Werewolf Cop Read Free

money stacks. He was kneeling and stooped to fit into the cramped hideaway. He was trembling with terror, sucking the thumb of one hand—and clutching in his other hand a bedraggled Teddy bear with one eye missing.

2
    DOMINIC ABEND
    W omen make crap detectives,” said Martin Goulart. “The only good ones are lesbians—you ever notice that? Lesbians and fat black women. I don’t know what that’s about. I’m thinking of that two-ton Negro broad—what was her name?—Susie—used to work the one-seven. She was all right. But for the most part, being a detective, what is it, right? Reason, unemotional observation, a sense of responsibility, guts—why would you hire a female to do a job like that? It’d be like hiring me to do sensitivity training.”
    This was typical Goulart. He was always saying stuff like this. He’d been called on the carpet for it a dozen times, sent to—speaking of sensitivity training—sensitivity training himself, twice. Didn’t help. He was incorrigible. Nothing changed him. An all-American mongrel of French, German, Italian, and Scottish extraction with some Jew in there somewhere, he was a bubbling cauldron of urban energy, a walking flashpoint on the lookout for a flame. In service to that quest, he felt it was his duty to say just about anything that would offend just about anybody, just about anything you were not supposed to say.
    It was April Gomez who had gotten him started today. Plus the fact that he was bored. He and Zach had been standing in a storage-slash-observation room of the city’s one-six precinct for the past half hour. Slouched amidst file boxes and broken computers in their habitual shoulder-to-shoulder position. Gazing sleepily at the monitor which was now showing live video of NYPD Detective April Gomez interviewing little Mickey Paz in a language neither agent understood. Which April had been called in to do because the little boy had been traumatized and because children generally responded better to women and because April was proficient in the Castilian dialect common to Venezuela which, in his traumatized state, was the only language little Mickey could remember how to speak. So Goulart felt it was necessary to explain to Zach that April Gomez had only been promoted to detective in the first place to fulfill some sort of minority quota because she was Hispanic and female—and the rest of his diatribe followed from that.
    Zach, as usual, could only roll his eyes and shake his head. Some people were shocked by Goulart’s rants and some secretly agreed with them, but Zach just found them comical and ridiculous. Goulart could say whatever he wanted about women—or blacks or Hispanics or homosexuals or French-German-Italian-Scottish-maybe-Jews, for that matter: Zach took none of it seriously. For him, there were only two kinds of people in the world: sinners and criminals. If you were the former, he considered himself your brother and protector. If you were the latter, he considered himself the flawed but relentless instrument of a just and terrible God.
    Goulart’s nonsense was obnoxious at times, if Zach bothered to pay attention to it. But, on the other hand, the New Yorker was one of the best detectives he had ever worked with. Goulart had an instinctive sense about people that was almost like mind-reading. He was funny. And generous, for all his blabber. Basically, a good partner all around.
    And there was this, too: despite all the hogwash the Brooklyn hard-ass spewed out, there was always a bit of truth mixed in. April Gomez had , in fact, been promoted to detective because she was a Latina and because some loud-mouthed pol and the media had complained about the absence of Latina detectives on the job. She was a sweet girl and by no means stupid, but she had as much business being called to a crime scene as a vase of carnations. Everyone in the department who knew anything about it knew