Barracuda Read Free Page A

replied.
    Only Micko’s best friends called him “Micko,”
and Gus was more than a close friend. The two men were more like
brothers. Gus and Micko shared some small talk until Micko said,
“Gus, I gotta go. I don’t want to be late. Call me later and let me
know how the investigation is going, and I’ll let you know what the
doctors said.”
    “Tell him to just cut it off so we can use it as
a doorstop,” Gus said with a laugh. “You don’t use it much anyway,
you lazy Irish bullox.”
    “I’m not worried about him. I’m worried about
the shrink,” Micko returned. “She might put me in a straitjacket
and send me off to the Bronx State Mental Hospital.”
    Micko took the elevator to the second floor and
signed in at the reception desk. The second floor of the station
house was peppered with numerous offices. The detective squad and
the medical section used most of them.
    “Have a seat over there,” a large, ancient
sergeant growled.
    Micko took a seat and silently laughed at the
old time sergeant stuffed into his little cubicle. I wonder who
he pissed off to pull this shit assignment , he thought. The
sergeant’s nametag read Callahan, and he was easily thirty pounds
overweight. Callahan was dressed sloppily, and his uniform shirt
bore the remains of his last dozen meals. He had an unusually large
head with cauliflower ears, making him look like an aged boxer just
waiting until his pension and Social Security kicked in.
    The clock on the wall read 07:48 hours, so Micko
knew he was on time. The waiting room was large, but each office
was rather small—an impression not helped by walls painted
battleship gray and the fact that each office was stocked with
metal military surplus desks. Various help intervention posters
were taped to the walls, including alcohol recovery, Gambler’s
Anonymous, drug rehabilitation, gay pride, anger management,
domestic abuse prevention, and psychiatric counseling. Micko began
to wonder if he was a member of the NYPD or a resident of Sodom and
Gomorrah.
    He sat in a little plastic chair that appeared
to be made for schoolchildren, but he didn’t want to stand lest he
incur the wrath of Sergeant Cauliflower Ears. God, this place is
so depressing , he thought.
    Then he chuckled to himself as he looked at his
choice of available reading material. Besides the intervention
stuff, there were pamphlets on how to save your soul and get back
to church. The sports magazines were comically outdated, as were
the business and news magazines.
    As he flipped aimlessly through a very old Reader’s Digest , his mind wondered back to the events that
had led up to this point in his life. What track am I on and how
will all this affect my career? he wondered.
    Mick O’Shaughnessy had been born and raised in
the Bronx, the oldest of three siblings. His family lived in a nice
tenement in the projects, and he attended the local parish’s
Catholic schools. He was athletic and popular all throughout
school. All these years later, he still maintained close
relationships with dozens of his childhood buddies.
    Although he had been a star athlete, he had been
a rather poor student. In high school, Micko had been called into
Brother Kevin’s office, the school’s guidance counselor. It was
time for him to interview each student about college and career
choices.
    At that point, Micko had recently become a huge
fan of Jacques Cousteau and the wonders of the unexplored
underwater world, so when his guidance counselor asked, “Well,
Michael, what do you want to do when you graduate?” he answered,
“I’d like to be an oceanographer.”
    In addition to being a humorless man who would
have made a great desk sergeant, Brother Kevin was built like a
linebacker. From his chair, Micko was knocked to the ground by a
wicked backhand. Brother Kevin then used the same hand to right the
boy and his chair. “Michael, you have a seventy-two percent grade
average. You aren’t even college material, so how can you