Senior Sergeant Gordon ‘Laney’ Lane walked slowly through the drizzling rain on the evening of what would be not only his last day as a cop, after thirty-seven years of service, but inevitably, the last day of his life.
Since he first joined up, as a rookie, at age twenty-three, following in his father’s footsteps, he had seen a lot of changes in the Police Force, and not all of them good. Truth be told, hardly any of them were good, he believed. The times had changed a lot, and not really taken old timers like ‘Laney’ with them into the ‘Brave New World’.
In his day, walking on his ‘beat’ he could give a misbehaving youth a good ‘clip around the ear’ and send him home crying, then his father would give him another one to make sure he had learnt the proper respect. These days, when a party got out of control, those same thirteen, fourteen and fifteen year olds threw rocks, empty bottles and even Molotov cocktails at the police. Respect, oh no, no way, not any more. That was a joke, and as non-existent as a sixteen-year-old virgin in King’s Cross on a Friday night, and Laney, for one, was sick and tired of the bullshit that came with wearing a coppers uniform.
These days it was all about political correctness, you were expected to call the drunken louts sir as you helped them into the back of the paddy wagon, while they swore at you and called into question your parentage. It was about trying to subdue meth heads that wanted not only to fight, but to kill you, and had the strength of three men to make it easier for them to achieve that goal. It was about kids stealing cars and driving on the wrong side of the road so the cops had to break off a chase so innocents weren’t hurt, but the joyriders then carried on doing as they liked. Worse, it was making a good bust, then spending hours doing paperwork, making sure all the I’s were dotted and t’s crossed, only for the bastard to be let out with a warning by a lily-livered judge who thought the perpetrator was just misunderstood, or had had a tough upbringing.
The job was fraught with domestic disputes almost nightly that threatened to spiral out of control, as an irate husband who thought it was just fine to beat his wife senseless, and then turn on the attending police for having the temerity to try to break it up. It was trying to avoid being bitten by a drug addict, who could have aids, or hepatitis A, B, C or whatever letter you added to it these days. It was about being verbally abused, or physically assaulted, and risking your life every single shift. Quite simply the job sucked, and sucked the life out of good officers.
And, the final irony, the last nail in the coffin of modern policing? Everyone wanted more police, except nobody wanted higher taxes to pay for them. And the public certainly didn’t want more police officers if it meant being caught speeding or going through a red light because they were running late for work. Oh no, you can’t have too many on the spot fines for a ‘user pays’ society, or actual crime breakers and offenders paying for more police officers to provide a visible deterrent, no; that was just revenue raising. How dare police hide speed cameras in trees, and use unmarked cars to catch hoons and drivers who just don’t care about the safety of other people on the roads.
While Laney had been able to stay married, and not be tempted to put the end of his service pistol in his mouth and pull the trigger, the divorce and suicide rate among serving police officers, and those recently retired, was catastrophically high. But did anybody really care about that when they could just bring more officers over from the UK, or Ireland? They kept coming over in droves to replace locals, because if we thought it was bad here, try being a copper there. For them, it was almost like a working holiday.
And, if you did something wrong, made an error in judgement, lose your temper and hit some ignorant, loud mouth insulting thug back? The law itself then came down on you three times harder than it did on a criminal, and where was the justice in that? Imagine being a cop, doing your best, but then making one mistake and they send you to jail with a lot of people you put in there; life wouldn’t be worth living, the criminals would make sure of that.
Of course he could have applied to have become a detective, over the years he had had his chances for advancement, but he just didn’t want to wear a suit and look like a dickhead. Laney wanted ‘real policing’ and in his day, ‘real police officers’ wore a uniform. People used to respect they were there to help, and by their visibility alone it would lower the crime rate. In the old days you could walk the beat, meet the local shop owners, who might give you a leg of lamb for your Sunday dinner, or a spare packet of smokes, a half priced hamburger for lunch, or other ways to show their appreciation. Did they have to do that? No they did not; they just wanted to say thanks, Gordon, for helping keep the crime rate down in our area. Slowly beat cops had been phased out, and the muggings, break ins, and violent crime incidence had increased.
Of course, now, walking the beat alone was a thing of the past. These days you had to wear a stab vest and watch out for any stray, extremist, who might want to behead a copper who was just trying to do his job. To try to uphold the law, every time you left the station, was sometimes a very dangerous thing to do, simply because we are infidels in our own country, he believed. Naturally though, to voice that opinion out loud, was deemed to be racist; no-one should get Laney started on being racist, when he didn’t think he was.
Really, was it any wonder it was hard to attract young people to want to join the police force? If you could stop them playing violent computer games long enough they probably wouldn’t pass the physical exam, or they would fail the drug test for smoking too much weed. Where was it all going to end, Laney, wondered several times a day.
Laney stopped under an overhang while the drizzle turned to a short, sharp downpour. He hitched his belt holding the pistol, handcuffs and Taser back over his hips, and adjusted his rain poncho while looking up and down the street, just in case that rabid extremist was out and about looking for a victim to sacrifice.
So, life sucked being a cop, but after a life time of service, what else was he going to do? He and his wife Joyce had raised two kids, and put them both through university. One was now a doctor working in a Brisbane hospital, while the other was a mining engineer and worked one month on and one off, in the Sudan. But on his month off he usually spent it in Thailand, or Bali with his Asian wife, so on average he saw his children only if he went to see them these days, and that meant very, very rarely.
It hadn’t always been that way of course, they used to want to visit home, and did frequently, but then Joyce had had her stroke, and though she fought the good fight, and clung on for three long months, a second stoke hit her, even harder than the first and took her away from Laney, and their two children.
She had been the light of his life, the constant that kept him balanced, his rock, if you will. He had never been unfaithful, and never had any desire to, though he could have quite easily, in his younger, fitter days. Back then his six foot three frame was fit and rippling with muscle, rather than the rotund look that he had taken on of more recent times. And, he had to admit; he had cut quite a figure in his uniform back then, and did attract the ladies’ attention. But though he could have, and even once or twice thought about it, he never strayed, Joyce was more than enough woman for him.
In the last ten years of their marriage, he couldn’t remember a single argument they had had. Maybe they did have them, but if they had, they were resolved quickly. Arguments weren’t permitted to fester below the surface, and be brought up later as a weapon in the next disagreement. No, both believed in the old saying that their parents believed in too; that you should never let the sun go down on an argument, and bed was for loving and sleeping, not fighting.
The rain was easing, and he set off once again, down the city street he had once patrolled, to his date with destiny. He knew he was going to die that nig
ht, and he was fine with it, because it would actually mean something. At sixty years old, to him, it was important that he stood up for something, and then, when he met up with Joyce again, as he thought he most certainly would, he could look her in the eye and she would understand.
He had never been able to forgive himself that Joyce had been alone when the stroke hit. She had been in the laundry, washing his clothes after he had been on a fishing trip with Roger and Wilfred, two other cops he knew, and had come back late on a Sunday Night, with two very nice Flathead, and a smaller Bream.
He had gone off to work, as per normal the next day, and Joyce had set herself her daily tasks of cleaning, which she did religiously, and washing his damned fishing clothes, which he knew stank to high heaven of mud, fish blood and worms. They had one of those brightly coloured plastic laundry baskets to hold the dirty clothes in, and when Joyce said hello to her stroke, she fell across it, and crushed it. If there was a blessing, it was she had fallen that way and the basket had cushioned her fall; else she could have banged her head. Mind you, in the three months that followed of seeing Joyce like