He had worked another all-nighter, said goodbye to his partner Sanchez who was going home to her husband and two kids, finished writing up some reports and then swung by narcotics to say adios to an old friend who was retiring at the end of the week. Good for him. He liked the all-nighters. They kept his mind off the fact that he slept alone and that his son Lucas had moved across the country after being accepted into Princeton’s School of Architecture. Croker was proud. But he was lonely. His wife had died of breast cancer two years ago and Croker, who was a shoo-in for promotion to Lieutenant, had decided against taking the exam, preferring the stimulation (distraction) of the homicide beat to the more sedentary confines of an office. Nights were the hardest, and that’s why he preferred to spend them at work. He found it easier to sleep during the day with the sun squeezing through the cracks of his old but clean venetians and the white noise of the freeway reminding him he was not alone in a city filled with busy people with places to go and people to see and little time to think about it.
