Deadeye Read Free

anyway. So why was she still around? The answer could be summed up in a single word: results. She solved crimes, she caught perps, and she was so good with the Glock that the uniforms at the practice range called her Deadeye. Which was why he wanted to ride with her. To learn what she knew.
    *   *   *
    An elevator carried them up to the sixth floor to the Detective Bureau. After more than a half century of hard use and tight budgets, the walls were a dingy green, filing cabinets crowded once-wide hallways, and offices were crammed with tiny cubicles.
    Lee could see that,
knew
that, but couldn’t fully connect with it. Because the building would always be a special place for the little girl inside her. It was the place where the good guys worked, where the bad guys got caught, and justice was done.
    That’s why she had joined the force right out of college and remained part of it. Even if she had come to realize that some of the good guys weren’t so good, some of the bad guys weren’t so bad, and that “justice” was often in the eye of the beholder.
    The sixth floor was home to the Chief of Detectives, her staff, and about sixty “real” detectives. “Real” being Lee’s designator for people who logged more street time than chair time. All of them were housed in an open area that had been subdivided into a maze of cubicles called the bull pen.
    Of the larger force, only twelve men and women were members of the elite Special Investigative Section charged with going after the city’s most dangerous criminals and taking them off the street. That was the unit Lee belonged to—and the one Conti wanted to join. She led him back to the corner where half of the S.I.S. detectives were gathered around a long table. All of them were dressed in variations of street clothes and said their hellos as Lee and Conti sat down.
    Deputy Chief of Detectives Ross McGinty was there along with Assistant Chief Sean Jenkins. What hair McGinty still had was military short. His eyes were the color of faded denim, his face was narrow, and his lips were thin. “Well, well,” he said. “What have we here? Detective Lee and Detective Conti. A word to the wise, Conti. In spite of what Lee may have told you, members of the S.I.S. team
are
expected to show up for roll call on time.”
    Lee smiled sweetly. “Conti
made
me stop for breakfast burritos. That’s why we’re late.” Nobody believed that, and, with the exception of McGinty, all of them laughed.
    They spent the next half hour on HR stuff, arrangements for an interdepartmental softball game, and updates on active cases. “Thanks to Detective Howe and his team, the Bradley brothers are living in the slammer now,” McGinty told them. “But our work is never done. Now there’s a
new
set of assholes to deal with. They call themselves the Freak Killers, or FKs, and claim to be folk heroes out to protect norms from the plague.”
    He looked from face to face. “And they
are
mutant killers. They’re killing mutant merchants who enter the city on short-duration visas. There have been three murders so far, which means we need to find the FKs and do it fast. Once this meeting is over, Lee and Conti will report to my office for a briefing.”
    Lee felt a rising sense of anger. The mutant thing was a shit detail . . . McGinty’s way of punishing her for calling him “a jerk” two weeks earlier and for being her father’s daughter. Frank Lee and Ross McGinty had been partners once. Back when both men were patrolmen. And, according to the stories she’d heard, they’d been friends. Then something happened. No one knew what led up to it, but there had been a fistfight. McGinty came out on the losing end of it and, according to departmental lore, had been pissed off ever since.
    The meeting ended shortly thereafter, and the two detectives followed McGinty