Beauty Queen

smothered by the smell and feel of thousands of excited angry bodies pouring past her.
    "Move along," she kept saying if anyone paused.
    Not far away, Danny had his back to the barricades too, and was actually keeping up an unsmiling banter with the crowd. "Move on now. Just be free and do your thing, that's okay. But keep it quiet. We don't want anybody to get hurt____"
    Mary Ellen wondered if Colter was there in the office. Probably not. That woman probably didn't have the guts to face the people she had destroyed with a vote.
    Mary Ellen kept moving them along too. She kept her hand away from her gun, and tried to keep an expression of friendly disinterest on her face.
    Now and then she could see the leather men go into action. Down the line, a couple of hotheaded kids were about to mix it up with the cops. The leather boys swooped in like eagles and the kids found themselves being whisked out of the crowd and scolded by their own kind. The cops watched unsmilingly.
    Suddenly, from the mob closer to her, someone heaved up a Molotov cocktail. It went flying over Mary Ellen's head. The thrower's aim was short, however. The bottle splashed harmlessly into a pool of flame on the empty sidewalk in front of the headquarters. A cop quickly put it out with a foam-thrower.
    As Mary Ellen's nerves reacted to this with a hot rush of their own, she saw a disturbance in the crowd, out there where the bottle had been thrown from. Just a ripple, like when a big trout comes flashing to the surface to snap up an insect. She saw a couple of leather caps and broad backs moving away, and someone being pushed between them.
    She pretended not to see.
    It was the longest night she had ever spent.
    And sometime during it, a young lesbian leaned out of the crowd at her, said, "Woman pig," and spat in her face.
    Mary Ellen controlled herself with clenched hands. She looked the lesbian directly in the eyes and said, "Sister, you don't know me."
    The lesbian flushed, understanding her meaning, and moved on hastily.
    After midnight, the crowd started to taper off.
    When they finally went off duty, Mary Ellen and Danny dragged themselves to Mary Ellen's apartment.

Liv was waiting up for them, drained with worry. Switching from channel to channel, she had caught glimpses of the walk-by on the evening news. She sat the two exhausted cops down at the kitchen table, and poured two strong cups of coffee.
    Danny slumped down in his chair.
    "I'm fed up," he said.
    Mary Ellen propped her elbows on the table, put her head on her bands, and closed her aching eyes. She could still feel the girl's spit on her face.
    "Was Armando out there tonight?"
    "No, he wasn't," said Danny. "We had a discussion about it. Not a fight, you understand. Just a discussion. He said he wasn't going to go because he sincerely believes that somebody should take Colter out."
    "Hard to blame him for thinking that," said Mary Ellen, getting up and fishing in a kitchen drawer for the aspirin bottle. She took two. "On the other hand, the guys who were there got you and me off the hook, didn't they?"
    "Yeah, sure, this time," said Danny. "What about next time?"
    "Look," said Mary Ellen, "you want to come out? Come out. And start job-hunting right away."
    Liv sat listening to them with her eyes full of pain, stroking Kikan on her lap.
    "I like being a cop," said Danny. "But I like feeling good about myself too. I don't like the way I feel anymore. Everybody at the Spike thinks I'm a truck driver. Well, I might as well be one. Better be a truck driver and free than what I am now." Mary Ellen started to speak, but he kept talking. "Look, I'm not passing judgment on you. You're carrying on this family tradition, and it's harder for you to think of giving it up. Me, the only tradition I have is Danny Blackburn."
    "I'm not trying to stop you," said Mary Ellen. "Go ahead and try it, and see how far you get. I don't like how I feel either, and I have to find my own way. But I support you one hundred percent, whatever you decide."
    The next day Mary Ellen went through her usual routine of visiting with Sam and Jewel. At Pier 36, Sam bit into the cheeseburger she brought him. He wasn't too interested in hearing about the walk-by. He said:
    "You lose one, you win one."
    "What do you mean, Sam?" she asked.
    "Well," he said, "the city council voted my rights down, right? But I got my library back."
    "You mean the Mattachine books are safe?" she said.
    He grinned. "The Church of the Beloved