Free Contents Under Pressure by Edna Buchanan Page B

children. I felt unutterably sad for them all, and I wondered how I could find out what had really happened to D. Wayne.
    After writing the funeral story, I called police headquarters and asked to hear the radio transmissions of the chase and the earlier BOLO for the car the police had been seeking. The transmissions are continuously recorded, and the tapes are changed every twenty-four hours, stored for ninety days, and then reused. The voice on the line told me it would take a day or so to pull that particular tape; not an unusual delay.
    I couldn’t shake my thoughts of the tapes and the cops out there on the midnight shift, so I called Francie Alexander from home that night, and we agreed to meet for lunch. Francie stood not quite five foot one and weighed about 105 pounds, all muscle and guts. She worked midnights, on patrol. Francie’s only problem, if one can call it that, was sometimes tending to overcompensate for her size and sex by acting braver and tougher than cops twice her size. When she worked the hooker detail on Biscayne Boulevard, some of her would-be johns later complained that she was rude, even verbally abusive, when handcuffing them. They dropped their complaints, however, after hearing the playback of their lewd propositions to her. She had been wired for sound, somewhere under the little tube top and miniskirt she wore for the detail.
    Dispatched to back up a male officer in a major barroom brawl, she hadn’t hesitated to wade right into the melee—and a mean drunk hadn’t hesitated to break her nose. You could hardly see where it was fractured. I liked it better now; it gave her character.
    It was already 10 P.M ., so I stayed dressed, napping atop the flowered comforter on my bed for a few hours. My portable police scanner usually sat silent in a battery-charger on my nightstand while I slept. But tonight I left it on, the volume a low murmur. Police calls broadcasting on the edge of my consciousness kept me from falling into a deep slumber, and I had become fine-tuned to the point where only a three, an emergency, signal would penetrate and instantly jolt me awake. Piercing beeps from my alarm clock roused me at Francie’s “lunchtime”—3 A.M . I lay there for a few minutes in the dark, listening. The scanner crackled with a constant stream of routine dispatches. The night seemed calm and quiet, which meant Francie would have time to break for lunch.
    I carried my gun outside with me, its cool weight reassuring in the shadows. I slid it into the glove box of the T-Bird, and left the compartment unlocked in case I needed it in a hurry. It was a blue steel Smith and Wesson revolver, a .38 with a personalized sight and grips that fit my small hands.
    I favor revolvers, as they are more reliable. Automatics sometimes jam, and when fired, they spit out hot shells. That didn’t faze me until a mishap at the range where I practiced. A young couple who looked like newlyweds were using a small automatic. As he was teaching his bride to shoot, an ejected shell flew down the front of her sundress. She reacted with a squeal, inadvertently squeezing the trigger of the gun still in her hand. Her husband dropped like a rock, hit in the groin.
    The newspaper fiercely editorializes against handgun ownership, and I am loyal to the people who pay my salary, but the highly paid executives who write editorials don’t keep the hours or go to the places that I do. Like a hurricane tracking chart, a gun is something you hope you will never have to use. But if you live in Miami, you can be damn well sure that you will need them both someday. It is a fact of life.
    The drive to the Pelican Harbor boat launching ramp took about twenty minutes. I looked forward to seeing Francie. She always looked like a fresh-scrubbed teenager, a teenager who wore on her hip a Glock 17, a semiautomatic pistol loaded with eighteen .9mm full metal jacket hollow point rounds. She carried another loaded magazine in her heavy leather