Free The Patriots Club by Christopher Reich

air had a bite to it. Scattered snowflakes drifted past. The long-promised storm was on its way.
    They traveled down Columbus Avenue, then cut through the park at Ninety-fifth Street. Bolden stretched, then pulled his jacket tight around himself. His body was sore, his muscles groaning from the beating he’d taken. But his mind was alert, resilient, tracing a path back through the events of the night: the interrogation at the police station, the fight on 145th Street, Guilfoyle’s questioning, the ride with Wolf and Irish, all of it beginning with the attack itself. Somewhere a million years ago, he’d been standing on a podium inside a packed ballroom, accepting the most meaningful honor of his life. Closing his eyes, he could feel the audience’s applause—not hear it, but
feel it
. Three hundred pairs of hands. A tidal wave of appreciation.
    Nothing happens without a reason,
he was thinking.
    Six years he’d worked for the Boys Club. In that time, he’d spent countless evenings and Saturdays at the facility. He’d raised over a million dollars in contributions. He’d started a successful gang-intervention program. It wasn’t in any way arrogant to say that he deserved to be named Man of the Year.
    It was a rule of his that nothing happened of its own accord. That things happened that were meant to happen. It had nothing to do with fate or predestination or karma, and everything to do with cause and effect. A real-world application of Newton’s Third Law. There was no action without a reaction.
    Conversely, there could be no reaction without an action.
    If he was in trouble now, it was because he’d done something to deserve it.
    And yet, he could think of nothing he’d done that might have brought him to the attention of Guilfoyle and the organization he worked for.
Civilian contractors,
Detective Franciscus had said,
the more active side of things.
    Several of Bolden’s clients were active in the defense industry, but they were hardly the type to send out armed crushers to do their bidding. They were large multinational investment firms peopled by the superstars of the financial world. Corporations whose boards of directors boasted former heads of state, Nobel laureates, and corporate chieftains of companies like IBM, GE, Procter & Gamble—companies that functioned as states within a state. In six years, he’d never known their conduct to be less than strenuously scrupulous. To the best of his knowledge, none owned any companies that could be labeled contractors.
    Come on. Think.
    Bolden sighed. They had the wrong man. That was all there was to it.
    He sat up. He was no longer so tired. “Wired” was more like it. His eye wandered to the bank of hardware installed beneath the car’s dashboard. Some kind of computer equipped with a keyboard, a color touch screen, and a two-way radio that looked powerful enough to pick up the Reykjavík PD.
    “Pretty nifty,” he said to his driver, a Sergeant Sharplin. “What do you got in here?”
    “It’s a Triton Five-Fifty. She’s a sweet piece of work. A mobile data terminal’s the heart of the system. It connects me to whatever law-enforcement database I need. I can plug in a name, a vehicle-identification number, and see if my man’s got a warrant outstanding or if a vehicle is stolen.”
    “Just local databases or does it go national?”
    “We’re tapped in at the federal level, too. Just think of it as an Internet terminal. We got access to TECS, that’s the Treasury Department, DEA, even the National Crime Information Center. If you’ve got the right clearance, you can even tap into the FBI.”
    “All from this car?” It was a far cry from the last time he’d ridden in a cop car. But then his view had been from the backseat.
    “You betcha.”
    Bolden wondered what he’d get if he punched in Guilfoyle’s name. There was no point. Guilfoyle. Wolf. Irish. All of them were aliases.
    Bolden yawned and looked back out his window.
    Nothing happens