Body of Lies by Deirdre Savoy Read Free Book Online Page A

he acted. The little girl on the other side of the door had been too overwhelmed with relief to care.
    Some said committing a crime was like waving a red flag in Sammy’s face; he’d keep coming after you until he got you. Then there was the time Sammy was in foot pursuit of a man who’d robbed a woman’s pocketbook at gunpoint. Legend had it the suspect turned and fired on Sammy, hitting him three times. But Sammy still kept coming, until he tackled the perp and took his weapon. In truth, Sammy’d been hit once, a flesh wound that barely nipped his shoulder, but like any other myth, its veracity wasn’t based on anything so mundane as the facts.
    If you asked Sammy, he’d earned the name on his first post, walking a beat in Spanish Harlem. Sammy was old school, a relic from before the police department went PC, one of the first black cops the department deigned to admit. To hear Sammy tell it, it wasn’t uncommon in those days to draw the worst assignments or be cast as the screwup when things went sour or, worst of all, to call in for backup that never showed. He got used to going it alone, charging in and defusing a situation before it got out of control. And, Sammy had once told him with a grin, he’d been young and stupid and willing to fight anyone that swung on him. He wasn’t quick enough to use his hands or handy enough with a stick. He’d put his shoulder in the perp’s gut and take him down that way. Worked every damn time.
    Zach had been assigned to the Forty-second Precinct in the Morissania Section of the Bronx straight out of the academy. That first day, Sammy had come up to him. “I hear you’re a good cop.”
    Zach couldn’t imagine who’d said that or what anyone had to go on to make that type of statement. He hadn’t had a chance to prove much of anything to anyone yet. But he knew who Sammy was. A smile sneaked across Zach’s face at the compliment. “Yeah?”
    Sammy gave him a once-over that suggested whoever had given him the good word had lied. “If you want to stay alive, you’ll ride with me.”
    Â 
    Â 
    Zach laughed to himself in the confines of his car, remembering. That was Sammy, as much as he gave, he could often taketh away. But Sammy had taken him in hand, as if it were his personal mission to school Zach in the way of all things. For a kid whose father had died and whose siblings ignored him for the most part, that was a big thing.
    They’d been partnered about six months when Sammy made the pronouncement that Zach should come to his house for dinner the following night. Had he been asked, Zach would have turned him down. It was his day off, time to think of something more fragrant than the smell in the sector car and softer than its upholstery. But nobody argued with Sammy; at least nobody won.
    Given Sammy’s over-the-top personality, Zach had assumed his daughter would be more of the same. He hadn’t expected the girl who opened the door to him. Tall and skinny, dressed in a navy shirtwaist dress with a white collar, her hair styled into two braids that hung past her shoulders, she struck him as an older, darker yet equally morose version of Wednesday Addams. She’d stared up at him with huge, dark eyes that assessed him, and worse, found him, in some way, wanting. Or maybe she’d simply been dismissing him as a nine-second curiosity and nothing more.
    During the ensuing meal of roast beef, mashed potatoes and gravy, and string beans, she hadn’t spoken one word and fled the table as soon as the last morsel of her food passed her lips.
    After she’d left, Sammy had turned to him, his face split with a grin of fatherly pride. “So what do you think?”
    Zach shrugged. What was he supposed to make of an unsmiling, utterly silent girl who looked at him like he was as welcome as a case of chickenpox? “She always so talkative?” he asked finally.
    Sammy