Free Sons of the City by Scott Flander Page B

who made the call to 911.”
    Michelle put her hand to her mouth. “They were waiting for Steve?”
    “It’s very possible,” I said. “And I think it’s also very possible Bravelli knows why.”
    A few minutes later, we were pulling into the Yard at district headquarters. Michelle had asked me to take her back, she wanted to talk to her father about Ru-Wan Sanders.
    As I stopped the car in front of the police entrance, Michelle said, “We have to find out what Bravelli knows.”
    “It’d be nice.”
    “But there’s no way, is there? Bringing him in isn’t going to do any good.” “Not likely.”
    “How about somebody going undercover?”
    I shook my head. “It could take months to get inside Bravelli’s crew—if we could get in at all.”
    She thought about that for a while, then opened the car door. “We have to find out.”
    Once I had dropped Michelle off, I got back on the street and asked Radio to try to raise Nick. He didn’t respond. I figured maybe he had one of our famous nonworking radios. Other cops in the squad could hear me trying to reach him, maybe one of them would get on the air and say where he was. No one did, but no big deal.
    I tried the 7-Eleven at 40th and Walnut, across the street from the Penn campus. It was a favorite cop hangout, primarily because you could sit in your patrol car all day and watch a steady stream of Penn girls pass by. In the summer, when the girls all wore tank tops and shorts, the parking area in front of the 7-Eleven was like a police mini-station.
    I didn’t see Nick’s car, but I wanted some coffee anyway. I walked in and my heart jumped a little—there was Patricia, getting a small plastic bottle of orange juice from the glass case. She turned, and then stopped in surprise when she saw me.
    “Eddie. You back in uniform now?”
    She looked more relaxed, prettier than when I had last seen her, when our divorce came through a year ago. Her black hair was shorter now, shiny and curled in above the shoulders. She was dressed up—tight navy blue dress, black pumps, black leather purse on a long strap over her shoulder.
    “You have a job around here?” I asked.
    I had almost asked her whether she was going to Penn—I knew it was her dream to go there, to get a master’s in archaeology. But Penn’s tuition was something like $25,000 a year, hard to afford on the salary of a fifth-grade public school teacher.
    “We haven’t talked for a while,” she said. “I’m not teaching anymore, I’m a secretary at Penn. In the president’s office.”
    My stomach dropped. She deserved better. She was worlds above the girls at Penn with their daddies’ credit cards.
    Patricia smiled. “But, I’m also in the archaeology program here.” She explained to me how employees of Penn could enroll as part-time students without paying a penny.
    She said she had just gotten engaged. A Center City architect.
    He was designing the house they eventually wanted to build.
    “So in other words,” I said, “we split up and the gods start smiling on you.”
    She laughed. “C’mon, we had some good years, didn’t we?”
    “Yeah, we did.”
    At least until we started having our troubles. I was in OC, working permanent four-to-midnight. I had to leave for work before Patricia got home from the elementary school, and she’d always be asleep when I came in.
    I was in love with the job, in love with being a cop—I couldn’t get enough of it. But it was like being in a self-contained world. The stuff you saw, you couldn’t talk about with your wife, so you talked about it with other cops. After work, everyone in the squad would go out drinking to three or four in the morning. We were all too keyed up to go home.
    I’d get up late and hang around the house until I had to go into work. Sometimes Patricia and I would go days without seeing each other—we didn’t even have enough time together to fight about it. There were no kids as an excuse to stay together, and one day,