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"She called 911, whispered her address over and over in a high-pitched voice -- because she knew that's what they'd need first, how they'd find her -- that she was hurt, that she needed help, the words tumbling on top of one another in a clatter of syllables, indistinguishable."

-- Laurie Lynn Drummond

For eight years, Laurie Lynn Drummond worked as a cop.

A car crash ended her police career many years ago -- a career she admits she probably wouldn't have continued in anyway.

That said, you never really put the job behind you, as she makes clear.

Drummond confesses she still doesn't react to a siren the way that you and I probably do.

"I'm hyper-aware and alert, much more than other people," Drummond recently told ThisWeek. "I still tend to watch people's hands, I watch the face. There's that alertness I don't think you ever lose. I've talked to other police officers who have retired or left the department and they say, 'Yeah, it's always there.'"

Only now, many years after shifting gears into teaching and creative writing, can she tackle in prose the things she experienced as a law enforcement officer, first as a dispatcher while studying theatre at Ithaca College, and later as a cop in Baton Rouge.

Those experiences have been transfigured into a series of remarkable short stories, now gathered in Drummond's first book, Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You (HarperCollins, 250 pages, $23.95).

The collection is garnering stunning reviews and raves from the likes of ex-cop turned author Joseph Wambaugh and crime fiction elder statesman Elmore Leonard.

Anything You Say ... features five female Louisiana law enforcement officers.

Most of the women figure in two to three stories.

The women officers include one who is eventually killed in the line of duty. Another is a victims' support specialist. There is a female officer whose career was ended, like Drummond's own, by a car crash, and another who leaves the job after inadvertently precipitating a brutal act of vigilante justice against a suspected wife-killer.

Drummond is humbled by the praise her debut is receiving.

"I am just astounded and grateful and thrilled and giddy and it all doesn't quite seem real," Drummond said.

By the author's own estimation, it took approximately 12 years to complete and publish her collection of short stories. The shift of those stories from the private to the public sphere has been a somewhat disorienting one, she admits.

"It's rewarding," she said. "It starts to show that if you put in the time and really work at it, you can come up with something that people connect to ... You're on your own for so long and you have this kind of anonymous reader that you're writing for, then suddenly to be meeting people and reading what the readers have to say, it's really gratifying."

As a reader becomes aware of Drummond's own background in law enforcement -- and some of the events in her own former career that inform aspects of her stories -- it's hard not to wonder whether the author is concerned that the book will be regarded as something akin to nonfiction, or a roman ? clef.

"It's really inviting you into each one of these women's lives," the author said. "This comes out of my experiences ... I've heard from a lot of people that there seems to be a strong nonfiction narrative because these women seem to be 'real' in terms of talking about their experiences.

"For the most part, I have the opportunity to say, 'These come out of my experiences, but they are fiction,'" Drummond continued. "In 'Keeping the Dead Alive,' the only thing that is nonfiction there is that crime scene. I saw that photograph (of the murder scene) when I was in the academy and never forgot it. And the story grew out of that.

"On the other hand, the story 'Finding a Place' -- the fatality accident that I describe is word-for-word an accident that I worked that I could just never shake."

Drummond's women are all marked by their jobs and the violence attendant to their chosen careers.

In terms, of relationships, they connect best with other male cops. They take solace in the company of fellow officers and the strange, contained world in which they dwell. One female officer, after killing a man, reaches for the texts of the trade:

"Our departmental handbook stipulates: A police officer may use deadly force when her own life or the lives of others are in mortal danger. So it must be true."

Drummond's women are scarred by the job on the outside, too. They end their daily tours of duty in the shower, surveying the bruises to their bodies, "the constant, steady bruise on the hip-bone where my gun caresses the skin a deeper purple day after day ... My breasts are sore and tender from the bulletproof vest."

The author's story, "Taste, Touch, Sight, Sound, Smell" is a spiritual cousin to Hemingway's "A Natural History of the Dead" -- a morbid yet riveting meditation on violent death and its attendant prosaic realities.

One of these is the fact that most law enforcement agencies have a preferred dry-cleaner for those who work death scenes:

"Two washings, a steaming, and a buck-fifty off the regular price."

Though she tried her hand at writing about different subject matter, instructors guided Drummond back to her experiences as a law enforcement officer.

Reactions from police officers who have read Drummond's collection have been, she said, "enormously positive ... In particular, from the female officers, I'm getting enormously positive comments. I was very nervous about the level of emotional depth that I revealed. I was afraid that some officers would feel that I'd revealed too much, or there would be this knee-jerk reaction of 'that's so scary -- what she's writing about' ... that there might be that reaction."

Drummond is now working on a memoir entitled Losing My Gun, which will explore her evolution away from her former career and its tools.

"I gave up all guns about three-and-a-half years ago," Drummond said. "I do not have a gun any more. It took me a long time. It was a very deliberate decision."

In 2005, she will publish her first novel, Mother Blind.

"It's set in Baton Rouge and the main character is a police officer," Drummond said, previewing the book. "When she was 4 years old, her mother was murdered."

Anna, the protagonist in the novel, comes to believe that the man arrested and convicted for the murder is innocent.

"She's come back to Baton Rouge and joined the police department so she can have access to records and crime reports and she's going to try and solve the mystery of her mother's death," Drummond said. "It's about family and generational secrets."