Free The Runner by Christopher Reich Page B

days? Twenty-six? Twenty-seven?”
    “Something like that.” Actually, it was twenty-nine. Fifty-eight out of sixty cases won over a four-year period. A career built on the backs of corrupt city officials, shady building contractors, and union thugs. He’d earned the moniker Gangbuster for putting away Vic Fazio, a small-time hijacker looking to muscle in on Lepke’s turf of murder for hire by accepting contracts to knock off total strangers, men and women outside the rackets.
    “Fair number without a loss,” Mullins grinned suspiciously. “Not paying off the bench, are you?”
    “What? And have you lose faith in me? Never.”
    Mullins laughed, wagging a finger. “There’s my straight-shooter. Just remember, I knew you before you converted.”
    “Yeah, I remember,” said Judge. “You won’t let me forget.” He laughed, too, but less brightly, thinking it was the debts you could never repay whose reminder bothered you most.
    Mullins draped an arm over his shoulder, steering him toward his scarred headmaster’s desk and the pair of wooden school chairs set before it. “Well, lad, I’m pleased to set eyes on you again. You waited a damn sight long enough to get into the game. Frankly, I was beginning to wonder.”
    Judge chose to ignore the implicit chastisement, the hint of duty unfulfilled. It was a delicate issue, even now that he wore an olive drab uniform and a campaign cap. The fact was that Thomas Dewey, special prosecutor for the state of New York, an appointee of the president of the United States, had asked him personally to stay on. The army needed bodies, he’d said, not minds. And certainly not minds as astute as Judge’s. If he wanted to help his country, he should start at home. Clean up New York City. It had practically been an order.
    Bodies, not minds.
    The recollection of the words and the urbane attorney who had uttered them sent a proud shudder along Judge’s spine. For a kid raised on the streets of Brooklyn, it was the compliment he’d always dreamed of receiving. So he’d stayed. But as the war dragged on, year after year, as his promotions came faster and the cut of his suits improved, a voice inside him protested that he liked the size of his office a little too much, that he spent too much time adjusting the dimple in his Windsor knot, and that he grinned too eagerly at the sight of his name in cheap newsprint.
    Judge settled into a chair, dropping his briefcase to one side. He explained about his appointment to the International Military Tribunal four months earlier, his more recent discovery that Erich Seyss was responsible for Francis’s death, and his push for a transfer to the unit looking into Seyss’s escape. “I hope you don’t mind my forcing myself on you.”
    Mullins looked up from the nickel cigar he was unwrapping. “No, you don’t, lad. You don’t mind at all. And bully for you. You’ve got family to answer to. I imagine your wife’s proud of you. Teresa, wasn’t it?”
    Judge laughed softly, surprised by the acuity of Mullins’s memory, then remembering that he’d been at the wedding. “Maria Teresa O’Hare. Italian and Irish split down the middle. A half breed like me.” He smiled apologetically. “We’re not together anymore.”
    Mullins struck a match and fired the cigar. “What do you mean ‘not together’?”
    “We divorced two years ago.”
    “Oh?” Mullins’s countenance ruffled behind a cloud of blue smoke. Divorce wasn’t in an Irishman’s vocabulary. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
    “We were drifting apart for a long time before that. She wanted the job on Park Avenue, you know, white shoe firm, the athletic club, weekends in the country. I chose the other road—Dewey, the U.S. Attorney’s office, working weekends. It was the only law I knew.”
    Mullins pulled the cigar from his lips and leaned his bulk over the desk, the inquisitive blue eyes not settling for an excuse when the truth was so close at hand. “Was it the boy,