Copp For Hire, A Joe Copp Thriller (Joe Copp Private Eye Series) Read Free Page B

called it in, too."
           "Sure. Wouldn't you? The kid was lying there all broken and bleeding. No ... that's an unfair question, isn't it. Maybe you wouldn't. How'd you work the call, Tanner? Write up your report from the traffic investigation?"
           I must have been right on target. He moved too quick to cover it. "You know we can't work them all at once, and I haven't filed my report yet. You reading this as a deliberate hit?"
           "You want to quote an ex-sergeant?"
           "Maybe."
           I sucked on my cigarette, dropped it, stepped on it. "It sounded that way, yeah."
           Jones had stepped out of the vehicle and come around to join the parley. He said to me, "We'll bust your ass quicker than you can cover it if you play games with us, Copp . This old-soldier bullshit doesn't buy you a thing."
           I looked from him to Tanner, and I guess that "hideous smile" I've heard others talk about joined me in the look. It sent Tanner leaning away from me; he spoke from the deep interior of the car. "Shut up, Ed," he growled; to me: "He's frisky, Joe—forget it."
           I said to the frisky recruit, "Little unusual to come straight from reserve to detective squad, isn't it?"
           But the prick suddenly was not looking directly at me. Probably thought I was addressing his partner, and was content with the thought. Tanner answered for him, anyway. "You know how it goes, Joe. Feast to famine. Right now it's famine. So Ed got lucky. He's doing good, really good."
           I said, "With that mouth, he'd better do better than that."
           It became a laugher.
           We stood and jawed for a few minutes. Never again returned to the investigation. As soon as it was graceful to withdraw, they did.
           But you can see, can't you, why I did not volunteer any information to those guys. I mean, there's a limit to how far you want to go with guys like those. I actually had never meant to conceal anything from the official investigation. Why would I want to do that? It just worked out that way because of the circumstances.
           I'm sure I would have gone straight downtown and laid the whole thing on the appropriate desk before the night was over. Nobody would have faulted me if I'd done that. We're talking about a few hours here.
           I could have been downtown by eight o'clock easy.
           Would have been there, too.
           But I walked into my office and found deja vu.
    Some son of a bitch—or some sons of bitches— had gone in there and torn the whole place apart, emptied all my files onto the floor, turned out every drawer, slashed all my beautiful leather-upholstered furniture—I mean pure leather, the real stuff—even bashed into the hollow core of the door to the washroom.
           They say I have a truly hideous smile when I am upset.
           I must have been smiling like Long John Silver himself when I went out of there and set sail for the New Frontier.

 
     
    Chapter Four
     
    IT'S A LOW-SLUNG building occupying the corner of a busy intersection up in the foothills. Like I said earlier, a county area. That does not mean it is in the country. The patchwork of communities I was talking about do not always come together at neat boundaries. Sometimes there is a narrow buffer zone between the incorporated areas. Sp these unincorporated wedges or slices are governed directly by the county board of supervisors. In L.A. these are your traditional free-trade zones—which means that most anything goes, so long as it doesn't get too flagrant.
           The New Frontier was pretty damned flagrant.
           Big place. Legal capacity of probably several hundred patrons. Open from ten in the morning 'til two in the morning seven days a week. Gold mine. Kind of joint where the parking lot always seems to have as many pickup trucks as passenger vehicles. And you don't see Pierre Cardin or