Free One Monday We Killed Them All by John D. MacDonald Page B

“Working their way. Working the drunks. So they get a bath, a meal and a bunk, and a free trip to the city line.”
    “Except she was too ready to run.”
    “Huh?”
    “Put out an all-points inquiry, then team with Rossman and sell them the idea we’re going to use them to get that John Doe killing off our books, the bum somebody slugged too hard three weeks ago. She looked too case hardened to try that fool trick of running unless the reason was real good.”
    I saw Raglin respond to the idea. He began to nod. “Okay, but I’m supposed to go check the gas stations for—”
    “I’ll change the duty roster, Rags.”
    I went on up to the squad room. Eleven of the fifteen desks were empty. Three of the four men there were on the phone. Detective Sergeant Johnny Hooper was in my office with his feet on my desk. He jumped up violently, blushing and trying to hide the book he had been reading. It was my copy of Leadership for the Police Supervisor by Scott and Garrett.
    “A quiet day, Fenn,” he said anxiously. “One real quiet day.”
    Johnny Hooper is one of the good ones. He’s twenty-eight and looks twenty, a big tow-headed country boy, newly married, newly promoted, slightly unsure of himself except when things start to get warm, and then you wouldn’t want anybody else backing you up. He started to tell me about the small collar West had made, and I told him the orders I had given Rags, and he looked as if he was going to break into tears because he hadn’t thought of it himself. I altered the duty roster and he went out into the bull pento run the phone check on the gas stations himself. We’d recently had a loading dock theft of several cartons of assorted sizes of windshield wipers, about seven hundred dollars’ worth, and it had the flavor of local amateur talent, the kind stupid enough to start peddling them locally, in the logical places. In fifteen minutes he came in and told me he had a lead and he would run out and check it out. I remarked that he’d come up with something pretty quickly, and he said he had ignored the alphabetical listings in the yellow pages and started with those on the west side. They seemed more likely outlets. So he got his lead in fifteen minutes instead of an hour, and that is the kind of thinking you can’t go out and buy.
    Larry Brint heard I was in and asked me to come up to his office. Chuck West had just come back, so I asked him to mind the store and went on up. On the way I stopped at C&D and checked the all-points inquiry which had gone out on the couple who’d been caught indulging in the most primitive-known variation of the badger game. I sat on Larry’s green leather couch. He leaned back in his chair with a mild and attentive expression on his schoolteacher face while I told him about the trip to Harpersburg and my appraisal of Dwight McAran.
    On his wall was a speaker with a separate volume control, hooked into the prowl circuit, the volume turned down to the point where it was a faint raspy buzzing, seemingly impossible for anyone to hear. Yet I had been in that office several times when one of the several emergency code numbers had been given and had seen Brint stop in the middle of a word and immediately reach over to the speaker and turn the volume up.
    He didn’t ask me what I thought McAran might do. He slowly bent a paper clip into new shapes. “One man in ten thousand, Fenn, you hammer on him long enough, you create a new creature in the world. Sometimes a saint. Sometimes a monster. Sometimes a harmless idiot.”
    The paper clip broke. He got up restlessly and went to the window and rocked back and forth on his heels, looking out at the city.
    “Poor sad son of a bitch of a town,” he said. “Seems as if could they forgive a man income tax, some smart greedy man could come in here and put together an empty factory and skilled men and make something people would buy.Skip Johnson was in to see me this morning. Bought me a four-dollar lunch at