Free A Danger to Himself and Others: Bomb Squad NYC Incident 1 by J.E. Fishman

I served in the marines.”
    “That so?”
    “Does the pope wear a funny hat?”
    “You see combat?”
    “No. So I guess I’m a pussy.”
    Diaz nodded silently.
    “No disrespect to your prior accomplishments, Manny, but having seen combat doesn’t give you the right to run wild or jump rank or put your damned pet theories ahead of someone else’s.”
    “I didn’t say it should.”
    “And furthermore, your attitude sucked in there. Did I not ask you to keep it cool and let the man do his job? Now O’Shea’s gonna have a hard-on against you, which means he won’t be so happy seeing me coming either. How will that help the investigation? How much trouble do you need to stir up in one week?”
    Diaz sat brooding.
    “We’re not even twelve hours into this investigation and you’ve prejudiced yourself by defending this guy Horn in an unwarranted fashion. Why? Because you both served in combat? Maybe you don’t belong anywhere near this case, Diaz.”
    “You got it backwards.”
    When Diaz hesitated at the changing light, a dump truck rumbled by, drowning out all thoughts and belching a cloud of choking black exhaust for good measure.
    Kahn absently watched the truck go past, stared a moment at Diaz, and then turned his attention out the window. “This one time when I was in homicide, I had a case where we got called to a crime scene in Brooklyn. Bensonhurst. You probably know that’s a solidly Italian neighborhood, but the guy who got stabbed to death in his sleep was a Jewish guy. I saw pictures of him on the piano and he reminded me of my dad, who was then still alive. There was no wife. The son—seventeen years old—reminded me of myself at that age. He had a Camaro on the street that didn’t have a mark on it...kept it so immaculate. My partner says the kid cleaned it for traces after murdering the father—quarter million in life insurance on the line, plus the house. I’m like, No way. I know this kind of kid. He cherishes that damn car is all, saved every penny he had to buy it, begged his father to help him out, took great pride in that machine, always under the hood, adding pieces of after-market equipment every chance he got. That’s what I’d done with my Mustang. I knew exactly what it meant to be that kid.”
    “I still have my legs,” Diaz said.
    “Okay. Let me finish.” Kahn licked his lips and frowned. “Everything pointed to the kid. Motive, means, opportunity. There was a knife missing from the kitchen block. My partner wanted to home in while the kid was soft, nail him before he could re-gather his wits. Me—I felt sorry for the little bastard. Not because he deserved my sympathy but because I could relate to the pain he must be going through.”
    “Sure, but—”
    “And another thing. Here’s this Jewish family living in this Italian neighborhood. The kid kills the father for the money? The money? No. I couldn’t handle that. Because when you’re the only Jewish family on the block you stand in for the whole Jewish race. I didn’t say this even to myself at the time, but it was back there in a corner of my mind. I was rooting for the kid not to have done it.”
    “But he did.”
    Kahn smiled sardonically. “All that cleaning stuff he had for the car—carpet shampoo and whatnot—he used it to make the house spotless before calling for help. Kid did a helluva job, too, would’ve made his grandmother proud. Not a trace of evidence in the house and to this day I don’t know where the knife went. But we found the bloody sponges and chamois a mile away, in a dumpster near a park where the kid used to hang out. My partner broke the case, not me.”
    “So based upon that story, I’m protecting Horn as a fellow vet and I’m wrong?”
    “Don’t be an asshole, Diaz. O’Shea’s job—and ours—is hard enough without taking sniper fire from your nearest colleague.”
    Diaz reflected. He understood the story well enough, but as for sniper fire he felt more like the victim