Raines2007

Raines:
Maybe I read too many detective books when I was a kid: Chandler, Hammett, Macdonald, all the great California guys of the 40's and 50's. I even tried writing a story once, couldn't get past page one. Too many decisions; where do you find the body? 'Cause all these stories start with a body, right? Do you find it by a pool under a sunset the color of a blood orange, or is night with the twinkling lights of the city? And what about the victim? A movie producer in a sharkskin suit, who we think probably got what he deserved? Some beautiful starlet who fell in with the wrong crowd, and never saw it coming? But you know the real reason that I never wrote one of those stories? I became a cop. And I found out the images that I had in my head weren't like real life. Take the case that I got this morning. The body wasn't found by a swimming pool, high in the hills. It turned up in a parking lot by the 101. And the victim wasn't some movie weasel or starlet. It was a poor young woman in cargo pants and sneakers, with a bullet hole in her back laying facedown in the pavement.