Free Murder List by Julie Garwood Page B

as I am makes me feel better. I’ve done enough whining for now. I think I’ll order another iced tea and read this diary. Then I’ll walk over to the police station. I’m going to stay positive,” she added.
    “How are you going to do that?”
    “I’m going to believe that the day is going to get better.”
    “I wouldn’t count on it. And good luck with Detective Sweeney.” Before Regan could ask why, she added, “He’s the man you’ll have to talk to about the investigation. He’s a real piece of work.”
    “I’m not worried. How bad can he be?”

Chapter Eight
    Detective Benjamin Sweeney, known by his initials, B. S., to all the other detectives in the department, was having a worse than usual bad day. It started at five-thirty a.m., when he woke up with a hangover that felt like a jackhammer drilling behind his eyeballs. The only medicine that would take away the hallucination and stop the pain was what had caused it in the first place, another stiff drink of bourbon, which he downed in two thirsty gulps. It burned his throat and took the hair off his tongue.
    Bleary-eyed, he gargled Listerine to hide the smell of the booze, got dressed, and went to the dentist. At seven he had a bad root canal. By nine the shot of novocaine had worn off, and he was in agony. Then, at ten, the sun vanished, heavy dark clouds moved in, and he got soaked running from his car into a roach-infested apartment building with his partner, Lou Dupre. They climbed four flights to stare down at the decomposing body of a young twentysomething female. There were empty crack vials littering the room. Sweeney figured one druggie had offed another. No real loss that he could see.
    He also knew there wouldn’t be any identification on the victim—that would have been too easy—and of course he was right. There wasn’t. Usually he could complain enough to make Dupre do all the paperwork and the running around in circles before the file was put in the “still pending” drawer, which Sweeney had secretly labeled “who gives a damn.”
    Today, however, Dupre wasn’t cooperating. He called Sweeney an asshole, told him he was sick and tired of his constant bitching, and insisted he was going to have to get off his lazy fat ass and start pulling his own weight.
    In all the movies about cops and robbers that Sweeney had watched on television while he was drinking himself into oblivion, the detectives were like brothers with their partners. One would take a bullet—and inevitably did before the movie was over—for the partner. A frickin’ love affair in the movies. A fairy tale. In Sweeney’s miserable world—the real world—he and his partner, Dupre, hated each other’s guts. There were times when Sweeney would fantasize about a good old-fashioned shootout where he could get behind his partner and blow his brains out.
    He knew the feeling was mutual. Hell, these days everyone in the department was avoiding him as if he had the clap. They knew he was under investigation, unofficial though it was, and they had decided to condemn him before any of the facts were in. Sweeney wasn’t worried about Internal Affairs. Yes, he was guilty of taking the money to look the other way while a drug dealer was killed, but the men who paid him to close his eyes weren’t in any position to rat on him. And the money, ten thousand dollars, was clean. Squeaky clean. Sweeney had been real careful. Let the task force listen to all the rumors from the out-of-work whores the murdered dealer had been running. It didn’t matter to Sweeney. If they had anything concrete, he would already have been suspended.
    Sweeney had two years and three months to go before he could retire, but there were days, like today, when he knew he wasn’t going to make it. He could understand what happened inside a madman’s head just seconds before he opened fire on his coworkers, and sometimes he got a hard-on just thinking about Dupre’s blood and guts splattered all over