Formerly Fingerman by Joe Nelms Read Free Book Online

from the point of view of an experienced FBI agent?
    Wait. That’s it. She had cracked it. Tyra with a badge.
    Now she needed some reason for Hollywood to notice her. How had other talk show hosts done it? Some spent years as reporters, slogging away on local newscasts, covering water skiing squirrels and painfully obvious tips for beating the heat. Nope. Working her way up through the ranks of production in the hopes that some producer might notice how cute yet intelligent she looked schlepping cables across the stage and make her a star? Not happening. Getting an agent and auditioning along with every vapid former cheerleader in Los Angeles? Maybe.
    But what she really wanted was the Scarface promotion. Straight to the top by way of gutsy moves and unbridled moxie. And to do that, she needed a ginormous case to solve.
    Nothing makes a good, nationally devoured, movie-optionable story like a mobster case. That’s the kind of thing you can milk for decades and maybe even get Jamie Foxx to star in. So that’s what she looked for. A big commercially viable mob case.
    She passed on long-term drug stuff. Boring. She claimed to be too busy to join in on the war on illegal downloading. Yawn. She waited and waited until there was some Mafia action on the table. And then she jumped.
    It wasn’t much at the start. A small construction company shakedown investigation with hints of labor union embezzlement. Probably nothing prosecutable as usual, but Brittany begged to be assigned to the case and locked her jaws onto it until she found something. Nothing big, but something. The company had a few silent investors and one disgruntled partner who talked a little too much when he was in his cups. There was definitely some money being laundered there.
    Rather than moving in for that small kill, Brittany convinced her superiors that there was more to the case and asked for more time and resources. The truth was she had no idea if there was more to it, but this was a Mafia case and she was going to squeeze that bastard until she was sure there wasn’t a drop of juice left inside. So she squeezed.
    There was, in fact, more juice in the form of a link to the Maraschino crime family. It was precisely what she had hoped for and exactly what she needed to implement her plan to become a household name.
    Two years of slogging through paperwork and bureaucracy and ass kissing later, Brittany was about to get her shot at running her own mob sting operation. And then she heard Frank telling Sal about the guy and the thing. Cha-Ching! This was more than she could have ever hoped for. No longer a simple money-laundering affair or a city hall bribe, but an actual murder plot. Real Jamie-Foxx-on-line-two kind of stuff. And now, she faced one last hurdle. Her direct superior, Anfernee Fine.
    Anfernee Fine was not a stupid man. He was a company man. Long ago he had figured out that succeeding in the world of government employment had very little to do with how smart you were, how clever your ideas to improve workflow were, or even how well you did your job. No, it was Anfernee’s conclusion that the yardstick of success in the FBI was one that measured a murky mix of seniority, lack of offense, and an easy-to-recite summary of press-friendly cases with clever names in which you played some role. Not necessarily the top cop hero role. But a role.
    So that’s what Anfernee did. Not that he was lazy. Certainly he could have proven his intelligence, improved workplace efficiency, and performed far and above what his job description called for. But that would have gone unnoticed. Working hard in a government job, even the FBI, is like trying to perfect the balance of spices in a McNugget. Nobody cares.
    Instead, he played by the rules and avoided making waves of any kind. As flawed and weighed down with red tape as it was, the FBI wasn’t going to change anytime soon, so he decided to roll with it. Why beat your head against the wall