Bread (87th Precinct) by Ed McBain Read Free Book Online

face.

 
    Carella eased the door shut behind him and drew his pistol. He did not know if Reardon’s killer was still in the warehouse. He had been shot twice in his lifetime as a cop, both times unexpectedly, once by a punk pusher in Grover Park and again by a person known only as the Deaf Man. He had not particularly enjoyed either experience, since getting shot in reality is hardly ever like getting shot on television. He had no desire now to emulate Reardon’s present condition; he stood stock-still, and listened.
    A water tap was dripping someplace.
    A fly buzzed around one of the sticky open holes in Reardon’s face.
    On the street outside, a truck ground into lower gear and labored up the hill from the river.
    Carella listened and waited.
    Three minutes passed. Five.
    Cautiously, he stepped over Reardon’s body, flattened himself against the wall, and edged his way past the telephone. The door to the adjacent small room was partially open. He could see a hot plate on a counter and above that a hanging wall cabinet. He shoved the door wide and allowed his gun hand to precede him into the room. It was empty. He came back up the corridor, stepped over Reardon’s body again, and looked into the main storage area. Sodden ashes and charcoal, scorched metal tables, broken hanging light fixtures, nothing else. He kept the gun in his hand, went to the entrance door, and threw the slip bolt with his elbow. Ignoring Reardon for the moment, he went back to the small room in which Lockhart and Barnes had brewed their coffee and tippled their sauce. In the cabinet, he found a fifth of cheap whiskey. He put the gun down momentarily, wrapped part of his handkerchief around the neck of the bottle, a corner of it around the screw top, and twisted off the cap. Chloral hydrate has a slightly aromatic odor and a bitter taste, but all he could smell was alcohol fumes, and he wasn’t about to take a swig of whatever was in that bottle. He screwed the cap back onto the bottle, put the handkerchief back into his pocket, and the .38 back into its holster. He tagged the bottle for later transmittal to the lab, and debated whether or not he should call Andy Parker and suggest that not only had he missed the probable cause of the fire, but he had also overlooked a bottle that most likely contained a sizable quantity of CC1 3 CH0.H 2 0. He went out into the hallway again.
    Reardon was still lying on the floor, and Reardon was still dead.
    The first bullet had taken him in the right cheek, the second one just below his nose, in the upper lip. The hole in the cheek was neat and small, the one below the nose somewhat messier because the bullet had torn away part of the lip, shattering teeth and gum ridge with the force of its entry. Carella didn’t know any medicalexaminer who would risk his reputation by estimating the size of the bullet from the diameter of the hole left in the skin; bullets of different calibers often left entrance wounds of only slightly varying sizes. Nor did the size of the entrance wound always indicate from what distance the gun was fired; some small-caliber contact wounds, in fact, looked exactly like long-range shots. But there were powder grains embedded in Reardon’s cheek and around his mouth, whereas there were no flame burns anywhere on his face. Carella guessed he’d been shot from fairly close up, but beyond the range of flame.
    His initial supposition was that Reardon had opened the door on his killer and been surprised by a quick and deadly fusillade. But that didn’t explain the unlocked gate in the cyclone fence. That gate had been padlocked when Carella visited the warehouse earlier today, and Reardon had opened it from the inside with a key from his belt ring. He had locked the gate again before leading Carella to the warehouse, and when the visit was over, he had walked back to the gate, unlocked it, let Carella out, and immediately locked it behind him again. So how had the killer got inside the