and saw a civilian employee sitting at a workstation equipped with the room’s most