First Avenue Read Online Free PDF Page A

Her family would be relieved, and her friends, those still left, would stop thinking she was some kind of circus sideshow.
    More than anything else,
Katherine
was tired of being the woman in the squad. She was tired of them watching her, waiting for her to show fear or weakness or humanness. She was tired of them expecting her to be like them and then rejecting her if she was—these men who treated her like an experiment they knew would fail. If she saw Mike roll his eyes one more time toward the god of maleness when she insisted they go to the station for the bathroom rather than stop at some filthy bar that was good enough for him, she could not be sure she would not hit him with her flashlight.
    Down the hillside of concrete there was an unbroken view to the deep gray harbor. At this time of day’s end the buildings on either side of the street rose from long shadows. Her shadow lay far up the hill and dwarfed her. She could easily turn around and follow it.
    Numb with reluctance, she moved from her place and, like a highwire performer who dared not look at her feet, continued down the hill and into the garage as she knew she must.
    Inside she nodded greetings and forced a smile as she headed for the locker room. She found her locker and dressed in front of it. She did not try to squeeze in front of the one small mirror with the five or six other women who were preparing for work or leaving it, but she appreciated their voices. She wished there were more. She wished there would be so many that their voices would be indistinct and unrecognizable.
    At roll call she stood in the third row, farthest from the front, one of three women in the rows of men from the two squads that worked the late rotation. When her name was called, she lied and said “Here” like all the others.
    The streetlights were on when
Mike
drove out of the garage onto Cherry Street , and he reached to the control panel and flipped on the headlights. It was
Katherine
’s turn to ride shotgun, so she began to fill in the log sheet clamped to her wooden clipboard. With one hand she held her flashlight to illuminate the page and with the other wrote with a light touch accustomed to unexpected bumps. Without being asked,
Mike
told her the mileage. When she finished, she put her flashlight on the floor between the seat and the door, an automatic reach in the dark. She pulled a blank log report from the bottom of the short pile on the clipboard and folded it in half for scratch paper. She stuck it under the clamp and dropped the clipboard onto the bench seat in the empty space between them. Their nightsticks stuck out from the crease between the backrest and bottom of the front seat, hers on her left and
Mike
’s on his right, like stakes marking boundaries. She reached up for her seat belt and stretched it across her body. Then she sank back in the seat and waited for the show to begin.
    Radio rhythmically logged on cars and dispatched the non-emergency calls that had accumulated during shift change.
Mike
waited until he crossed their district line before logging on, then held the microphone in expectation of a call. When none came, he put the mike back in its metal rack with a self-satisfied smile.
    Two weeks earlier the shift began in daylight. It would be nine months before they worked in light again. Soon it would be dark when she left for work, dark while she worked, and dark when she went home. Was that the reason
Sam
chose the First Watch—to see light, to feel sunshine, to do work that might seem normal? Would any work be normal sitting in this fishbowl?
    She looked out the side window as they crisscrossed randomly through their district.
Mike
talked and she participated to the degree necessary not to listen. First Avenue was opening and coming to life. Kids began to gather on the corners, black and white, Indian and Mexican, standing in groups for company and protection and watching openly as the police car passed. Street prostitutes, serious and