Free Supreme Justice by Max Allan Collins Page A

again, sprinting across a backyard to catch up. When she got there, Reeder was already pulling the guy to his feet, the perp’s wail replaced by moaning as he cradled his broken forearm.
    Where had that baton come from? How had Reeder managed all that?
    Rogers vowed that she would watch her new partner much closer from here on out.
    She was getting cuffs out when Reeder said, “We won’t be needing those.”
    “What the hell were you thinking?” she asked, surprised by her own shrillness.
    Reeder was hauling the whimpering perp along by an elbow. “He took off, I took off.”
    “You’re a consultant, remember?”
    “Yes, and right now I’m consulting with Mr. Charles Granger here. That is you, isn’t it, Charles?”
    “Fuck you, man! I ain’t done shit. I wanna doctor and a lawyer!”
    “How about an Indian chief?” Reeder asked cheerfully, then shook him by that elbow like a rag doll. Granger’s eyes rolled, and he howled in pain.
    “ Are you Charles Granger?”
    “Yeah, yes! Gee -sus!”
    Reeder gave her a bland look. “Agent Rogers, meet Mr. Granger. Now I’ve consulted. Happy?”
    “Delighted,” she said.
    Nudging Granger back the way they had come, Reeder said to her, “Collect his gun, would you?”
    Frowning to herself— why was he suddenly in charge? —she holstered her pistol and slipped on a latex glove, then bent down, picked up the revolver, and followed her partner and their catch.
    With Reeder in the lead now, she wondered if her temp partner was going to cause her any real problems—like maybe get her killed. And she had thought Gabe Sloan was a handful of a partner . . .
    Yet, for some reason, she was smiling. Pain in the ass or not, Joe Reeder was why they were heading back with, just possibly, one of Justice Henry Venter’s assassins.
    And he had done this because she had spotted the key clue that brought them here.
    Maybe they would make decent partners at that.

“Laws are made to protect the trusting as well as the suspicious.”
Hugo L. Black, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, 1937–1971, fifth-longest serving Supreme Court Justice.
Section 30, Lot 649-LH, Grid W/X-38.5, Arlington National Cemetery.

SEVEN
    Through the one-way glass of the darkened observation room of the Fairfax County Adult Detention Center, Reeder took stock of Charles Granger.
    Slumped in a straight-back chair, right forearm in a cast, left hand cuffed to a metal ring in the scuffed metal table, the suspect flexed the fingers of both hands. He presented a blank mask of a face, though shifting eyes betrayed anxiety.
    Given Granger’s hippie hair, this was not likely the “Butch” his mother had called out to, though of course it might be a childhood nickname.
    The suspect had been given painkillers at the ER, but nothing narcotic—FBI orders. That meant Granger’s forearm would be throbbing like Reeder’s shoulder had that day he had taken a bullet for a president he despised.
    Maybe he’d used excessive force with Granger—or what used to be considered such, before law enforcement had been granted so damn much latitude. He almost felt pity for the perp— almost .
    This was, after all, an armed robber, a three-time loser circling the drain on the tavern holdups alone—a small-time stickup artist with the face that went with it: eyes crowding a frequently broken nose (boxing background or just bar fights?), his teeth crooked and yellowed from smoking and lack of care.
    But was Charles Granger a murderer?
    Wasn’t as if a hired killer couldn’t be a lowlife piece of scum. Few paid assassins were the glamorous figures of espionage fiction or even the real-life cold-blooded, blue-collar hit men who did contract work for organized crime.
    No, Charles Granger did not seem to be somebody you might hire to kill a justice of the Supreme Court. Rather, he was the kind of slimeball you met in a bar and offered a few hundred bucks to, to kill your ex-wife who lived in