AfterNet 01 - Good Cop Dead Cop

cops. So she’d never shot anyone or been in a situation where she was about to pull the trigger. She’d trained for it and was fully prepared to shoot to protect herself or others, but she hoped she might go her whole career as a cop and never have to do it. If she joined SWAT, however, she knew her chances of shooting someone certainly would be higher.
    And she had to admit, the risk was an issue. It didn’t make sense, but she could accept that every day on the job, she could get killed at any time. But it was a small chance spread out over a large period. A SWAT officer’s risk of injury or death, however, occurred in very small periods of time but the risk was very high. They were called to do any hazardous entry, remove barricaded suspects or raid meth labs. She wasn’t that eager to become a disembodied cop herself.
    “For three months, OK,” she said, regretting it already.
    The chief smiled and Munroe regretted it when he saw the smile. “Now, let’s talk about the press conference,” the chief said.
    “So I didn’t look weird this time, you’re sure?” she asked Munroe later that evening.
    For the third time, he said, “You looked fine. You were great, very professional. No snot, I swear.” She’d not had time to pack a lunch, so they had stopped at the Sixth and Grant universe of fast food restaurants so she could get a burrito and she was eating it in their car. She was trying to eat quickly so they could get back to the station and catch up on the disembodied witness reports that had piled up over their weekend. Beans and rice were squished out of the tortilla as she ate and plopped to the napkins on her lap and from there to the floor of the car.
    “It’s not that I’m vain or anything, you know that. But after that last time,” she said, talking as she ate. Not every word was intelligible to him, but he got the gist of it. He wished she would stop worrying about her appearance and onto more important matters.
    “Did I do OK?” he asked. For the press conference, they’d again hooked up the terminal to speakers so he could address the reporters directly. It had been a challenge to get the reporters to ask their questions one at a time, so she’d taken their questions and relayed them to him.
    “What have you got to worry about? Sorry. Yes, you handled the press very well. I wish you could have been like that last week.” She was impressed by Munroe’s careful answers. He must have had a lot of experience with press conferences when he was the famous Strangler detective, she assumed. He worried that he’d slipped into official police jargon and cringed when he remembered that he’d used the word “re-purpose.”
    They’d both been energized by the press conference and had tried to make the best of their re-assignment and not voiced any doubts.
    She stopped in mid-munch. “We’re so totally screwed, aren’t we?”
    “Yeah, we are. I think we oversold it. I mean when you get on a roll, you’re pretty hard to stop.”
    “Me? What about … well, whatever. The problem is that it does make sense.”
    Munroe had to agree. If you only have one disembodied officer, it makes sense to use him on SWAT. It’s just my hard luck if it doesn’t fit in with my wants and desires.
    She got out of the car to dump the remains of her burrito and returned. “We’d better get back and work on those reports. And who the hell’s going to do them when we switch?”
    He thought the answer was obvious. “I am, of course. Or at least, I’ll be the one who sorts through them. I won’t be able to follow-up any of them.”
    She was driving up Lincoln to get back to the department. “I don’t understand,” she said.
    “You’re going to be too busy because of training, which should be just about done when the three months are up, you know. So then they’ll say, give it another three months because you really haven’t had a chance yet.”
    “Or I wash out.”
    “I don’t think you’ll wash out. But I won’t need any training. Yeah, I’ll have to learn their names, their procedures. I’ll be involved in exercises. But you know SWAT. Most of their time is spent either training, cleaning weapons or stupid crap like nuisance abatement and community involvement. I won’t need to be around for that stuff so I’ll probably have time to sort the reports and route them.”
    “Oh, poor Alex. Meanwhile all I have to do is hundreds of pushups and hours of playing commando.”
    She parked