AfterNet 01 - Good Cop Dead Cop

from his computer. He told her to do the latter and a minute later she had placed her terminal on his desk and attached the speakers.
    “Are you here?” he said, looking at the terminal.
    “Yup,” Munroe said.
    “Where, exactly?”
    “Kind of sitting on your desk next to the terminal. Your desk is … annoyingly large. If you’d move the terminal closer to the edge, I could sit.” She moved a chair next to the desk and slid the terminal closer. She also removed her ear buds to eliminate the stereo effect.
    “Comfy?” the chief asked. When Munroe assured him he was, the chief continued. “Anyway, we’ve decided the way we’re using you is a waste of resources. We’d planned to announce this the first of the year, but with this shooting … well, we’re going to announce it now before the press or somebody starts asking why you weren’t involved.”
    “Announce what?” Munroe and Yamaguchi asked together.
    “We’re moving you to SWAT,” the chief said. He waited for them to say something. “Well, you could thank me or something.” They remained silent. “What, you don’t want to be part of SWAT?”
    “It’s not what I signed up for,” Munroe said.
    “What the hell does that mean? You wanted to be a homicide detective again. You knew that wasn’t going to happen. We told you you’d be working with SWAT when we hired you.”
    “Yeah, from time to time. But when I was hired, we agreed that I’d work with the disembodied community, that I’d be the initial investigator when a disembodied witness was involved. And that from time to time, I’d work with patrol and the fire department.”
    The chief was confused. “Yes, but …”
    “I don’t want to go to SWAT either,” she said.
    “Huh?” The chief had forgotten about her in his efforts to convince Munroe. He looked at her. “Why not? I wouldn’t have thought you’d object. You’ve got a pretty gung ho reputation. There’re a lot of cops who’d jump at the chance to join SWAT.”
    She crossed her arms and said, “I like patrol. And I like working with Alex. And if he doesn’t want to go, I don’t either.”
    “If it’s your safety, don’t worry. We wouldn’t be putting you on the line immediately. You’d still have to go through the same training as any SWAT candidate.”
    “So then I’d just be his handler until you’re ready to use him. And if I wash out, what happens then? Back to patrol?”
    The chief settled back in his chair. He let out a breath and looked at Clemens. “We thought you’d be onboard with this.” Clemens nodded, but didn’t risk saying anything.
    “Look you two, maybe this isn’t a perfect plan, and maybe we have to rethink who goes where and when, OK? But let’s just say we play along for now.”
    “Maybe a trial period?” Clemens suggested.
    “Yeah, excellent idea, Paul. You give it … three months. If you don’t like it, you go back to what you’re doing now. By that time, we’ve got our new hires. We’ve already got one dead SWAT officer who we might be able to sign if Phoenix doesn’t grab him first.”
    “We’ve got to be able to announce something to the press today,” Clemens added. “We need you onboard for this.”
    “Linda, what do you say?” Munroe asked. The chief and Clemens glanced at Alex’s empty chair, then at her.
    “There’s already a lot of people who resent me having this job. If I get attached to SWAT …”
    “We can deal with that,” the chief said.
    “Three months. We don’t like it, we go back to what we’re doing now,” she said.
    “And if you screw with us,” Munroe said, “we raise so much stink with the press …”
    Damn it, Alex, don’t get us fired, she thought, afraid he went too far, but the chief said, “It won’t ever come to that.”
    “It’s OK with me, Linda,” Munroe said.
    She thought a few seconds before answering. While in the academy, she thought SWAT was a possibility, but after just a year on patrol, she knew she’d hate it. As an ordinary officer, she was responsible for herself. When something big happened, a sergeant came out and took the responsibility. She didn’t doubt her ability, but she did know her limits.
    In her four years, she’d never had a situation where she thought she might really have to shoot someone. She’d trained her gun on an armed suspect several times, of course, but so far either the suspect had put down the weapon or had been hit with a TASER or she was just one of a number of