Chief Oshry deliberately kept me waiting forever outside his office, just to teach me a final lesson. Not that I was in any particular hurry to get inside and face my firing. I knew my career here with the Boston Police Department was over for good. After twenty-one years of exemplary service, starting as a rookie at nineteen, I was going to be booted out on my a*s due to one screwup. Admittedly, it had been a hellaciously big screwup, but still. There would be no second chances for me. Not after shooting a Whateley.
As busy ex-fellow cops came and went in the anteroom, all of them studiously avoiding me as if I were Pickman’s Model with parts falling off me, I tried to divert my gloomy thoughts from my unknown future by eye-flicking through the headlines displayed on my memtax. I had the
