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“What?”

“I told her about how he came in at the top of the captain’s list but apparently doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell getting promoted. And she said she remembered you and my father talking about it when you were blue shirts. That is, people getting frozen out of promotions.”

Coughlin chuckled.

“What? Why’s that funny?”

“It’s not, Matty. I just had a flashback of all the Bushmills your pop and I put away at that wooden table in the kitchen. By God, we thought we solved, if not all, then many of the world’s problems at that table.”

“So she said.”

>

“Solved a few cases there at that table, too. Anyway, Jack, your pop, to his credit, understood that early on.”

“About getting frozen out?”

He looked at Payne, and nodded.

“Yeah. I suspect he got it from Dutch, who, as I’m sure you remember, was damn sharp. That’s one reason why your uncle made commander of the Highway Patrol. Who knows how far he’d have risen had he not gotten killed by that punk at the diner. Same goes for your pop. Who knows how far? He was smarter than I was, and he’d probably have my job now.”

Payne didn’t know what to say and decided silence was best. He sipped his coffee.

“Even though I knew Jack was smarter,” Coughlin went on, “I still was skeptical about people actually getting ahead who didn’t deserve it, and others who had earned a promotion, genuinely deserved it, getting held back. But, hell, we were in our early twenties. I found out soon enough that even I could learn something new. Even today.”

“Do you remember Tank Tankersley, big guy, retired from Homicide? Apparently has a multitude of ex-wives.”

Coughlin nodded. “Absolutely. Good man. Great detective. I don’t know about the ex-wives. But I can tell you that he got one lousy, rotten deal as a cop.”

“So I heard. Peter introduced me to him. And told me how, when Peter got into Internal Affairs, there was the story of Tank turning in the blue shirts who skimmed money and drugs they had seized in dead dealers’ homes. Tank got painted as a gink.”

Coughlin nodded again.

“One of the blue shirts was Harold Walker’s son-in-law,” he said.

Payne, taking another sip of coffee, almost sprayed it.

Wafflin’ Walker? That sonofabitch!

That has to be one reason why Uncle Denny was pissed that they twisted his arm so that Walker reported to him.

“Walker was the one star in that story?”

Coughlin nodded.

“I heard that after that,” Payne said, “Tank got passed over three times for promotion before tiring of the politics. He gave up and retired.”

“As I said, he got a lousy, rotten deal.”

Payne felt his phone vibrate.

“Sorry,” he said, pulling it out.

Coughlin gestured that he understood.

Payne glanced at its screen. He grunted.

“What?” Coughlin said.