TO SERVE AND PROTECT

 

A few years ago……five, six, It’s hard to tell.  Time blurs after a while.  But it’s a fine, fair Saturday morning and I am standing on the 16^th Street Mall, the pride of Denver.  A ‘Great City’ by all accounts.  World class.

A well dressed matron approaches me and asks directions to a nearby hotel.  Old money, I take her to be.  Very refined and indeed a pleasure to be of service to.  I give her directions, she thanks me and goes on her way.

As I turn to leave another woman stops me.  This one is about 35, blonde and wearing a powder blue plaid wool skirt.  She looks like she should be teaching Freshman English in a high school.  Then it gets a little strange.  She propositions me.  Me!  Jesus, I’m an old man.  (Well, not that old.)  I am standing there thinking, “Look whores do NOT work the 16^th St. Mall.  Ever! And particularly not at Ten o’clock on a Saturday morning”  I ask her why she picked me and she says because she had seen me talking to that lady.  I am starting to think I have been catapulted into the Twilight Zone.  Anyone with any sense would have fled for their life at this point but nobody ever gave me credit for having much sense.  So I think I would like to run with this.  I invite her into a nearby McDonalds.  (What McDonalds isn’t nearby?)

   I buy the coffee and we take a booth.  I ask her why she is hooking.  She says she is doing it to make the rent.  This is at least plausible.  All of this without agreeing to her proposal.  So I ask her how much she wanted.  She says $150.

Now, unless you are into schoolteachers, there is no way that this broad is worth 150 bucks.  No!  Nyet! Nada! Never!

   This is going nowhere.  I am looking at her purse which she had placed on the table.  The fashion police comes out in me.  It does not match her outfit at all.  It is a cheap little square box with a hinged lid and a handle, like a school girl’s lunch pail.  It is just big enough to hold a snub nose .32 and a badge.  I made her for a cop about a minute after she stopped me but I like to play with fire.  I can usually spot a cop or a whore.  Little difference, really, at times.

  I am about to ask her to open the purse when she bolts.  I think she knows she had been made.  She went out the door.  A few minutes later I follow her.  I spot her a half a block away with her head stuck in the drivers’ window of a patrol car of the Denver Police Dept.  It is time to go.

About six months later I am again walking on the mall.  I walk past the horsie patrol.  This is something the city does to promote good will and photo ops for tourists and conventioneers.  And there, in a blue uniform and a cowboy hat and holding the reins of a horse, stands my whore.  There were many things I thought of to say to her but for once prudence dictated that I keep my mouth shut.

True Story.

Citizens, do you wonder where your tax money goes?

THE SHADOW KNOWS