The cop took a step back and slipped a little on the ice before catching himself on his cruiser.
"Since when do you kick unarmed civilians in the back?"
"He — he ran away. I had to catch him. I wanted to teach him not to run."
"By inspiring his trust in the evenhandedness of Toronto's Finest?" Hershie could see the cooling tracks of the cruiser, skidding and weaving through the projects. The kid had put up a good chase. Behind him, he heard the kid regain his feet and start running. The cop started forward, but Hershie stopped him with one finger, dead centre in the flak jacket.
"You can't let him get away!"
"I can catch him. Trust me. But first, we're going to wait for your backup to arrive, and I'm going to file a report."
A Sun reporter arrived before the backup unit. Hershie maintained stony silence in the face of his questions, but he couldn't stop the man from listening in on his conversation with the old constable who showed up a few minutes later, as he filed his report. He found the kid a few blocks away, huddled in an alley, hand pressed to the small of his back. He took him to Mount Sinai's emerg and turned him over to a uniformed cop.
#
The hysterical Sun headlines that vilified Hershie for interfering with the cop sparked a round of recriminating voicemails from his mother, filled with promises to give him such a zetz in the head when she next saw him. He folded his tights and cape and stuffed them in the back of his closet and spent a lot of time in the park for the next few weeks. He liked to watch the kids playing, a United Nations in miniature, parents looking on amiably, stymied by the language barrier that their kids hurdled with ease.
On March first, he took his tights out of the overstuffed hall closet and flew to Ottawa to collect his pension.