Free Blood Line by Rex Burns Page B

now? What’s so important you got to interrupt my morning coffee?”
    “It’s not morning, Willy. It’s almost eleven. And I’m looking for a killer.”
    “Shit, when ain’t you? And when you gonna start catching some?”
    “Don’t believe everything you read in the newspapers, Willy.”
    “I don’t read the papers, my man, just the racing form. I got my own ways of finding things out. And I bet you calling right now from a donut shop, ain’t you?”
    “Close—a Burger King. I want to know what you’ve got on Big Ron Tipton.”
    A few wheezing breaths as the heavy man thought. “That be about the kid got shot? The one over near the old Stapleton projects?” Fat Willy was telling Wager that he did, indeed, know what went down in his neighborhood.
    “John Erle Hocks, yeah. Thirteen years old.”
    “Um.” Breath. “That Big Ron is a mean nigger, all right. Crazy-like, you know?” Another breath and Wager could sense the man feeling his way, trying to discover what the event might mean for him without letting Wager or anyone else know what was or wasn’t important about it. Life, for Fat Willy, was a poker game. “What you after with him?”
    “I hear John Erle was one of his runners. I want to know if that’s why he was shot.”
    “One of Big Ron’s runners? He don’t have runners. He works by hisself. Least, that’s what I hear.”
    “I’d like to find that out for sure, Willy.”
    “Uh-huh. You mean maybe Big Ron trying to expand his business, like?”
    “Or if someone’s moving in on him.”
    “Either way, could be bad news all around.”
    “Something else; I want people to know I’m asking around about him.”
    “Folks hear that, they gonna be careful about doing business with him. Big Ron ain’t going to like that.”
    “Tough shit.”
    “Um.” In the background another clack of pool balls at the break, followed by a high-pitched laugh. “I see what I can do. And Wager—”
    “Yeah?”
    “Like I say, everybody get a little something, right?”
    “I deal fair, Willy.”
    “Uh-huh.”

8
    H IS NEXT CALL was via his radio. The Vice and Narcotics people would be straggling into the office about now, catching up on their paperwork before meeting with the SWAT teams to set up tonight’s festivities. Walt Adamo, who had been in Wager’s class at the police academy and who had been miffed when Wager made detective sergeant and he didn’t, had finally been promoted and found a home in V & N. It wasn’t, to Wager’s way of thinking, equal to the Homicide section; but then not much was.
    He also knew that most good cops would think the same way: that the job they were doing—V & N or whatever—was the most important one in the department. But Wager knew absolutely that his was. Evidence: There was no statute of limitations on murder. And it didn’t matter who was killed—John F. Kennedy or John Erle Hocks—it was the act itself, it was murder itself, that gave so much weight to the job he did. And maybe that was the real reason Gargan’s article was still rankling so much: Running through the reporter’s facts was the implication that, because a victim had been Wager’s relative, he would work harder to find the killer. A personal stake that called for effort he would not give to a victim he didn’t know. But Wager had never met a killer who required just ordinary effort, because murder was not just your ordinary crime—despite the familiarity corpses were gaining on television and in the newspapers. No homicide was run-of-the-mill. There were a lot of killers who were just plain dumb and careless, even more who did what they did out of an immense selfishness. There were some who were pure scum, and even a few he might have let himself feel sorry for after he had nailed them and they were convicted. But despite who they were or how they got that way, it was what they had done that counted with the law and especially with Wager; it was what they had done, not who they were