Copp For Hire, A Joe Copp Thriller (Joe Copp Private Eye Series) by Don Pendleton Read Free Book Online

exploded inward. It's one-way glass—I can see out but others cannot see in without really working at it—and we were in muted lighting, so I guess the guy was firing blindly and trusting to luck, but somebody just beyond that shattered glass was pumping buckshot into the room in a murderous fire pattern via a semiautomatic shotgun.
           Stuff was flying everywhere and moving our way by the time my reactions took hold. I pulled Linda to the bottom of the tub with me and held her there until she began to fight me, then gave us nose depth and no more until I could assure myself that it was reasonably prudent to expose more.
           I charged up out of there then with a mad like I had not tasted for a long time, grabbed a pistol from a drawer of the desk and quietly went out the back door.
           Caught a glimpse of the guy in time to get off a couple of rounds as he disappeared at the corner of the house—but it was only a glimpse and I knew better than to chase after him.
           I was, after all, balls naked and dripping wet.
           But I was alive and Linda was alive.
           I figured we got lucky. And I felt like the biggest jerk in town.
           I should have been expecting something like that. Somebody was on a killing streak, and it was not just for kicks.
           Jerk, yeah. I'd damned near got the lady killed. It was time to stop being a jerk. It was time, maybe, to start giving back.

 
    Chapter Eight
     
    I GUESS MORE than anything else I was fuming over the loose way I'd been playing the thing, like it was some kind of game and I was having fun with it, in spite of the deaths of three people in a matter of hours. In defense of my stupidity, though, let me point out that I'd gotten into the thing sort of edgewise. If I'd been a public cop I'd still be working on my reports. A lot had gone down in a very short time. There had not even been time enough for me to start having a good theory about the case.
           With Juanita in the early going, I had been sort of halfway inclining toward spurned lover or fruitcake. I figured she hadn't come entirely clean with me and that the hidden facts would emerge on their own with even a shallow investigation. If she'd been stalked, raped and killed in a sex crime, that would have been a case with a familiar color.   To be run down by a car, though, moments after consulting a private investigator for help, suggested a totally different sort of motive for murder. Also, early on there, I could not even entirely rule out a purely accidental death. After all, the girl had not come to me asking that I save her life. A guy was bugging her—or that was the story—and she wanted him bugged-off; no big deal.
           Before I could even begin to assimilate those ideas, I go and find her roommate murdered beyond any doubt. This could have been a sex crime, though, with no relation to the first death; all the marks were there. Even the torture angle. But a sex killer does not usually tear the scene apart in a search of the premises. Looking at the whole picture there, it would seem that the murder was almost incidental to something else. The torture and the frantic search of the premises pointed to that "something else." But that was all I really had, at this point.
           Then I have my little run-in with Tanner and Jones; they both seem more interested in what I know about Juanita than in what happened to Juanita. During the two hours I have been away someone has ransacked my office in a way strongly similar to the scene at Juanita's apartment. Is it coincidence that I find Tanner and Jones waiting for me there? Is it also coincidence that Tanner logged himself onto the case before he was even officially on duty? And wasn't it just a bit too sloppy, even for Tanner, to let the traffic detail conduct the only official investigation at the scene? Sure it was; but again and still, all I had were deep rumbles and a