"Charles L. Grant - Whose Ghosts These Are" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Charles L)

Retirement, on the other hand, was, in the beginning, good.

He had loved his blue tunic and the brass buttons and the polished belt with its gleaming attachments,
refusing promotions once he had reached sergeant because he’d wanted nothing to do with the politics of
being an officer, nothing to do with other parts of the city, nothing to do with anything but his job as he
had eventually defined and refined it.

He was a beat cop, nothing more, nothing less.

He wrote parking tickets and scolded kids who taunted other kids and old folks; he investigated minor
break-ins and petty theft; he had heart-to-hearts with shoplifters and angry spouses; he broke up fights
and arrested drunks and gossiped and swapped jokes and had once spent an hour on a damp stoop with
a little girl, trying to reattach the head of her doll.

He was a beat cop.

And now, at long last in his mid-fifties, he was something else, and he wasn’t sure yet what that was.

That was the bad part.

In a way, it was kind of funny, that first day away from the Job. He had slept in, a sinful luxury whose
guilt he had cheerfully grinned away; he had made a slow breakfast and read the paper and done a little
cleaning of his second-floor apartment; and when at last habit grabbed him by the scruff, he had taken
out a new denim jacket and had gone for a walk. The street first, of course, then several others north and
south. Not too far afield, but far enough. Restraining himself from checking closed shop doors, the timing
on parking meters, the alleys between buildings, the empty lots.

It had been an effort.

It had nearly worn him out.

It hadn’t been until that evening, while he ate a sandwich in front of his living-room window and watched
the street put itself to bed, that he’d realized no one had greeted him with anything more than a polite
nod, complained to him, whined at him about the injustices the city had settled upon their shoulders and
why the hell couldn’t he do something about it.

The good part was, he didn’t have to answer them anymore, didn’t have to lie or be a confessor or a
teacher or a parent who happened to have a gun on his hip.
The bad part was… nights when he couldn’t sleep because he was supposed to be on shift, nights when
he slept and didn’t dream and woke up feeling as if he’d walked a hundred miles with a hundred-pound
pack on his back, nights when nightmares of horribly distorted and twisted faces pressing close to his
face made him sit up and scream—except the scream was only a hoarse croaking, and the nightmare
itself eventually began to lose some of its terror when he figured they were the faces of the angry victims
he couldn’t help and the angry culprits he had apprehended over the course of thirty years.

Over a year later, he and the nightmares had become old friends. But his friends on the street still looked
at him oddly.

“It’ll take some getting used to, you know,” said Lana Hynes for at least the hundredth time, dropping