Free White Shadow by Ace Atkins

that he had respect for him. You didn’t talk to hoodlums like cops in B movies, because after all, that got you nowhere. That was movie-cop stuff. The only people you’d ever see Dodge talk down to were other cops who took free vacations from the mobsters or would look the other way at whores who gave them squad-car blow jobs.
    Mostly, Dodge just listened. He was good at listening.
    “You know why you come to me?” Rivera asked. “ ’Cause I’m the only fucking guy you know in this city to shake down. You’re a lazy, dumb cop who doesn’t have shit on anyone, and the only thing you know is I got a rough past. So what? I got nothing to do with this.”
    “With what?”
    “Fuck off, Dodge. That’s why you are so goddamned stupid. You think that I’m gonna tell you I ain’t heard about Charlie Wall. Everyone in this goddamned town with a radio or a set of clean ears has heard.”
    “Okay, let’s talk, Johnny. I’ve always been fair with you, and so far you’ve been straight with me. But if it’s not me, it’ll be Mark Winchester or Sloan Holcomb. Do you really want that?”
    “Like I said, save the mind-fuck.”
    “Where were you Monday night?”
    “He was dead last night.”
    “Okay.”
    Rivera wiped down the bar and began to wander in back to a storeroom filled with wooden crates.
    “Can I have that beer? How ’bout that Miller on tap?”
    “You want an alibi? I was working here all night.”
    Dodge sighed and listened. He waited for a while in silence and then said, “All night?”
    “All fucking night.”
    “I suppose someone saw you.”
    “I got a hell of a lot of people who saw me.”
    Dodge took out his small flip pad and pen. “Who?”
    “You know who was in here the other night?”
    Dodge waited.
    “A goddamned city councilman, that’s who. I remember, because he’s the Calvert distributor, and”—Rivera pointed behind him—“I just got in a case the other night from him.”
    “Who was it?”
    “Belden. Doug Belden.”
    “Okay,” Dodge said. “Who else?”
    “I’m calling Franks.”
    “Franks knows I’m here.”
    “Bullshit.”
    “Allison,” Dodge called over to Al Wainright, using his full, real name, who’d found that new song, “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” on the jukebox, and the record dropped in place at the end of “Mambo Italiano.”
    Wainright grinned. The ballad started.
    Rivera twisted his head and leaned across the bar. “I got something for you. All right? I know who killed the Old Man. But don’t bring this back to me.”
    Dodge nodded.
    “His wife is batshit crazy,” he said. “She once took a shot at him while he was on the toilet. You know he was always going out for some strange reason when he turned seventy, and she shot right at the Old Man while he was reading a magazine and taking a crap.”
    Dodge nodded, and tried to make Rivera consider that he may be making some headway, some kind of level of belief that would never occur for a million years.
    “While you’re looking up where I was, why don’t you find out that Mrs. Wall was up at Chattahoochie last year.”
    Dodge looked at him. Waiting.
    “Look it up,” Rivera said. “She bounces around to nuthouses like a pinball. I took the Old Man up to North Carolina a couple of years ago to look at her. She was sitting in some room eating Jell-O and drooling all over herself.”
    “She tried to kill him?”
    “Like I said, look it up,” he said. “She got a goddamned brain operation last year. She’s mental.”
    Wainright stood beside Dodge now.
    Davy, Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier!
    Wainright pulled open his coat and tucked his hand in the pocket, not to be cool but to show off his new blue-finish .38. And Dodge tried to ignore him, because showing a guy like Rivera your gun was kind of like sticking out your tongue.
    “If you’re lying to us, we’ll run your ass into jail so fast your ears will bleed,” Wainright said.
    “I got it, Allison.” Dodge kept looking