Last Chance for Glory by Stephen Solomita Read Free Book Online Page A

having to explain a second assault? Think about it.”
    Blake saw a flicker of awareness float through the Russian’s eyes. He decided that while it wasn’t exactly intelligence, it did indicate a certain shrewdness. A memory, perhaps, of his own native land and what the authorities in that native land could do to you.
    “Why you no mind own business?”
    “I should have. I admit it. But there’s no sense in going any further. What we oughta do is let it drop and wait for the police.”
    “You are dirty coward.”
    “Okay, I can accept that.”
    “You are dirty American coward.”
    The Russian turned to face the oncoming police, and Blake, acting entirely on impulse, stepped forward to drive his fist into the fat man’s lower back. While his blow (like that of the little man with the pipe) was not a killing blow, it was entirely disabling. The Russian fell to the ground and howled like a castrated pig.
    Blake shook his head in disgust. “Check it out, putz. The first rule of American street life is never turn your back on a man you’ve just humiliated.”
    “Sarge, my whole family was on the job,” Blake explained. “Two uncles, my old man, a bunch of cousins. Since 1883 when my great-great-grandfather was appointed to the cops by a Tammany boss named Kilpatrick.”
    “So what happened to you?”
    They were sitting, Blake and Detective-Sergeant Paul O’Dowd, in a mercifully air-conditioned blue-and-white on Tenth Avenue, happily blocking the already snarled evening traffic while they chatted away.
    “What happened, Sarge, was that my Irish father married a nice Jewish girl from Forest Hills. And what I did was become a computer freak with a bad attitude.”
    It was true, as far as it went. Blake had come out of CCNY in 1983 with a BS in computer science and a job worth thirty-five grand a year. Not bad, for a twenty-one-year-old kid. The only problem was that he’d hated his work. Customizing software for investment bankers had seemed interesting enough, especially from the prospective of an undergraduate with no money to attempt a master’s degree. In fact, it’d turned deadly dull in a hurry.
    “So, how come you’re drivin’ a cab?”
    “It’s a long story. You sure you wanna hear it?”
    “That coon’s in a bad way, Blake. If he should happen to expire, it’ll go down as a homicide. You’re a witness. Good or bad is what I’m trying to find out. So, how come you’re drivin’ a cab?”
    “You ever have a job you hated, Sergeant?”
    “I hate the one I’m doing now.”
    “Well, pretend that somebody you just happened to meet at a party offered you a job that was a thousand times more interesting and paid better than being a cop. Would you think you stepped in shit?”
    “Keep goin’, Blake. There’s gotta be a punch line here; I can feel it coming.”
    “The someone I met is named Joanna Bardo, president and sole shareholder of Manhattan Executive Investigations, Incorporated. When I told her I was a computer programmer, she offered me a job on the spot.”
    “Doing exactly what?”
    Blake smiled. “Sarge, you know about knocking on doors? Burning shoe leather? Well, at Manhattan Executive, we don’t knock on doors until after we knock on the computer. Motor-vehicle records, accident reports, criminal records, insurance records, property sales, births, deaths, marriages—it’s all there, all legal. All just a phone call away.”
    “I take it the computer makes the phone call.”
    “That’s right. Give the computer a social security number and it’ll find you anywhere. Manhattan Executive was one of the first companies to use the computer for skip-tracing. There was a time, about five years ago, when every bail bondsman in the city was sending us business. There’s a lot more competition, now, but we still get to pick and choose.”
    “It sounds okay, Blake. Probably good money in it, too.”
    “It would have been better if I’d stayed with the computer, but I wanted to do