Free Time Expired by Susan Dunlap

jabbing right in Grayson’s face.
    “A hostage could have died, Tiress.”
    “Green curb means twenty minutes. Your car was there three hours and fifty minutes.” Elgin Tiress was not known as Tight Ass for nothing. “You’re lucky I only gave you one ticket.”
    Grayson’s hand tightened into a fist. “Can’t you get it through your head, you … I was out on a life or death case!”
    Tiress puffed up his small, rounded chest, looked directly ahead—at Grayson’s chin—and said, “Tell it to the judge.”
    “Too big for your fucking little britches,” Grayson muttered as Tiress made—in small but rapid steps—for the door.
    The rest of us headed for the meeting room and slid into chairs just as Chief Larkin walked in. The chief attended Morning Meeting only sporadically. His presence was rarely a good sign. I figured things couldn’t get worse.
    Jackson pushed me a cup of coffee. “I don’t know if this’ll do it, bad as you’re looking, Smith,” he muttered. “It’s good, but it doesn’t resurrect.” A couple years ago I’d made a deal with Jackson’s son: swim lessons for morning coffee. Darnell was away at college now, but during the swap days Jackson had gotten hooked on Peet’s, and now he filled a thermos every morning. It was a practice I wasn’t about to question.
    Now the chief settled into his chair directly across from me, his gray suit and signature red tie looking crisper than anything in the room but his own self. Irritably fingering a clutch of messages, he waited while the hot car list circulated, and representatives of the various details reported the last twenty-four hours’ activities: tools stolen on Parker Street, stereos on Sixty-second, Hopkins, Fairview, Sixty-seventh, and Mabel; assaults with gun, stick, feet, bottle, metal pipe, and a water balloon; commercial burglaries: telephone from an auto sales shop, fax machine from a copy shop, and from a cleaner, cash and every suede item in the store.
    Chief Larkin listened, pensively rubbing his messages between thumb and forefinger. I began to doubt the words would survive long enough for him to read them. I should have been so lucky.
    When the regular daily business was over, Larkin leaned forward and said, “The Berkeley Police force is becoming a laughingstock. It’s bad enough we have some crazy fixated on Parking Enforcement. This one loony’s running all over town stealing marking wands out of the Cushmans like they were free samples.”
    Cushmans, the little golf-cartlike vehicles Parking Enforcement used, had metal roofs and zip-up sides. Meter minders like Elgin Tiress were too busy popping out and depositing tickets to fasten the siding each time. We all knew that; no one felt called upon to remind the chief.
    Larkin went on. “He’s crashing into the Cushmans. He’s stealing them. He’s rolling one into a pile of manure, depositing another in a Dumpster—we had to get a crane to get that one back out!—and now stealing traffic tickets and helmets.”
    I’d been around long enough not to interrupt his tirade. Howard had too, but as a Vice and Substance Abuse detective he knew he wasn’t going to be mashed with the fallout from this. He said, “Helmets?”
    “Stole a helmet right out of the meter vehicle. Left the officer in violation of the law!” City governments across the state had applauded a new state law mandating helmets on motorcyclists. They’d been less pleased to discover that meter cart drivers came under the same classification. And downright distressed when informed they couldn’t send out those drivers to check on meters, much less generate new revenue when those meters expired, until the drivers were legally helmeted. “Meter maid had to borrow a helmet from a Cycle Patrol guy on vacation. Thing was so big it floated on her head. Took us a week to replace hers.” Chief Larkin’s face wasn’t the color of his blood-red tie, not yet.
    Celia Eckey from Parking Enforcement glared.