My What a Pretty Bus
Although she'd been dead on her feet, Julie lay staring at the ceiling, sleep evading her. Finishing her third assignment, she still couldn't quite come to terms with the fact that she was a police officer. Of all the careers she could have chosen for herself, that one would have never crossed her mind. She thought back to the pile of money, phony, but looking like the real thing and how the three of them had bagged it up. And then the wine that had knocked her and Linc out.
And then her mind wandered to Linc, and to Pete. They were strangers to each other not so very long ago and here they working together like they had known each other forever. A small smile crossed her lips as she thought about her new partners. She had an easy going relationship with Linc, and there was definitely some spark of chemistry between her and Pete and when she thought about how Pete and hugged them that day, she felt like she belonged somewhere, as a part of something, for the first time in her life. His embrace felt good and Linc's comment about it being a family reunion was accurate. That was how it felt. And as she slowly drifted off to sleep, she actually looked to a future that held promise.
Not far away, Julie wasn't the only one staring at the ceiling. Linc's thoughts were as jumbled as Julie's. Being a cop was also the last career that Linc could have envisioned himself doing, but if someone would have told him he'd end up with two white partners, one even being female, he would have thought them mad. Yet that's exactly where he found himself when just a few weeks ago he would have claimed every white person to be racist – an idea engrained in him from growing up in Watts. Yet his new partners really weren't. They didn't see black/white, they saw him as a person and he too couldn't deny that there was a chemistry between them. And so far they had solved every case they'd been given, so maybe they not only discovered a place to belong but a skill they were good at. Rolling over her grinned to himself as he recalled kidding Julie about the pretty bus resembling a Julie Barnes' pizza.
The third member of the terrific trio was not lying in bed staring at the ceiling. Clothed in his pajamas, robe, and slippers he was propped up on his couch but no matter how hard he try his eyes would not stay focused on the page of the book in front of him. Out of the three of them, Pete most definitely thought the idea of a Mod Squad was ridiculous. In fact, he really didn't even know why he went along with it, and he swore that first case would be his last. Why he agreed to come back, he didn't know, but some higher power got him to agree to the Captain's request.
Growing up a rich kid, he'd also grown up as a selfish kid. As he'd told his partners 'everything had to be his way.' Whether it was the reason he didn't quite fit in or the result, he wasn't sure but he just always felt he was somewhere he didn't belong. Seeing Julie and Linc at the pier that day had stirred feelings in him that he'd never felt. Even he didn't know until that moment how much he cared about them and when he took them into a hug and told them he was just happy to see them he wasn't kidding. He was happy to see them and Linc said it best when he called it a family reunion. That's how it felt for Pete, for the first time, like a family. He wasn't a fortune teller and didn't know where this would lead but something inside of him told him that these two people were going to play an important part of his life as the last of the trio slipped into sleep.
