Free Copp On Ice, A Joe Copp Thriller (Joe Copp Private Eye Series) by Don Pendleton

Confiscations dropped during that first year to a little over five million, and held at about that figure over the two succeeding years. Apparently there had been some wrangling in the city council over the matter but Murray had stuck to his guns, the mayor backed him up, and Brighton remained alone in its solitary war against drugs. Surprisingly, drug arrests had climbed steadily during that period when confiscations were tailing off, but the busts were smaller and seemed to be largely confined to smalltime operators.
    Occasionally during those years Brighton had cooperated with other agencies in the area and with the task force itself, but there had been no large scale regional operations out of the Brighton PD since their decision to go solo.
    I asked Ralston about that and he referred me to Captain Williamson. "That's his headache," he said sourly.
    So I called Williamson at home and asked him about it. I suspect he was drunk, or else I'd awakened him from a sound sleep and he's a slow awakener. The voice was furry and the speech slurred as he told me, "That was Tim Murray's pet project. I don't really know that much about it. I'm nominally in charge of that area of operations but I'm really not in that chain of command. Sergeant Boyd runs the undercover narcs and he reports directly to the chief, which we haven't had lately. Since you've become such great buddies with the ex-chief, why don't you ask him about it?"
    "Who told you we've become great buddies?"
    "It's a small town," he said, and hung up on me.
    It was exactly the same comment Ralston had given me earlier. So I went over to the dispatcher and asked her, "Who gave the order to report my movements?"
    That flustered her. She said, "I don't..."
    I said, "Sure you do. Let me see the log."
    She pulled a small clipboard from a pigeonhole near her console and handed it to me without a word. How cute. I'd been under surveillance since I left the PD following the shootings of Manning and Peterson, time in and time out at each stop of the night.
    I returned the log to the dispatcher without comment, returned to my office and tried again to connect with Lila, struck out again at every number, decided to have it out with Ralston; called him in, closed the door, wiped the sour look off his face with a backhanded slap that put him on the couch.
    He stayed there, gazing up at me with sheer hatred but wisely non-combative. "You can't get away with that," he growled.
    "So file a complaint," I growled back. "Why was the narc unit hit?"
    "Hit? It wasn't hit . Set up, maybe, with a stolen car. That's why the officers pursued, it'd just made the hot list. Terrible, terrible mistake."
    "Try another," I insisted. "It was a hit . First me, then them. Maybe I can understand me. Them, I can't. Why them?"
    "This is crazy," Ralston muttered.
    I kicked at him, missed on purpose, told him, "Don't make me kick it out of you. You guys had me spotted all night. Every cop on duty knew exactly where I was at every minute. Why? What's so damned hot in this town? What are you guys covering? Not Murray. It can't be Murray." I kicked at him again, and this time I missed only a little.
    He rolled off the couch and came up on one knee at the
    wall, his service revolver in hand. "I won't take this shit, Copp," he said angrily. "Try that again and I'll take your leg off."
    I turned my back on him and went to the door, opened it, turned back to tell him, "You're going to take a lot of shit, pal, before I bow out of here. If you guys think I'm going to roll over for you, think again. I've had cops like you for breakfast all my life and I'm starting to gag on it. Clean it up, starting right now. You won't enjoy it if I have to clean it up for you. Speaking of that, get ahold of Boyd. Do it now. I want him and his whole scruffy bunch in this office at one o'clock sharp—and I don't care where they are or what they're doing, I want them here at one."
    I stepped outside and almost into the arms of a homicide