Book 2: Chapter 4: A Day in the Life (1/2)
”Domestic disturbance reported in Parkwood,” Connor's radio crackled. ”Delta-314 please respond.”
He blinked past his burrito as Freya snagged the receiver off its loop in their patrol car. ”Delta-314 responding, go ahead dispatch.”
”Got a milk run here for you two,” the dispatcher teased. Like most in the department, she was perfectly aware of who Connor was, and who his family was. Freya's connections to the department were less solid, but she was no less noteworthy. They were widely considered the babies of the APD, something Connor doubted would be going away any time soon.
He'd been partnered with Freya in an incredibly overt show of nepotism that he was having trouble complaining about. They were both rookies, despite their prestigious backgrounds, and without a senior officer around to babysit them, it was unlikely that they would be allowed to do anything more dangerous than a car stop.
In other words, every run was a milk run, and the dispatcher was not nearly as clever as they thought they were. But that was nothing new.
He wolfed down the rest of his lunch as Freya noted down the details from the dispatcher. A domestic disturbance in a middle-class neighborhood. The caller had reported loud shouting and sounds of things breaking. It was more a noise complaint than an actual emergency. A rowdy couple having a standard dispute, Connor presumed, but still worth checking on.
Bite, chew, swallow. Connor crumpled up the wax paper his lunch had been wrapped in and stuffed it into a brown paper bag. The trash made pleasant crinkling sounds as he squashed the whole thing flat, then he briskly brushed his hands against the soft linen of his pants. Small grains of rice rained down on his seat and the car's rubber floor mat. Freya shot him a withering look as she finished scribbling down the last details of their assignment, and Connor couldn't quite hide an affectionate smile.
He started up their cruiser while Freya punched in the address to the built in GPS. Connor drove down the familiar streets of his city. He'd lived in Austin his entire life, and with law enforcement being the 'family business', so to speak, he'd made an effort to explore as much as was safe. Parkwood wasn't a particularly affluent area of town, but it was considered to be unusually safe. Limited gang activity, few crimes to speak of, and populated almost entirely by middle-class white collar workers, Parkwood was the perfect location to park a pair of rookies to keep them out of trouble.
It felt like busy work. But it wasn't! Connor would never downplay the importance of the job he'd spent his entire life preparing for. What he and Freya were doing was important, he knew that, it just wasn't quite as overt at the moment. He wasn't bitter; truly, he wasn't. This was what he'd wanted. To be a defender, a watchman, a pillar of a community. He'd leave the glory to people like his uncle. He was perfectly happy here, being the courteous face of the APD, and helping civilians with whatever small problems they faced.
Damn, though, was Connor shit at it. Community policing, Connor quickly realized, was a hell of a lot easier if you were part of the community. He'd spent his entire life in fairly outrageous affluence, living in the gated community of Grey Rock. His home was a mansion built on the side of what was, more or less, a mountain. Connor couldn't have been more separated from the community if he'd tried.
It wasn't that he was incapable of sympathizing, or communicating, with his fellow citizens. He was a human being, he had empathy, and training, and wasn't a complete moron. The real problem was that he was apart from those who he was supposed to police. He was other, and somehow every person he encountered in the inner city instantly knew it. Some odd affectation of diction or mannerism tended to immediately give away Connor for what he was: a wealthy scion of law enforcement.