Hit and The Marksman Read Free

like .02 percent than 20—a hardly perceptible limp on damp days. It had been an excuse, not a reason, for them to get me off the force.
    The slugs had been put in me by a cop named Joe Cutter, by mistake—he said—one night when we had split up to come at a team of burglars from opposite ends of a hardware store. Cutter had a zealot’s pride in his .357 Magnum hand cannon. He had paid for it himself. He spent evenings in his soldier-tidy antiseptic apartment devising sophisticated recipes for homebrewed ammunition.
    My retirement, which I had not fought, had been a separation without sorrow. They probably still had a dossier on me in the Inactive file: Simon Crane, 30, ht 6 ft 2 in, wt 185, eyes gray, hair black, unmarried, parents deceased. City grade and high schools, state university—bachelor’s in History, minor in Journalism, letters in tennis and in baseball the two years we’d gone to the College World Series at Omaha. University ROTC, two years an Army Intelligence lieutenant. Then three years a newspaper reporter while I decided what I really wanted to do with my life, to justify my existence. Finally, with zeal to the police force. Rookie to patrolman to detective 2/G—and back to patrolman. I had bucked too many bagmen.
    There were a few others like me. Cops who cared about one or two other things besides grease and the pension you got after twenty years on the force. Cops who believed in the notion that the law was a fine precision mechanism designed to right wrongs. They learned. Some stuck it out, trying to reform from the inside; some quit, joined the FBI, became juvenile probation officers or set up their own private detective agencies; some, like me, forsook the rat race. They all quit for the same reason: they ran up against the organization. You got evidence on a hood and it looked ironclad and then the hood’s protectors stepped in: the organization’s battery of attorneys marched into the courtroom, the organization’s bagmen got to the judge. One honest cop’s testimony against the paid perjury of half a dozen hired witnesses—where could you find legitimate citizens to testify in Mafia cases? Good citizens didn’t know anything about the organization’s operations; how could they testify? If you had a corroborative witness, he was likely to be another hood, and the organization’s attorneys didn’t mind ruining his reputation to get the client off. Then it went to the jury—what Darrow called “twelve men of average ignorance”—and even if you got past that obstacle, got past all the obstacles of appeals and delays, achieved the nirvana of a conviction—even then you ended up with a judge who passed a sentence of fifteen weekends in the House of Detention on the hood, who laughed at you when he walked out of the courtroom. The public bought the mockery with the “It’s God’s will” sophistry of small minds; the legal system had been satisfied because the system thinks a lot about the rules of the game but never asks whether the game itself has any meaning.
    In the end it became just another entry in a file someplace. You brought them in and they went right out again through the revolving door. You came to loathe the organization, and that kind of deep hate was a fervor that got stronger with time and frustration; there was nothing to do, in the end, except quit. To preserve whatever was left of sanity.
    When I left the force, feeling as if I had lived through it merely because I happened not to have died from Cutter’s .357 fusillade, I considered going to work as a private operative—one of those eyes who investigate husbands who play golf when it rains. I couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for the idea, or for going back to newspapering, a jungle of scrambled copy in which every edition ought to have eight-column banners on the front page: “ENTIRE CONTENTS FICTION.”
    When I