Big Sky Blues — Robert Sims Reid

Even in a small town, street rules apply. That means you handcuff everybody. Even the dead and dying. When two cops spend hour after hour together on the street, policing the bleak hours between midnight and dawn of a Montana winter, they live by street rules. They also get to know things about
each other. Sometimes, they know more about their partner than about themselves. Or think they do. Often, they become lifelong friends, until something happens. And something always happens in those bleak hours.

How do you treat a friend who kills a man to save your life? Rescues you, the world proclaims, from a situation that you had under control? And if you are that friend, how do you deal with somehow who is ungrateful for the favor? How do you deal with the judgment that you made a foolish mistake, and someone else had to pick up the tab so that you could go home to your family? So that he could go home to a stark room and his memories of a war the whole country wants to forget?

How do you keep going on the street -- and at home -- after the daytime hours turn bleak, too?