Killing Zone by Rex Burns Read Free Book Online Page A

whatever his name is. How come the Denver police ain’t hiring Americans no more?”
    Nick Papadopoulos worked out of Assault in the Crimes Against Persons division. Wager knew the man but not very well. “What’s the charge, Willy?”
    “Arson and assault. But that’s only what the police say.”
    “They don’t have to say a hell of a lot more than that. That’s a couple of felonies.”
    “It’s a bunch of bullshit, is what it is. You don’t know nothing about it, Wager—I’m telling you it’s bullshit and I want them out. You owe me!”
    “Willy, you’ve got a couple cruds beating up on people and burning down their property and you want them sprung? I don’t owe you that much.”
    “That’s not the way it was, God damn it all!”
    “If that’s what they’re charged with, I don’t care how it was. They don’t need me, they need a lawyer. Besides, if the charges have been filed, there’s nothing I can do about it, anyway.”
    “They ain’t been filed—they was just arrested. They being held for questioning—ain’t no charges filed on them yet. That comes Monday.” He added, “And don’t give me no shit about you not being able to do nothing. I know and you know the police drops charges all the time, Wager. You owe me—you owe your ass to me. And now I want to collect!”
    It was bound to come sooner or later, Wager knew. He’d used Willy and his information to solve an earlier series of homicides along the Colfax strip, and now the fat man was calling in his marker. “Have they been arrested before?”
    “Who ain’t?”
    “Convictions?”
    “That’s the problem, man. They get convicted on this, it’s the third conviction inside ten years. Shit, six more months and they be past the ten-year limit on their first one—that goddamn Papalopoulos!”
    A third felony conviction within ten years meant an automatic twenty-five-to fifty-year sentence. A fourth felony, regardless of how much time passed, meant life. Willy and his people were right to be worried. “I’ll ask.”
    “You do better than that.”
    “No, I won’t. I’ll see what I can find out. Then if I can help you, I will. If I can’t, I won’t.”
    “Damn you, Wager—”
    “I know, you’ve told me: I owe you. I’ll see what I can find out.”
    He dropped the receiver on another squawk and stretched against the stiff pull of his back. Slowly finishing his beer, he stood in the cool night air of the small balcony above Downing and gazed out without seeing the flickering restlessness of the city. Maybe, by now, he was tired enough to sleep.
    There had been times when he was this tired that he and Jo would just hold each other, their naked bodies pressed tightly together beneath the thin protection of the sheet, not thinking sex but only wholeness. Together—her eyes even larger and darker in the room’s dimness and only the twitch of lips against his cheek to tell him she was smiling. Those were times so good he didn’t think they needed words, the union of their slow breath and heartbeat making the only statement. But he should have told her how nice it was; how—despite his silence—he found a kind of peace in those times that existed nowhere else. But he’d said nothing, until the chance for saying anything was gone.

CHAPTER 4
FRIDAY, 13 JUNE, 0802 Hours
    Lieutenant Wolfard called him and Stubbs into his office two minutes after he arrived. “What’s this about threats to Mrs. Green?”
    Wager told him.
    The lieutenant swiveled his chair around to gaze out his narrow window and into the busy Friday traffic below. Wager had noticed that before—when administrators searched for words they usually did it without looking you in the eye. Maybe that way you wouldn’t see they didn’t know everything. “You think she needs further protection?”
    “She’d probably feel better with it. And if something happened to her, there’d be a lot of questions about why she was given none.”
    “Yeah. Shit. Operations