Free Greed: A Detective John Lynch Thriller by Dan O'Shea

figured would smell like money. Field’s was the sort of thing that felt permanent when you were a kid, like Pluto being a planet. People liked to switch that shit out on you when you weren’t looking, remind you that nothing stuck, that the whole world and everything in it was circling the drain one way or the other.
    He fired up his laptop, checked his e-mail. Nothing he needed. Reached for the remote. He’d watched more TV in the last day and a half than he had in the previous twenty years.
    And there was that fucker Fenn, some Oprah special, tears in his eyes, running through that child abuse crap he started peddling a few years back. And then Oprah had to cue up the tape – the cell phone video from the damn Darfur party that had had a short run on YouTube back in the day.
    “That’s really when I knew something was wrong with me,” said Fenn. “I’ve been doing the work in therapy, and I’ve been trying to make it right with people I’ve gone off on. But I look back at this, and I think of all the damage I did to the good work that Jerry Mooney was trying to do. And I worry about Nick Hardin – he’s the guy I’m taking the swing at here. I mean, this cost him his gig with Jerry, and who knows what else a guy like that has.”
    Hardin noticed they’d cut the tape right after Fenn took his swing and Hardin took his fall. Didn’t show Hardin busting Fenn up.
    Just great. All Hardin wanted to do was to keep his head down for a few days while Fouche put a deal together. Then he and his $10 million would find some place nice to live out their days. Now his face and his name were on Oprah .
    Hardin suddenly remembered bivouacking in some pissant village in the ass-end of Benin maybe fifteen years ago, back in his Legion days. This old jou-jou insisted on throwing the bones for them. She threw Hardin’s, and her eyes got big, and she grabbed Hardin by the arm. “Beware the black woman with a million eyes. She will be your downfall.” It creeped Hardin out a little at the time, but he hadn’t thought about it in years. He never figured she meant Oprah.
    Too many people had seen him at the Hyatt. If the bad guys didn’t have a line on him already, they would soon enough. Time to move. And time to find a fucking gun.
     
    Beans Garbanzo and Snakes DeGetano were two hours into their second morning sitting on Hardin’s car when Snakes took a look down at his picture and nudged Beans. “Here he comes. Make the call and pull up behind him.”
    Garbanzo pulled out his cell.
    “Yeah?” the voice answered.
    “It’s Beans. I’m working that thing for Tony Corsco. Kill the camera.”
    “OK, you got ten minutes max. Ping me when you’re clear .Just remember, I don’t need anybody getting curious about convenient camera outages, so grab him and run. Don’t leave a mess there, give anybody a reason to start checking for pictures.”

CHAPTER 13
     
    Dr Atash Javadi walked along the shore of Lake Michigan on the Northwestern University campus with a slight, olive-skinned man. Javadi had been a youth of twenty in 1979, the year the Shah fell. He had been the intellectual playboy scion of one of Iran’s wealthiest families. Now, with degrees from Cambridge, Yale, and Dartmouth, he was one of the West’s leading scholars on the Islamic world and the professor of Middle Eastern studies at Northwestern University. An ardent and frequent critic of Islam, he was a regular guest on various news programs and a long-time favorite of the American right.
    He was also a devout Shiite and had, for his entire life in America, been an agent for MOIS, the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and National Security.
    “The things that they hoard shall be tied to their necks like a collar on the day of resurrection,” said Javadi. “So sayeth the Holy Koran. Cling not to greed, my friend.”
    “He must pay their wages in full,” replied the olive-skinned man, “and give them even more out of his grace. So also sayeth the Holy