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playing the game -- rick austin (takingsides) wrote in bellumlogs,

No matter what anyone tells you, police work is sixty percent paperwork and calls and forty percent waiting. Rick was a practiced, patient waiter--not the kind that serves drinks, the other kind. To pass the time, he started going through the first dozen karate pinan katas he knew in his mind, unhurried, one by one. He knew a guy on the department that just stopped doing everything when he waited, just sat there and breathed, and some other guy that watched movies in his head from memory--most others got a smoking habit, chewed sunflower seeds, that kind of thing. As he visualized the motions in his mind, he absently shifted his weight from hip to heel to toe and back.

Several minutes later his phone rang. The conversation was short, and went like this: "Austin." (He had a pleasant phone voice, the epitome of conversational, though surprisingly low, like a cat's purr.) "No, it's my night off. ...Really. ...Did he pick him out of a line-up? ...Nice. ...No, don't wait. Go for it. ...No. I'm moving. ...Uh-huh. Let me know how it goes. Don't get shot." (Smirk.) "You too." He hung up without an additional farewell, and went back to midway through the fifth kata (crane spreads wings).