Officer Escobar was not having a great day.  Started too early.  Not enough donuts at the station (and those that were there were of criminally poor quality).  Too many actual crimes.  Not enough down time.  Too much heat.  Not enough fans.

Officer Escobar was not having a great day, but he was willing to admit the possibility that other people were having worse ones.  Take Officer Tang, for example.  She had burst into the precinct mid-morning demanding assistance in arresting someone.  That was astonishing in and of itself, for Tang never asked for anybody’s help for anything, but then when she started describing the situation, it got downright ludicrous.  A person that physically could not be moved from the scene of the crime?  Come on.  No one believed her, but that wasn’t about to stop her.  She tried to convince anyone and everyone she could find—sergeants, lieutenants, the captain, the coroner, homicide detectives, ballistics specialists.

Escobar, luckily, was lowly enough to escape her notice, so he spent much of the morning watching her running around the building yelling at people.  Last he heard she had gone off to the courthouse to try to get the judge to order her arrestee to be removed.

Then there was this kid.  Escobar had taken him into an interrogation room—not because he wanted to scare him, but just because that was where there was space—sat him down, and asked him to explain himself.  Finally Peter was in a position where he felt he had to tell the whole truth.  And I mean the whole truth.  He told him about pouring coffee in his cereal, the muted wrath of Mr. Abrahamson, accidentally stumbling on a couple of sites that may have been pornographic when searching the term “earworm,” being silently mocked by Sourdough for the decay of his musical talent, and stealing a nickel from a saxophone player.  Officer Escobar had heard of bad days before; he had participated in a number himself.  But this one stretched the boundaries of the imagination.

And yet he believed every word.  When the boy mentioned the old woman in the subway station, on the outside, Escobar simply nodded.  On the inside, he jumped out of his shoes.  He had kept his vow to avoid Simon Park Station all those months, but he had never truly forgotten the old woman.  So she had found her champion.  He looked like kind of a mess.  Escobar, in one of his more philosophical moments, supposed that real champions often do.

Even more shockingly, Officer Tang’s story all of a sudden made perfect sense.  In her frantic ravings, she had somehow neglected to mention the age, gender, or location of the person she was trying to apprehend.  If she had, she might have secured assistance sooner.

Escobar wanted to find out more about the woman, for the bits of information he picked up from Tang and the kid really raised more questions than they answered.  And he wanted to let the kid go.  He hadn’t done anything seriously wrong.  But there were some crimes that even Officer Escobar could not overlook.  If you did something to a fellow citizen, he might glance the other way—hey, maybe that person deserved it.  But if you did that same thing to the police, then you would be introduced to justice of the biblical variety.