Werewolf Cop Read Free Page A

that this was true.
    That said, April was doing a good job with the boy right now. The kid seemed mesmerized by her gentle sisterly gaze. Still clutching his one-eyed Teddy bear, he was speaking to her in a fluid half-whisper.
    So when Goulart started up again: “It’s like we’re all supposed to pretend that women are what they aren’t and if we pretend hard enough that’s going to somehow make it true. Which is the opposite of police work, when you think about it. Which I mean is, what? It’s figuring out what’s true no matter what you want it to be. Take the Muzzies, for example . . .”
    . . . Zach lifted a finger and said, “Turn your face off and listen.”
    Goulart’s voice trailed to silence, and the two of them focused on the monitor, standing just beneath them on an old conference table.
    â€œI think April just asked him if he heard any names mentioned,” said Zach.
    The boy’s tremulous voice continued, only just audible—and suddenly April Gomez, assuming the detectives were watching her, glanced up, startled, at the video camera hanging in one corner of the ceiling above her.
    And simultaneously Goulart said, “What?”
    And simultaneously Zach said, “Did you hear that?”
    April apparently couldn’t believe it either, because she turned back to the boy and asked him to repeat himself: “ Dijo Abend?”
    The boy nodded solemnly. In a corner of the room, an older black woman from Children’s Services looked on with her hands folded on the skirt of her purple dress. Even she seemed to understand that something important had happened.
    â€œ Si ,” said Mickey Paz. “Señor Abend. Señor Abend.” Then he went off into another musical strain of something akin to Castilian.
    Zach and Goulart listened, leaning their heads forward as if that would help them understand.
    â€œAre you getting any of this?” said Goulart. “What exactly did he say about Señor Abend?”
    Zach, who knew just enough Texican to avoid a bar fight, said, “I think he said one of the men was named Abend, that someone called one of the killers Señor Abend.”
    â€œYou gotta be kidding me,” said Goulart. “You mean, as in: Abend was there himself? In the room? Standing there while they’re hacking these people apart? You think that’s even possible?”
    â€œNo,” Zach murmured. “I don’t. Sure ain’t likely, anyway.”
    â€œBut that is what he’s saying?”
    â€œNear as I can make out. Have we found any security footage from the scene yet? Anyone who took a picture with a cell phone? Any pictures at all?”
    â€œLast I heard, they were still canvassing,” said Goulart. “But I’ll go check.”
    He detached himself from Zach’s shoulder and left the room. Zach stayed where he was, still gazing down intently at the monitor. He remained like that, in hyper-focus mode, for another few seconds; but as the boy was now rattling on much too rapidly for him to comprehend, his mind eventually drifted. To Dominic Abend. Who was said to be the chieftain of the BLK. Which had wafted out of the post-World War II gulags to infiltrate every level of Soviet tyranny; and had then become the very medium of Eastern Europe’s post-Communist gangsterocracy; and had then, with the fall of the Iron Curtain that had once contained it, spread like a miasma over the free nations of Western Europe, infecting every organized crime operation on the continent and in Britain, transforming all of them into mere agents of itself.
    Now, these last few years, the Brüderlichkeit was said to have traveled here, to the U. S. of A., breathing a new, poisonous, unifying zombie-life into the homeland’s beleaguered organized crime operations—Cosa Nostra and Yakuza, the black Disciples and the Mexican mob, and the Russian Bratva, which had never been more than a tendril