Don't Ever Look Back: A Mystery (Buck Schatz Series) by Daniel Friedman Read Free Book Online Page A

up. This simple task was the thing I’d been working so hard to be able to do, and I could still barely achieve it without help.
    My vision went white, and my side was all fire. I yelped in pain and let go of the wall. Now my weight was on my legs, which was exactly where my weight was never supposed to be. My thighs shook, and I felt my knees begin to give out, and my body started to pitch forward, but I managed to splay my arms across the top of the walker and regain my balance. Before I pulled myself fully upright, I took a couple of deep, ragged breaths.
    And then the phone stopped ringing.
    “Aw, shit,” I said to the empty room, because I was feeble and senile and miserable and broken.
    And then it rang again. He must have hung up and called back. I pushed the walker across the room and fumbled the device out of my pants in time to answer.
    “Hello, Baruch.”
    “Elijah.”
    “I thought maybe you had decided not to help me.”
    “I ain’t helping you. You said you’d turn yourself in, and I said I’d be there.”
    “Very well. I have obtained the services of a criminal defense attorney, and I am prepared to surrender, if the authorities can protect me.”
    “Go to the Criminal Justice Center at 201 Poplar, and I’ll meet you there.”
    He laughed. It was still a chirpy sound, but now it had some gravel in it. “Didn’t I tell you that I am in danger? I did not come looking for Baruch Schatz so that I could walk through the front door of a building full of police and criminals. You know as well as I do that men who carry badges may serve many interests other than that of justice.”
    I hated a lot of things about Elijah, but I hated the way he talked most of all. “So what do you want me to do?”
    “Well, since you are famously incorruptible, I would like you to make arrangements with a police contact you trust. I will surrender to that officer at a place of my choosing, and you and he will arrange for me to be taken to a secure location.”
    “You want some kind of witness protection program?”
    “I would like to not be murdered today.”
    “You have to tell me what you’ve got yourself into.”
    “I will tell the police. You are not the police. Not anymore. Your task is a simple one: You are to put me into contact with men to whom I can entrust my safety. Are you capable of this?”
    “I know a guy,” I said.
    “Very well. Get in touch with this man. I will assume you can reach him in the next hour. At that time, I will call again and tell you where we will meet.”
    “I don’t like this,” I said. But the line had already gone dead.

 
    7
    2009
    I retired from police work in 1976, so all my friends on the force were retired, and very few of them were even alive anymore. I had only one real police contact left, a twenty-six-year-old colored kid named Andre Price. He and I were not friends, on account of I shot his mentor, homicide detective Randall Jennings, in the face with a .357 Magnum revolver.
    Jennings had it coming; he was a scumbag who killed four people and shot me in the back with a deer rifle. But killing him was still a sore point with Price, who had been the only policeman in attendance at Jennings’s funeral. He gave the eulogy.
    There’s nothing to be gained by showing up to bury a disgraced man. There was nobody there for him to ingratiate himself with; no angle to play. Attending that funeral invited scrutiny from Internal Affairs and made any mark on his record look like something to dig into. If he couldn’t stand some heat, he wouldn’t have gone, and even if he was squeaky clean, he was still making trouble for himself that most cops could happily live without.
    I respected Price for eulogizing his scumbag friend. It showed real integrity. Real backbone.
    When I called him on the phone, he hung up on me, which was also an honest thing to do.
    I called him back.
    “Old man, I know you ain’t got nothing to do all day, but I am busy,” he said. “I’ve got no