Free Man with an Axe by Jon A. Jackson

fashion of cops and robbers—a kind of grudging respect.
    In many ways, Grootka's experience had been similar to theirs: poverty, a rough upbringing. Gagliano, for instance, had run away from home as soon as possible, getting to New York in his teens. Like many, he had gone back when he had made some money, to play the role of the gentry. But like most of those, he hadn't been able to bring it off.
    “It's tough,” Grootka observed. “You go back in your flashy suit and Florsheim shoes and you find out they still ain't as good as what the real gentry got, and then they wear out. You buy some land and they cheat you—you pay too much, the land's no good, the well is dry. Pretty soon you knock some peasant babe up. You're just about out of money, ‘bout the time the Florsheims wear out on that stony ground. It's time to go back to America, now or never. You're gonna be a peasant if you don't watch out. Gags got out in the nick of time. He brought the kid with him, but not the mother. Maybe she was too ugly or a witch—he believed in love potions, they all do. He hooked up with one a these Sicilian babes in Detroit, she raised the kid like it was her own—Umberto prob'ly thinks she's his real ma. Gags got careless doing a hit and got his own ass wiped when the kid was only about six or something, I don't remember. The kid grew up with Carmine, I think the mothers was sisters, not the real mother, but the step. Umberto was always Carmine's fat cousin. Except he's smarter than Carmine. But the way things were laid out—it's Fate, see, and these mopes believe in Fate like it was the Blessed Virgin—Umberto (he calls himself Humphrey, after Bogart!) ain't never going to be boss, unless he's very patient. Which he is.”
    Grootka was prescient. At the time, Humphrey was just Carmine's lieutenant. But now he was the boss.
    For some time now my chief concern had been with Humphrey and his minions, especially one Joe Service (actually, not a regular hand of DiEbola's, but a favored contractor). Lately, I had managed to bring down Service—he was currently recovering in a Colorado hospital—but Humphrey himself was another matter. He seemed untouchable. ‘What I wanted was an entrée into the big man's field of operations. Every week I spent at least a few hours sifting through old files and trying to make pieces fit, but so far nothing seemed to work.
    I was getting weary of this pursuit. Another part of me wanted nothing more than to just be a harness bull, as the old movies have it. Just work the precinct. By contrast with the complex strategies that would be needed to bring down a Humphrey DiEbola, the day-to-day chase-and-file grind of the precinct looked like a vacation. But it's never a good idea to think that you can take things easy.
    I must have been thinking out loud: Jimmy Marshall knocked on the doorjamb of my office. Jimmy used to be my assistant; now he's my boss. We get along fine. It's a good thing to train the man who becomes your boss. He tends to do things the way you would do them. Now Jimmy had the headaches and I had the pleasant task of commiserating with him and encouraging him. At the moment Jimmy had the unenviable task of informing me that I was in violation of basic police department regulations. To wit, I was not living within the Detroit city limits, as required by chapter 3, section 48, of the police manual.
    This was not news. But it was an embarassment. For many years it had become commonplace for officers to reside outside the city. The issue had become an open scandal in the last few years, since the extraordinary transformation of Detroit had become so pronounced. Between the 1980 census and that of 1990, there had been a population decline in Wayne County (which comprises just about all of the city), of about 220,000 people. Almost all of thesewere whites. There had been a corresponding decline in the number of police officers, most of whom were also white.
    Presumably, to forestall this