Darkness for the Bastards of Pizzofalcone Read Free

inevitably that had been recognized, which resulted in his serving as deputy captain in a quiet precinct in a residential district where, after his superior officer had taken seriously ill, he’d had a chance to shine as the youngest and most dynamic official in the city’s police department.
    When his superior officer, the commissario, had resigned to fight his last battle, Palma expected to be promoted to the now empty office; and that’s what his men—many of them his seniors—would have wanted; they all valued his sincerity and modesty. But what’s logical and right is so rarely done in this world and a woman with more prestigious credentials and stronger political support in Rome had arrived from another city.
    It was neither anger nor envy that had prompted him to leave after that. Quite simply, he knew it would be impossible to keep the precinct running efficiently. He needed to step aside: If he had stayed on, his men would have defied the authority of their new commanding officer and continued to turn to him for help, since he knew the district, the men, and the balance of power in the precinct.
    It was then that the affair of the Bastards of Pizzofalcone had gone down, delivering a true body blow to the public image of the local police. Like so many of his colleagues who battled from dawn till dusk, with hard work and great pain, against the decay of life on the streets and in the
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, largely at the hands of their own inhabitants, Palma had been disgusted, had felt immense rage. But when he learned that the chief of police intended to shut down the precinct entirely, admitting de facto defeat, he rebelled against the idea.
    And he asked to take over command of the precinct himself.
    An impulsive gesture, no doubt. And a risky one, for sure. But also a way out of the stagnant pond his career—and his life, in a way—had become. A new place, a new situation. And a new group. Something like a new family.
    The human resources that had been assigned to him, at least on paper, didn’t leave much hope for success. The four bastards, dismissed for conspiring to run a grim drug-dealing ring, had been replaced by new bastards, stray dogs whose original precincts had been all too eager to get rid of them: the hamfisted Aragona, protected by nepotism, tin-eared and offensive, intrusive and rude; the enigmatic Di Nardo, who’d fired her handgun inside her old station house; the silent Romano, subject to outbursts of rage during which he wrapped his powerful hands around the throats of suspects and colleagues alike. And Lojacono? The Sicilian known as “the Chinaman” for his strange almond-shaped eyes? No, he wasn’t a reject, Palma had actually requested him. Not that Di Vincenzo, Lojacono’s previous boss, hadn’t been delighted to be free of him: the mark of infamy that the Chinaman carried with him, that of a transfer away from his home territory because of allegations made, though never proved, by a Mafia turncoat about Lojacono’s collusion with organized crime, was exactly the kind that could never be forgiven in law enforcement circles. But Palma had watched Lojacono in action during the hunt for the Crocodile, a serial killer who had terrorized the city months before, and had clearly recognized Lojacono’s talent, his fury, his emotional involvement: Those were qualities he sought in his investigators, the things that were needed to succeed in that profession.
    Even the two staff members who had survived the purge carried out by the internal affairs commission had proven to be anything but burdens.
    The elderly deputy captain Pisanelli knew everything there was to know about the precinct where he was born and where he’d worked his whole life. He was an honest and empathetic man, a source of solid and extensive information that helped to make up for the fact that nearly all the others were pretty much new to the place. If not for his unfortunate