Final justice - W.E.B. Griffin [5]
In the employees' locker room, he opened his locker and took his cellular telephone from his jacket, punched in 911, and when the voice said, "Police Radio?" he blurted: "This is the Roy Rogers restaurant at Broad and Snyder. Two black guys just shot the kitchen lady and a cop who walked in while they was robbing us."
This call too, coincidentally, was answered by Miss Regis. And again her experience told her the call was legitimate.
"Sergeant!" she called, raising her voice just to get his attention, not to ask his permission. Then she threw the appropriate switch.
Three fast, short beeps, signifying an emergency message, were broadcast to every police radio in Philadelphia.
Miss Regis pressed the switch activating her microphone.
"Assist the officer, Broad and Snyder, inside the Roy Rogers, report of an officer shot. Assist the officer, Broad and Snyder, inside the Roy Rogers, report of an officer shot. This is a civilian by phone, we have officers responding to a previous call of a possible armed robbery at that location."
[TWO]
The second vehicle to reach the Roy Rogers restaurant at South Broad and Snyder Streets in response to the first "possible armed robbery in progress" call over the F-Band was a new Buick Rendezvous CXL Sport Utility Vehicle, on the roof of which were three antennas capable of listening to police radio frequencies. A fourth antenna was mounted on the rear window, and just before getting close to Synder Street, the driver of the car switched off a flashing blue light with a magnetic base that he had put on the roof after hearing the call.
The driver, however, was not a sworn police officer of the Philadelphia police department, and--as had often been pointed out to him--using the flashing blue light on the roof to speed one's way through traffic was in violation of at least four laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, ranging from violation of Paragraph 4912 of the Criminal Code of Pennsylvania--impersonation of a public official, such as a police officer--to violation of Paragraph 6504 of the Criminal Code--setting up a nuisance in public.
The Rendezvous itself, and all the expensive radios and scanners, were the property of the Philadelphia Bulletin, with whom the driver, Michael J. "Mickey" O'Hara, a wiry, curly-haired man in his late thirties, was professionally associated. The magnetic base flashing blue light was the property of the Philadelphia police department, having been removed by Mr. O'Hara from a wrecked and burned unmarked car, rendering him liable to charges of having violated one or more of Paragraphs 3921, 3924, and 3925 of the Criminal Code, which deal with the unlawful taking of property.
Mr. O'Hara's association with the Bulletin went back twenty-one years, to his sixteenth year, when he was hired as a copyboy, shortly after having been expelled from West Catholic High School. Monsignor Dooley had caught Mickey with a pocketful of Francesco "Frankie the Gut" Guttermo's numbers slips, and when Mickey had refused to name his accomplice in that illegal and immoral enterprise, the monsignor had given him the boot.
Mickey had immediately found a home in journalism, and had become a reporter--the Bulletin said "staff writer"-- before he was old enough to vote. As he had risen in the Bulletin city room hierarchy, his remuneration had naturally increased. He had been perfectly happy with his relationship with the Bulletin and the compensation he was given until his childhood friend, Casimir Bolinski, had brought the subject up.
"Face it, Mickey, those bastards are screwing you," Casimir had said when passing through Philadelphia to visit his parents.
It was more than an idle observation; it was a professional one. Because Mickey had refused to name him as his fellow numbers runner, Casimir, already known as "The Bull," had graduated from West Catholic High, gone on to Notre Dame on a football scholarship, and from Notre Dame to the Green Bay Packers.
There, while his Packers teammates had spent their off seasons in various nonproductive