Sudden Exposure by Susan Dunlap

taking it.
    A smile settled on my face as I looked at my friends. Hanging around the station after a ten-hour shift was a sizable gift on their parts. And, I thought looking at them, in this case a gift from the best-looking guys in patrol. Tall, sleek, Mercurio Acosta looked like he should be holding a French cigarette between his fingers. Paul Murakawa, at thirty-two, still abashedly brushed a swatch of thick black hair off his forehead before he spoke and would probably always look like the all-American kid. Howard had his head of red curls, his lantern chin, and his “something’s up” grin, and Leonard …well, Leonard wasn’t going to be doing beefcake calendars, but he was still in with the best in my book.
    “I suppose Howard”—I nodded at him as he pulled out his chair and stretched his legs at the required angle—“told you about Sam Johnson, the nouveau entrepreneur.”
    Leonard shook his shaggy head. The man looked like the oldest bear in the circus. The joke around the station was the department should get him a funny hat and transfer him to bike patrol. “I wondered what happened to Sam. Haven’t seen him on the Avenue in months. He even skipped the last People’s Park confront. To tell the truth, I almost miss the guy.”
    “Loses the pizzazz without him?” Acosta asked, wiping off the top of his can before he drank.
    Leonard nodded, but before he could go on, Howard leaned back in his chair and said, “Do you remember the Persian Gulf protest on San Pablo?”
    Leonard nodded—no department-related maneuver escaped him. But Acosta frowned questioningly. That was enough for Howard.
    “The Persian Gulf protest was vintage Sam Johnson. I’ve got to hand it to him, pain in the ass that it was. He gets fifty of his disciples to sit down in the intersection of San Pablo and University. Twenty after five on a Friday afternoon. Traffic’s pouring off the freeway, all four lanes of both streets are full. Calls are flooding the station like every driver in town’s got a cellular phone—and this was back when every driver didn’t. I go flying out of here, get in the car code three.”
    Pereira thrust one hand on top of her head for the light and the other in front of her mouth, more of a bull horn than a siren, but no one quibbled.
    “I get to University and it’s stopped dead. Up here, a mile from the site. It hasn’t been five minutes since the first call! I drive on the grass divider as far as I can then I just give up, leave the car, and run the rest of the way. “Course when I get to San Pablo, Johnson’s crew is long gone. Traffic jam lasted another two hours.”
    “But you knew it was Johnson,” Murakawa put in.
    “Oh, yeah. It had his touch. But what could I do? Blocking an intersection is a traffic infraction. Believe me, citizens who’ve just spent hours sitting in their cars aren’t anxious to sign a citizen’s arrest form so they can repeat the experience in municipal court.”
    “When the press guys asked Sam why he’d felt free to inconvenience half of Berkeley,” Leonard said, “he did the tried-and-true thing—he blamed George Bush!”
    We had all heard the story before, but we laughed anyway.
    Pereira and Acosta smiled and drank as if their Calistoga cans were operated by one switch. But Leonard held his thoughtfully. “Yeah, Sam Johnson really believes he’s … well, not making a better world as much as hacking away at the bad one. But the thing is”—now he was talking to me—“what you see is not what you get with him. Maybe it’s a midlife crisis.”
    “What are you telling me, Leonard?”
    “To be careful, Smith. Sam could have gone over to the good life, but maybe not. Maybe he’s got one last, desperate move in mind. And if he does, it’ll be a beaut. Don’t get lulled by Howard’s prank tales. Or Johnson’s Puckish charm. The man’s like an IRA terrorist. One minute he’s buying you a pint and filling your ears with blarney about freedom for