Cherry top

And it was less than five minutes before a black-and-white turned off Wisconsin Avenue onto P Street to investigate, its spotlight sweeping back and forth and its cherrytop spinning.

But we could hear it, we were happy, and we were as unprepared as we possibly could have been for the piercing white strobe and swirling red cherrytop of the police car that swooped in from nowhere and pulled up behind us.

As a police armored car with an earthmover-blade for a battering ram smashed through the barricade by the Citibank, whirling the watery-neon shine of its cherrytop beacon over the lizard-skin asphalt, cops in armor and heavy riot gear booming out unintelligible warnings with bullhorns, firing tear gas, the rioters scattering...