Free We Are the Cops by Michael Matthews

right.’
    ‘It is and actually your son is dead.’
    ‘No, no. That can’t be right. I just talked to my son. That can’t be right.’
    Then you have to watch the different stages of grief kick in.
    They say, ‘You’ve got to be mistaken. It’s not my son.’
    ‘Yeah, it is and I’m very sorry.’
    ‘No, no. This is a training exercise for you guys, right?’
    The reality of the situation kicks in and we spent the next, I don’t know, maybe three hours with them, trying to help them find a babysitter so that they could go to the funeral home.
    Then they wanted to see the body and I’m saying, ‘Let the funeral home have until the morning. You don’t want to see your son like this. Let them at least clean him up a little bit and makehim presentable.’
    I didn’t want them to see their son in the state he was in but they were adamant that they wanted to see him and get some closure.
    We don’t have the physical danger that a city police officer does but the emotional danger of this job is twice as bad in a small community because you know everybody. You’re anonymous in a city like New York with ten million people because there are very remote odds that you are going to deal with somebody you know. Down here, everyone you deal with, you know.
    I didn’t sleep well for a month. It’s awful. It’s an absolute finality. You’re telling a parent that their child is never going to come home again, yet they just saw them forty minutes ago. I watched this kid grow up. He was seventeen when he died and I had watched him since he was two years old. I watched the kid riding around the neighbourhood on a bike, I saw him doing sports, watched him walk to grade school, then high school. And now he’s dead, on a slab.
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    On the transit system, we usually average one death every week or two weeks. Sometimes it’s accidental but a lot of the time it’s suicide. Probably the goriest one that I was at was a fifteen-year-old kid who was on the wrong side of the commuter rail tracks. His mum was picking him up and the kid went across the tracks to meet her. I don’t know why he did it but he ended up trying to hop the fence. He didn’t make it; there was a train going about 130 miles an hour through the station and it just nailedhim. That was probably the goriest one I’ve been to. Half of his brain was in a different parking lot. It landed like a hundred yards away. People freaked out. When I got there the kids books were all neatly stacked up, so you just knew that somebody flipped out and took this kid’s schoolbooks and made them into a nice pile. That’s probably one of the grossest I’ve ever been to.
    All the cops go to these calls. In fact, most of the guys want to go. Everybody wants to go see the dead body. It sounds disgusting but it’s part of the job. We’re morbid and we like seeing weird stuff that we don’t normally get to see. It sounds really bad but everybody will go to look, usually.
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    We got called once to an odour complaint. It was a house that sat just off State Street. It was a two or three storey home and some of the residents complained about this terrible smell that was coming from the house. I mean, I could stand on State Street and literally smell it and I knew right away that there was a dead guy there because you know what the smell of death is. Once you get that in your nose you never get it out again – you know it right away, anytime you smell it, driving down the street, you know what it is. Especially in the summer and this was summer.
    So we went up to the person that called and she said, ‘Yeah, I’ve noticed this smell in the house.’
    She lived up on the second floor and the smell was overpowering. I don’t know how someone can live like that.
    She said, ‘I noticed it a couple of weeks ago and it wasn’t that bad but it’s been getting worse and worse.’ Then she says,‘There’s also a stain up on my ceiling.’
    And sure enough there’s a brown,