Free The Big Fear by Andrew Case

up the phone, and called City Hall. Even with Davenport quitting so suddenly, Leonard still had a friend or two left. He had paid out enough favors as the top lieutenant in a couple of different agencies. There are always children of friends looking for jobs, tickets to minor-league baseball games to distribute, introductions to make. All of it the completely-above-board butter that feeds any big organization. And the City of New York is a very big organization.
    A soft, bored lifer answered the phone. You have to be pretty high up in the city before they give you someone to pick it up for you. “Deputy Mayor Victor Ells’s office.”
    “Is he in? It’s Leonard Mitchell at DIMAC.”
    “Let me check.”
    The Deputy Mayor for Legal Matters had been brought into the new regime from the US Attorney’s office and had a reputation as a corruption fighter himself. He had led the rackets division in the Southern District, prosecuting a crime family that had controlled every street repair project in Manhattan. Not content to lock up mobsters, he had started going after the executive staff of the Department of Transportation, bagging the deputy commissioner there on fraud and perjury charges. After the election, the new mayor had brought him on board—maybe because he trusted him or maybe because he wanted to pluck him away from a job where he could throw the mayor’s cronies in jail. Leonard had always liked him; he was the only person at City Hall he could speak to without getting the impression that he was being scolded for something.
    Rumors were that he was eager for the top job himself and was going to challenge his own boss in a couple of years. He would be receptive to what Leonard had to say either way. His patent-leather voice was worth the wait to reach him.
    “Leonard. It must have been an interesting day and a half over there.”
    “Is that because my boss has just quit, or because I’ve got one detective that gunned down another and swears the guy had a gun that no one seems to be able to find?”
    “Isn’t it great to finally be in charge of something, though?”
    Leonard held the phone away from his face for a moment. He was in charge. Was about to be. And what he was about to ask Victor Ells to do might compromise that, if it went the wrong way. No matter what, he was about to go from being someone who was owed a debt to being someone who owed. But if it all panned out, he would be able to pay it back, and then some.
    “Listen, Victor. I have something to ask you. I need to call in a favor.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

    LEGWORK
    As he rounded the corner of the third flight of stairs, Detective Mulino’s knee started talking to him. It asked him to find an ottoman or a coffee table to prop his leg up on. No dice. Mulino looked up the landing. The only NYPD building he had ever been in with a working elevator was One Police Plaza downtown. Even here at the OCCB headquarters, right next to the recently refurbished Brooklyn DA’s office, it was five flights up if you wanted to talk to a chief. Mulino figured there had to be an elevator somewhere. The chief himself wouldn’t take the stairs.
    It was a short walk anyway from Gold Street, where Mulino had been stewing for three days. Mulino understood the optics—you shoot someone, you have to turn in your gun and get parked someplace where you can’t hurt anybody, no matter how competent you are. If they pin you for it, you stay there. So every customer service job in the NYPD was filled with guys too dangerous to put on the street but too insulated by their union protection to actually fire. Vehicle impound centers. Parade and demonstration licenses. And most of all the Property Clerk, sandwiched between the Eight-Four on one side and the Social Security office on the other. The dim brick municipal office dug in even as one thirty-story glass condo after another sprouted next door.
    There were twenty-six officers in Property, and it was a strict daytime tour, so if