Free Deadly Assets by W.E.B. Griffin Page A

Payne had then appeared vindicated in his assessment of the underpowered .38 when the department was given approval by the city council to issue Glock 9-millimeter semiautomatics as the standard sidearm. Officers who passed muster on the department’s shooting range with a .40 caliber Glock were given the option of carrying one—if the officers paid for the optional weapon with their own funds.
    The magazines of the Glocks held three times as many rounds as the revolvers they replaced, and put the police officers on more or less equal footing with the bad guys, who (a) were not subject to the whims of the city hall politicians who had been against replacing the .38s and thus (b) had long been packing the more powerful semiautos.
    Once again Payne had bent the rules to his needs—and once again had not only gotten away with it, but proved that he thought ahead of the conventional curve.
    Payne wasn’t sure which pissed off his detractors more. But he really didn’t give a damn. He was right. And he knew it. And he wasn’t going to risk his life because of some outdated bureaucratic rule.
    The CI said that his guy likes that “Wyatt Earp shoots dudes”?
Payne thought.
That it gives me “street cred”?
    He shook his head.
    My bet: the bastard’s blowing smoke.
    But it’s a lead. Maybe another to nowhere. But for now a lead.
    Be wary of wrestling with a pig, Matty ol’ boy. You can get very dirty—and the pig likes it.
    It was Payne’s opinion that confidential informants were a pain in the ass and, with rare exceptions, tended to be more trouble than they were worth.
    But, reluctantly, he also considered them a necessary evil.
    They knew the streets and they knew what the players were up to . . . and sometimes they even told the damn truth. Not the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help them God. The bastards were dirty themselves—the threat of doing time often was the leverage used to get them to act as CIs—and always working an angle, one beyond getting cash payments and other considerations.
    Payne knew that some off-the-books information was better than nothing. Because nothing was all that most witnesses wanted to give cops. Getting them to answer any questions—truthfully or not—was next to impossible.
    The reason for that wasn’t just that the citizens didn’t have enough faith in the police; it was more that if they talked to cops they feared retaliation from the neighborhood thugs. They knew there really was no way that the cops could protect them from that, and thus it was safer just to keep their mouths shut and not risk being accused of dropping a dime on anyone.
    Unfortunately, they really don’t trust cops.
    And the reality is the best we can do is deter crime. Because, unless we somehow develop some lead, nabbing a bad guy before he actually commits a crime is practically impossible.
    We nab him before he does his
next
one.
    Or next ones, plural.
    If we nab him and if the charges stick . . . CIs or not.
    The faint chanting from the sidewalk directly below seemed to be getting louder. He took a sip of coffee as he looked down again.
    The chants sounded like “Stop Killadelphia! No more murder, no more pain!” And if one were to only hear their chanting, it made perfect sense to believe that that indeed was their message.
    The message, however, took on a distinctly different tone when one saw some of the dozen signs that the protesters pumped over their heads. While there were posters painted STOP KILLADELPHIA!, others read NO MORE MURDER! NO MORE PAYNE! and had, so that their message was made unequivocally clear, the enlarged image of Homicide Sergeant Matthew Payne standing over the dead robber.
    Payne drained his coffee cup.
    Not exactly fine poetry,
he thought, disgusted,
but it does get your point across.
    Worthless point that it is.
    I could disappear right now, and the murders