good men never hunt trouble

Littlegirlcop would be moderately embarrassed to read in a blog that he loved old Louis L'Amour paperbacks. He'd be more embarrassed if it said he read Harlequin romance books: which he doesn't. And he'd be much less embarrassed if it said he read old crime paperbacks: which he has but only rarely. What Murphy loved about these books was what he loved about police work: in the end, good triumphed over bad. He also liked the orderliness of their universe where the world functioned in structured and explainable ways. Littlegircop loved that the good guy got the girl. He loved that these women were both beautiful and strong. He liked that they were described as someone you'd ride the river with. He liked the men too. The bad ones were tough but the good guys were tougher. The good men never hunted trouble, but they never shyed away from it when confronted. Murphy thought these good guys were the kind of men any guy would want to be and any gay man would want to be with. They had names like Sandy Bob, Buster Jig and William Tell Sackett. If Murphy ever had a son (or a black labrador retriever) he'd want to give him a name like that. While he knew that the cowboys of the nineteen sixties books and country songs were much more fiction than fact, when he heard Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings sing about them, he felt in a small way they'd seen inside him.

On his drive to the station house that morning he sang along to the tape of "Mamma's don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys" and he felt a cut above the countless thousands trapped with him in the morning commuter traffic. If you cut Murphy at that moment, he'd have bleed cowboy blood. For that moment he was someone to ride the river with, well that's at least what he hoped.