Hard News

concerned citizens about as much as he liked his hemorrhoids and he almost felt sorry for the petty street dealers and hangers-out and drunks who got pushed around by these wild-eyed, lecturing, upstanding, taxpaying citizens—the women being the worst. But he’d studied community relations at the Police Academy and so now, though he couldn’t bring himself to smile pleasantly at this short woman, he nodded as if he were interested in what she had to say.
    “You guys aren’t doing a good job patrolling. My little girl and I were out on the street, just taking a walk—”
    “Yes, miss. Did someone hassle you?”
    She gave him a glare for the interruption. “We were taking a walk and do you know what we found on the street?”
    “Nade,” the little girl said.
    The cop infinitely preferred to talk to the little girl. He may have hated intense, short, concerned citizens but he loved kids. He leaned forward, grinning like a department-store Santa the first day on the job. “Honey, is that your name?”
    “Nade.”
    “Uh-huh, that’s a pretty name.” Oh, she was so goddamn cute, he couldn’t believe it. The way she was digging in her own little patent-leather purse, trying to look grown up. He didn’t like the lime-green miniskirt she was wearing and he was thinking maybe the sunglasses around the girl’s neck, on that yellow strap, might be dangerous. Her mother oughtn’t to be dressing her in that crap. Little girls should be wearing that frilly stuff like his wife bought for their nieces.
    The good-citizen mother said, “Show him what we found, baby.”
    The cop talked the singsongy language that adults think children respond to. “My brother’s little girl has a purse like that. What do you have in there, honey? Your dolly?”
    It wasn’t. It was a U.S. Army-issue fragmentation hand grenade. “Nade,” the girl said and held it out in both hands.
    “Holy Mary,” the cop gasped.
    The mother said, “There. Look at that, just laying on the street. We—”
    He hit the fire alarm and grabbed the phone, calling NYPD Central and reporting an explosive device.
    Then it occurred to him that the fire alarm wasn’t such a good idea because the forty or fifty officers in the building could get out only one of three ways—a back exit, a side exit and the front door, and most were choosing the front door, not eight feet from a child with a pound of TNT in her hands.
    What happened next was kind of a blur. A couple of detectives got the thing away from the girl and onto the floor in the far corner of the lobby. But then nobody knew exactly what to do. Six cops stood gawking at it. But the pin hadn’t been pulled and they got to talking about whether there was a hole drilled in the bottom of the grenade and how if there was that meant it was a dummy like they sold at Army-Navy stores and in ads in the back of
Field and Stream
. But whoever had put the thing in the corner had left it so that you couldn’t see the butt end and, since the Bomb Squad got paid extra money to do that sort of thing, they decided just to wait.
    But then somebody noticed it was in the sun and they thought that maybe that might set it off. They got into an argument because one of the cops had been in Nam, where it was a hundred and ten degrees in the sun and their grenades never went off but, yeah, this might be an old one and unstable….
    And if it did go they’d lose all their windows and the trophy case and somebody was bound to get fragged.
    Finally, the desk sergeant had the idea to cover the thing with a half-dozen Kevlar bulletproof vests. And they made a great project out of carefully dropping vests on the grenade one by one, each cop making a run, not knowing whether to cover his eyes or balls with his free hand.
    Then there they stood, these large cops, staring at a pile of vests until the Bomb Squad detectives arrived fifteen minutes later.
    It was about then that the concerned mother and the little girl, who nobody had noticed walk past the desk sergeant and into the file room of the deserted precinct house, slipped outside through the back door, the mother shoving some papers into her ugly leopard-skin shoulder bag.
    Holding her daughter’s hand, she walked through the small parking lot full of blue-and-whites and past the cop car gas pump then turned toward Columbus Avenue. A few cops and passersby glanced at them but no one paid her much attention. There was still way too much excitement going on at the station