The Red Storm by Grant Bywaters Read Free Book Online Page A

Brawley went back to the other officers who were wrapping the scene up. I watched as two officers brusquely yanked Storm’s lifeless body off the bench, and dragged it toward the back of the waiting morgue wagon.
    There he’d be taken to coroner’s office, where he’d be put in a steel refrigerator until he could be examined.
    I suppose a normal person would feel something about an old acquaintance winding up dead. I felt nothing. It was always going to end this way for him, the only surprise being it took this long. And yet even in death, Storm seemed to have a way of taking people down with him, in this case, his own daughter. I did not like the idea of having gotten her involved and in the crosshairs of the police.
    A small, ghoulish crowd had gathered around the corpse. They watched as the attendants unceremoniously tossed Storm into the back of the wagon as if he was nothing more than a bag of laundry and they pulled out.
    Bill Storm was on the front of the morning paper with the overglamorized headline: “Notorious Heavy Found Dead in Congo Square.” The article read:
    At around midnight this morning a pedestrian passing through Congo Square found the lifeless body of a man slumped over on a park bench. The police were notified, and the body was promptly identified as known New York criminal Bill Storm. The coroner’s office cited the cause of death as being a gunshot, possibly a .38, to the back of the head. No known witnesses or suspects were disclosed by the police when this story made print. Storm was wanted for a kidnapping charge in Brooklyn that dated back over a decade and the death of two police officers who were killed when Storm escaped capture. Authorities did not know Storm’s whereabouts until now. It is still a mystery to them where Storm had been all these years, and one that will likely not be solved anytime soon.
    I pushed the paper aside, and went through the stack of mail I found wedged under my door. It was all bills, the biggest being from the Bell Company. Oh, Ma Bell, the evil madam that controlled most, if not all, phone companies, wanted her money. It took little time before I stuffed the mail and all its contents into the waiting garbage can.
    After breakfast, I drove out to the coroner’s office on St. Peter Street. The coroner himself, Joel Wilkins, was not a pathologist, nor did he have any medical background. He was a used-car salesman who got elected since no physician wanted the low-paying position. He ran the place the same way he ran his business: into the ground. There were many reports that he diverted the annual budget money, which should’ve gone to supplies and salaries, into his own pocket. This led to a pileup of bodies waiting to be examined since last summer, but little to no staff to do it. There were newspaper rumors that Wilkins was to be audited for grand larceny charges for stealing state funds.
    Yet Wilkins was the type of man I liked dealing with, because no matter what his personal prejudices were, the desire to make a buck or bargain trumped it. The few dealings I had with him, I negotiated with money. Yet when I heard him grumbling about not being able to get tickets to an upcoming fight at the Coliseum, I used the few contacts I still had with the boxing world to get him a pair.
    He could always be found in his office, signing death certificates or betting on the ponies and anything else that had four legs and could run.
    His office, endowed with a solid wood office desk and a deep chestnut-brown filing cabinet, smelled of stale carpets and furniture polish. Wilkins ignored me as I came in. Instead, he sat behind his desk on an Old Rimu captain’s chair, cradling his phone like a hophead cradled a mud pipe.
    Wilkins was tall, about six foot two, and I guessed through my years of sizing opponents’ actual weight, weighed around one hundred and ninety pounds, with slick black hair, sharp blue eyes, and wearing a loud blue