Bad to the Bone Read Free Page A

together, anyway.”
    Tilley looked up and shrugged. “I should have stayed on patrol. I love the gold shield, but I definitely should’ve stayed on patrol.”
    “How’d you get so dirty?” Moodrow asked. “Didn’t I teach you to make the uniforms do the dirty work?”
    Jim Tilley, much to Betty’s surprise, took the question seriously. “The precinct’s supposed to be cleaned every night,” he responded, “but whatever dirt there is, I was under it all afternoon.”
    Moodrow looked for a sign that his friend was able to joke about his day, but Jim Tilley was obviously weary. His ordinarily handsome Irish face was pinched and anxious. He looked, to Moodrow, like an aging parish priest. “You wanna take a hit on this before you tell the story?” Moodrow continued. He offered his bourbon, but Tilley drew back in disgust, reaching instead for his wife’s bloody mary which he drained at a gulp. Betty, who’d been sipping at her own bloody mary, tried to stop him, but she was on her second drink and just a little too slow. At first Tilley had no reaction, but then a tear began to blossom in the corner of his right eye. It grew until his eye couldn’t hold it anymore, then rolled down his cheek, only to be followed by another and another and another.
    “Holy shit,” he cried, desperately pressing a cocktail napkin against the stream of mucus issuing from both nostrils. “Who made this drink?”
    Betty grinned. “I did. Stanley calls them ‘Bloody Bettys.’ ”
    “It’s very hot. Do you always make it this hot?”
    “I use cayenne and horseradish. The horseradish makes it chewy.”
    “You look like Dracula,” Moodrow observed, sipping at his rejected bourbon. “In that movie with Frank Langella. Remember? His eyes got bright red before he bit people.”
    Tilley had nothing to say in return, but his anxiety was slowly disappearing as the Stolichnaya (almost two ounces) made the jump from his belly to his blood stream. His eyes continued to tear, of course, but he no longer cared.
    “I feel like a dumb animal beaten into submission,” he declared. “The goddamn job is like being in the army. It’s a military organization. The assholes at the top say ‘jump,’ and if you don’t get your feet off the ground, they put you in front of a firing squad.”
    “This is a shock?” Moodrow asked pleasantly. “Being a cop is like being a soldier. So take a lesson. A sergeant in the army knows he can’t confront the system head-on, no matter how much he hates it. So he learns to manipulate it. He squeezes it for whatever juice it’s got to give.”
    “Well, today the system squeezed me,” Tilley said. “This was supposed to be a nothing day for me and, instead, I got turned into orange juice.”
    Rose came back into the room, bearing a plate of Irish stew, a fork, a napkin and an unspiced red drink that looked just like a bloody mary. “How did it get so screwed up?”
    Having found a sympathetic audience (and a second drink), Tilley began to unburden himself. He and his team were near the end of a year-long attempted-murder investigation involving a crack dealer with a long string of priors. The case was straightforward: the dealer, Ernesto ‘Babu’ Fariello, identified by a witness, had been arrested an hour after the shooting with a 9mm in his belt. Ballistics, upon comparing the patterns of lands and grooves in slugs found at the scene with slugs fired through Babu’s weapon, had sealed Fariello’s fate. There was no need for eyewitnesses—they might get a conviction even if the victim failed to show up. Nor would witnesses be needed for a second group of felonies that fell into their laps: Tilley and another Detective had tossed Babu’s apartment after the arrest and discovered three and a half ounces of cocaine, along with the paraphernalia needed to turn it into crack.
    “We’re gonna go before the judge tomorrow,” Tilley complained, “and the Lieutenant asked me to make sure the chain