Fourth Victim Read Free Page B

all concrete and tile. A bullet might ricochet anywhere. Meanwhile the fat man bends over me and puts the shotgun so close to my face I can feel the residual heat from the first shot. I squeezed my eyes shut and started praying. There’s a second blast. Its heat registers even before the concussion. My ears are ringing like crazy and there’s Monaco all over the big bastard. Ralphy comes over and puts the cocksucker down with the butt of his shotgun. In the end it was all bullshit. There was no stash in the apartment. We’d been set up.”
    “Wait a second, Joe. I read all of your jackets. I’ve gone over everyone of your cases. Fact is, I probably know your cases better than you do and I never saw anything about this.”
    “That’s right, you didn’t. Officially, it never happened.”
    “Forget it. I’m not even going to ask.”
    “Okay, but the fact is that Rusty Monaco, nasty prick that he was, is the reason I still got this head on this neck. I owe him for that.” “Yeah, but how much?”
    He held the dead man’s driver’s license up to the flashlight.
    “Not your lucky day, Jimenez … Alberto, you stupid fuck. How much did he have on him?”
    “Twenty-two seventy-eight. He was a busy little amigo.”
    “Yeah, meanwhile all he had in his wallet was four bucks. He was really living the American dream. Stupid moron. Come on, let’s wrap him up.”
    They rolled the body onto the blue plastic tarp, neatly tucking in the edges.
    “He’s like a little burrito.”
    “Very funny, asshole. D’you get rid of—”
    “Don’t worry about her. She’s not gonna say nothing.”
    “You sure?”
    “Yeah, I gave her a sample of what would happen if she opened her mouth.”
    “Okay, then let’s finish up with Alberto over here and get going.”
    Serpe didn’t answer Healy’s question, but they both knew he was going to take Monaco’s murder on his shoulders. That’s what made Serpe the man he was and what made Healy admire him even as he built the case against Joe that would end his police career. Healy hadn’t been a sentimental type or the kind of man to lose sleep over putting other cops away. Healy was a man who believed in right and wrong, good and evil; one type of good, all sorts of evil. And to mask evil with a badge or hide it behind a priest’s collar was plain wrong. It was that granite conviction that gave him the strength to withstand the withering criticism and abuse he received at the hands of other cops during his twenty plus years in the Internal Affairs Bureau.
    Soon after putting in his papers and settling into retirement with his wife Mary, the bottom dropped out of the assumptions by which he had lived his life and that rock solid foundation crumbled. He and Mary had long ago agreed that she would put up with whatever she had to until Bob left the job, but after that, the time was hers. Problem was, the time wasn’t hers to bargain with. Within a year, she was dead of pancreatic cancer.
    For months after Mary’s death, he’d been haunted, haunted by the anger in her eyes, by the silent accusation that he had somehow cheated her out of her due. He was haunted by the thought that Mary had paid his karmic bill for all the lives he’d help destroy. The faces of dirty cops came to Bob Healy in his sleep, especially the ones that had, like Ralphy Abruzzi, eaten their guns instead of facing the fallout from their crimes. Bob Healy questioned everything about his beliefs and for the first time in his life he found little solace in the church. So it was no small irony that Joe Serpe had been the man to help him find his way back and why, in spite of how he felt about the late Rusty Monaco, that he would help Serpe find the killer.
    “You’re going after this guy, huh?” Healy asked, threading the thick chain through both sides of the yard gate.
    “You have to ask?” Serpe hooked the heavy lock through the end links of the chain and snapped it shut.
    “Stupid question. I