Free Dancer in the Flames by Stephen Solomita

office, Corcoran’s voice rang out. ‘Detective Farrahan, we’re waiting.’
    Farrahan smiled before turning away with a shrug. Homicide or not, he was a bit player.
    Still, Boots was unsatisfied. Instead of leaving, he waited for Jill Kelly to emerge from the bathroom. ‘I have a couple of questions before you join the party,’ he announced, blocking her path.
    ‘Shoot.’
    ‘First thing, if there was a confrontation before Vinnie shot Chris Parker, how did Parker get shot in the back?’
    Kelly’s full mouth expanded slightly. ‘Maybe Palermo got the drop on Parker, but didn’t have the balls to look into his eyes when he pulled the trigger. So he made Parker turn around.’
    Undeterred, Boots responded with a second question, and a third, and a fourth. He wasn’t going to get another chance at this. ‘Think about it, Jill. If Parker suspected that Vinnie was stealing a car, why was his weapon still in his holster, his badge in his pocket and his overcoat buttoned? And if Parker wasn’t displaying a weapon, why didn’t Vinnie just run away? What was his motive for murdering a cop?’
    ‘Boots, you should’ve been a defense lawyer. You’ve got the knack.’
    The remark was obviously designed to end the conversation, only Boots didn’t take the hint, not even when Kelly walked away.
    ‘You’ve seen the case file,’ he called to her retreating back, ‘which makes you one up on me. So, what’s the official reason why Parker, who lives thirty miles away on Long Island, was in Williamsburg at one o’clock in the morning on his day off?’
    As Boots watched his ex-partner retreat, an anomaly he hadn’t considered popped into his mind. The Altima that Vinnie stole on the night Parker died was registered to a man named Rajiv Visnawana, who resided in Jackson Heights, a Queens neighborhood ten miles away. So, what was Rajiv doing in Williamsburg at one in the morning? Especially as there were no immigrants from the Indian subcontinent living in the area.

NINE
    B oots entered the Sixty-Fourth Precinct at two o’clock on the following afternoon, two hours before the start of his tour. He greeted the desk officer, then headed for the weight room to complete the workout he’d begun on the prior morning. There he found Sergeant Craig O’Malley and his long-time driver, Boris Velikov, known to one and all as the Bulgarian. Both these men augmented their weightlifting with injected steroids. Boots knew this because they’d offered to juice him up. Perhaps, if he was fifteen years younger, he would have been tempted. But these days the weight room was more about slowing the rate of attrition.
    ‘Yo, Boots, you’re the best, man,’ O’Malley cried out when Boots made his appearance. Craig was seated on a workout bench, his right elbow on his thigh, doing curls with a forty-pound dumbbell. ‘Come down to Sally’s tonight. The drinks are on me.’
    ‘Ya got the mother-fucker,’ Velikov added with a grin that would have made Dracula tremble. After years of juicing, Boris tended to speak in threat-like grunts.
    ‘Could you repeat that?’
    ‘Godda mother-fucker,’ the Bulgarian repeated.
    ‘I guess you didn’t see the press conference,’ O’Malley added.
    ‘What press conference?’
    O’Malley’s right arm pivoted at the elbow, from full contraction, to full extension, to full contraction. ‘The one the bosses threw at noon. Where they announced the arrest of a cop killer named Vinnie Palermo.’
    Boots reached into the pocket of his trousers for his Tic Tacs. He filled his mouth, then lay down on the mat and hooked his legs beneath a bench. Boots hated doing sit-ups. Not only did they leave him panting, but his waist never seemed to get any smaller.
    ‘Everybody knows it was you,’ O’Malley added. ‘You’re the one who found Palermo.’
    All three worked out for the next half-hour, exchanging little more than grunts, until O’Malley and Velikov decided to call it an afternoon. Boots stopped