Reese bolted around the corner of the alley with a quick pivot from his left leg, causing him to nearly take a spill on the cracked sidewalk. The force of his own lunge took him off guard – he didn’t normally need to run this fast on an average work day, but now those weeks of morning jogs were finally paying off.

The hooded figure slipped into the streets at the end of the alley, clearly with a considerable lead. Reese shook his head and kept up the pursuit while snatching the radio from his belt.

“Right behind him, going left along King Street. Backup!”

He returned the radio and fixed his eyes on the opening at the end of the alley. Through the gap between the buildings, King Street was brightly lit by a host of different colored lights. Horns and the humming of engines flowed from the city streets like the droning AC unit in Reese’s apartment. Traffic.

Like surfacing from a lake, the rush of sights and sounds enveloped Reese as he exited the alley onto a crowded sidewalk. Under labored breaths, he looked left to see several pedestrians craning their necks behind them.

Reese jostled a man in his way and took off down the sidewalk. Hopefully the badge on Reese’s chest would be all the apology he needed.

The radio at his hip squawked, but he paid it little attention. His team was coming.

Reese managed to keep sights on the crook down three more streets, determined to close the wide gap between them he’d unintentionally created earlier – next time he should just drop the hose rather than place it back in the pump.

Finally, the hooded man came to a portion of sidewalk blocked by construction tape. Normally this wouldn’t stop a criminal, but this particular construction project had removed the sidewalk entirely. Rather than take his chances leaping into the pit of concrete beyond the tape, the crook hesitated for a moment and looked toward the stopped city traffic. Reese could begin to see the crook’s foggy breath escaping into the cold night. He was gaining on the man.

“Hey!” Reese shouted.

The hooded man cast a quick glance at Reese, then dashed to a gap in the stopped cars and began crossing the congested street.

But Reese was already pulling up to the construction tape. He wasn’t exactly a veteran of the force, but he knew it was costing the man a lot of time to weave between six lanes of frozen traffic.

Taking barely a moment to think it through, Reese pulled up beside the closest car – a low-riding sedan, thankfully – and vaulted himself onto the hood with a quiet grunt. The car honked furiously at him, but there was no time to divert any attention from the chase.

Reese deftly leapt across car hoods where he could, drastically cutting the time it would take to maneuver around the individual vehicles. Sure, he was igniting a tidal wave of angry drivers who were already upset about the traffic, but Reese just told himself it was part of the job.

By the time the hooded man escaped past the last car to the sidewalk on the other side, Reese was leaping off the fifth car’s hood and rounding the truck in the sixth lane. Guy might want to think twice about robbing a gas station when a cop’s refilling, Reese thought. Yes, that was pretty stupid of him, wasn’t it?

Sirens were roaring closer to the scene somewhere down an adjacent street. Reese began sprinting.

The radio squawked again and Reese focused his eyes past the hooded man to see two cops running in from the other end of the street. They were going to cut the man off!

His two partners up ahead yelled, and the crook saw them coming. Boy, his buds were charging in fast!

But just before either he or the pair of cops reached the crook, Reese saw the hood swing into an alley on the side and vanish.
           
Reese desperately slowed his momentum to avoid colliding with his allies, who had noticed the man’s quick thinking and were compensating their speed to angle into the alley.
           
“Around that corner!” one of the officers called, pointing to a bend in the alley itself. Reese followed behind.
           
The turn ended in a dead end, with three grey buildings walling off a deserted, filthy nook of the city. Two open alley dumpsters leaned against one of the buildings, empty despite the ground being absolutely littered with rotten food and large, black garbage bags.
           
On any other night, there would be nothing to see here.
           
But this night, a lone man in a grey hoodie stood in the dead end, struggling for breath and frantically looking for a means of escape. Reese and the two cops stopped to check the surroundings, then all three closed in around the man, offering him a little space. One of the other cops already had a pistol drawn on the man.
           
“Put your hands behind your head!” one of Reese’s colleagues ordered. The hooded man turned and faced the squad. His body was trembling, though the understood fear in his eyes was masked by the shade of the hood.
           
“Behind your head!” the officer barked. “Now! I said right now!”
           
Reese stood still in a ready state, his heart pounding as he tried to catch his chilled breath. The loud sirens were ceasing, and car doors were slamming. They were already surrounding the alley.
           
After a moment, the crook slowly lifted both hands into the air.
           
“Behind your head now!” the officer repeated forcefully. Then he added, “On the ground!” The crook’s hands clamped onto his neck, and carefully he sank his body to his knees.
           
Seeing the surrender, the officer motioned for Reese to cuff the man now prone on his stomach. The third cop stood by with the gun pointed to the ground, intent to watch the arrest unfold.
           
Reese wiped the cold sweat off his brow and took the cuffs off his waist. He looked to the cop holding the crook down. “Thanks for coming in, Mac. Burned a few calories on that one.”
           
“I’ll say,” Mac said, looking up from the crook. “What are you getting yourself into, Reese? I know you’re a transfer, but you’ve only been with us for, what, a few weeks?”
           
Reese dismissed Mac with a wave and knelt with the cuffs. “I was filling up the cruiser when the clown ran out the station with some cash. Saw me and took off running. Manager came out yelling and I followed.” Reese shook his head and chuckled. “I’m telling you Mac…”
           
Suddenly the crook rolled over with surprising speed and force, grunting loudly. Reese recoiled, but something about the grunt caught him off guard. Something about the way it sounded.
           
Before he could react, a fist crashed into Reese’s temple, sending him reeling from his crouch onto his back. He yelled, but the noise was drowned out by a ringing in his head, as was the ensuing conflict between Mac and the crook, whose hood had fallen off.
           
Reese strained to watch through slightly blurred vision as more cops from the cruisers rushed to the aid of Mac. Reese nodded to the cops that came to check on him, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the crook, who was now back on the ground with both hands behind his back.
           
But that was where, as his vision cleared, Reese realized he was wrong. The crook had both hands behind her back.
           
The woman’s blonde hair had come out of a ponytail - once trapped in the hood - and was draped over her back while her face lay halfway in the filth of the alley, partly facing Reese. The cops were swarming her like buzzards and quickly getting her cuffed, but all the while her eyes remained on Reese.

There was fear in them.
           
She had assaulted him out of fear. In a strange moment of the revelation, Reese felt pity for her. It was a shame such a pretty young woman was now headed to do time.
           
The cops yelled commands at her. They stood her up and forcefully marched her down the alley. She cried out in pain as they pressed her arms against her back. A few cops gave Reese a nod as they passed; Mac approached him and patted him on the back.
           
“You okay, bud? She clocked you good.”
           
“Yeah. It wasn’t much, I’m fine.”
           
Mac smiled and blinked, then walked away chuckling.
           
But Reese stood alone. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t get the woman’s eyes out of his head. There was a life there, a purpose, an innocence. She made a mistake out of desperation, he was sure of it. How could he blame her? Could he blame any of them? He was just doing his job.
           
Reese rubbed his head, cleared his throat, and went to regroup with the officers. The cruiser with the woman had already pulled away, lost to the multitudes of society like the unheeded messenger it was.

 
Reese opened his eyes and took a deep breath as the memories left him. His office chair creaked as he leaned back and stared at the man plastered on the computer screen. The man was him, younger and new to the force at the time the photo was taken. The younger Reese was leaning against a wall in his old office at the station, smiling beneath a ceiling fan that probably hummed much like the one presently spinning in his home workspace. Since the photo, he had achieved several promotions, and was now able to do some work at home – certainly a nice benefit after chasing baddies for years.
           
After chasing the woman, too. That night still scurried around his head like an incessant gnat, even after all the years. He knew why, of course.
           
The computer screen emitted his own face for a few seconds longer before he closed the window. Reese stood from his desk and grabbed some paper for the copier when a scream came from the hallway behind him.
           
“Daddy!”
           
Reese turned to hug his son, now six, who galloped into the room and leaped into his embrace. He rubbed Alan’s smooth blonde hair and set him down. Only when Reese looked up did he see his wife standing in the doorway, smiling. Alan charged past her and ran excitedly to his room.
           
“Getting work done?” his wife asked playfully.
           
“Actually, I was. Really.” He approached her and grabbed one of her lovely hands. “Just thinking about those days when I was new to the force.”
           
She wore a knowing smile and looked him in the eye. “So you were thinking of us.”
           
Reese looked to the floor. “Of course.” He lifted his head and met her eyes again. “Shelly, how did that happen? I mean, how did we happen?”
           
“You know.”
           
He angled his head and smirked. “Tell me.”
           
She sighed, but he knew she loved telling it. “Well, I punched you. Then you visited me. In prison, that is. And then… well, you know. I got out. We met up. Rehab. Marriage. Kids. The whole act. Ten years later, here we are.”
           
“It’s just so strange!” he chuckled.
           
Shelly’s eyebrows arched. “What do you mean?”
           
“It’s just… Well, when you say it like that, it sounds so simple. So weird. Love is supposed to be complex and we just… I don’t know.”
           
She put her free hand on his shoulder. “Fell in love?”
           
“Well, yes. It really doesn’t make sense at all, Shel.”
           
“Maybe it’s not supposed to.”
           
They held each other in his workspace for a bit longer. At length, Reese broke the silence. “And it was all because you needed the extra money for dope. Pretty low, Shelly, pretty low.”
           
She withdrew from his embrace with a grin. “I could punch you, Reese.”