Free In This Rain by S. J. Rozan

brownstone— period-detailed, with all the amenities, and so much more affordable than downtown! Park securely in your own garage. Harlem, USA! It’s clean, it’s new, it’s sanitized. Dope dealers and welfare moms, the homeless and the jobless been swept clear out to the Bronx. Harlem, the final frontier! To boldly go where no white man has gone before. Harlemland! Sho’ nuff.”
    Ford held his arms open a few seconds longer, then dropped them.
    “You want my pulpit next week, you can have it,” said Ray. “Now sit down.”
    Ford did.
    “Go ahead. Tell me just who it is we’re seeing tomorrow,” Ray said, “what you think is gonna happen and what you want from me. And be succinct, son. We got a lot of work to do here, and neither of us got all day. I got parishioners to see. And you got a building full of children you got to keep off the roof.”

CHAPTER
15
    Heart’s Content
    Someone died, Ann had said. But someone’s always dying.
    *
    Joe had never had an arrangement with Dolan Construction, that tie of callousness and greed the prosecutor painted for the jury.
    A relationship, that was true. Joe had run across Dolan three times before. Before what became known as the Moss case, though the case Joe was working was about nailing Larry Manelli, had nothing to do with seven-year-old Ashley Moss until she’d gone skipping down the sidewalk on a rainy day.
    The guys at Dolan Construction had been a dirty little bunch. But they were small-time; they were punks. They hired nonunion, they built with shoddy materials, their night security was one ancient wino snoring in a shed. Dolan Construction paid off everybody they could find so they could avoid doing anything they were supposed to do. Joe knew all that but it wasn’t his problem.
    Larry Manelli was his problem.
    Manelli was a Buildings Department inspector. Since the world began, bums like the Dolan crowd had infested the construction industry like roaches in the walls. In New York, it was the job of Buildings Department inspectors to keep them under control. Like the roaches, you could never completely eliminate them. But you could make their lives difficult, you could prevent them from flourishing. And if a roach colony lost all fear and all caution, if they began operating brazenly in the light, you could stamp them out.
    Or you could become one of them. A giant swollen cockroach king, growing fat on bribes and kickbacks deposited at your feet by all the other busy little bugs.
    Three years ago Larry Manelli had been on his way to becoming that kind of vermin royalty, and Joe Cole had been out to stomp him.
    Joe knew the Dolan Construction site was a station along Larry Manelli’s route, and he knew it wasn’t a major one. Manelli had his everyday circuit, a bottle of whiskey here, Knicks tickets there, grease so small it didn’t matter because what the giver got in return was sure to be small, too. Joe wasn’t interested in nailing Manelli on penny-ante stuff. The biggest dance on Manelli’s card was a huge commercial project near the Brooklyn Bridge. Joe knew Manelli was raking it in down there, trading big favors, sticking out both hands and squeezing his eyes shut. That site was Joe’s target.
    Knew how?
    From hours, days, weeks of meticulous investigation.
    And because Sonny O’Doul, one of the roaches at Dolan, had told him.
    Not out of the blue. Joe had backed Sonny into a carefully built corner. But once he’d seen the trap he was in, Sonny hadn’t fought it. A smart man, Sonny, and he’d done the quick calculus: maximize profit, minimize loss, save your own ass, and stick someone else to the flypaper as fast as you can.
    Joe had known he would. So predictable, the insect world.
    One blustery November morning, his facts, figures, and hidden-camera photos in a folder in his backpack (you can’t climb a scaffold with a briefcase), Joe strolled unhurriedly onto the Dolan site, watched by the cold, appraising stares of men who didn’t know him and the tight-lipped