Page 141

“Yes, sir,” Peter agreed.

“From the time we get there, we don’t have anything else to do, right? I mean, when it’s all over, we’ll walk by and say something to Jeannie and Gertrude Moffitt, but there’s nothing else we have to do as pallbearers, right?”

“I think that’s right, Chief,” Peter said.

“The minute we get there, Peter, I mean when we march away from the gravesite, and are standing there, you take off.”

“Sir?”

“You take off. You go to the first patrol car that can move, and you tell them to take you back to Marshutz & Sons. Then you get in your car, whose radio is out of service, and you go home and you throw some stuff in a bag, and you go to Jersey in connection with the murder of the suspect in the Nelson killing. And you stay there, Peter, until I tell you to come home.”

“Commissioner Czernick sent Sergeant Jankowitz to tell me the commissioner wants me in his office at two this afternoon,” Peter said.

“I’ll handle Czernick,” Coughlin said. “You do what I tell you, Peter. If nothing else, I can buy you some time for him to cool down. Sometimes, Czernick lets his temper get in the way of his common sense. Once he’s done something dumb, like swearing to put you in uniform, assigned to Night Command, permanently, on the ‘last out’ shift—”

“My God, is it that bad?” Peter said.

“If Carlucci loses the election, the new mayor will want a new police commissioner,” Coughlin said. “If the Ledger doesn’t support Carlucci, he may lose the election. You’re expendable, Peter. What I was saying was that once Czernick has done something dumb, and then realized it was a mistake, he’s got too hard a head to admit he was wrong. And he doesn’t have to really worry about the cops lining up behind you for getting screwed. I think you’re a good cop. Hell, I know you’re a good cop. But there are a lot of forty-five- and fifty-year-old lieutenants and captains around who think the reason they didn’t get promoted when you did is because their father wasn’t a chief inspector.”

“I won’t resign,” Peter said. “Night Command, back in uniform ... no matter what.”

“Come on, Peter,” Coughlin said. “You didn’t come on the job last week. You know what they can do to somebody—civil service be damned—when they want to get rid of him. If you can put up with going back in uniform and Night Command, he’ll think of something else.”

Peter didn’t reply.

“It would probably help some if you could catch whoever hacked up the Nelson boy and shot his boyfriend,” Coughlin said.

They were in the cemetery now, winding slowly down access roads. He could see Dutch Moffitt’s gravesite. Highway Patrolmen were already lined up on both sides of the path down which they would carry Dutch’s casket.

Jesus, Peter thought. Maybe that was my mistake. Maybe I should have just stayed in Highway, and rode around on a motorcycle, and been happy to make Lieutenant at forty-five. That way there wouldn’t ‘t have been any of this goddamned politics.

But then he realized he was wrong.

There’s always politics. In Highway, it’s who gets a new motorcycle and who doesn’t. Who gets to do interesting things, or who rides up and down Interstate 95 in the rain, ticketing speeders. Same crap. Just a different level.

“Thank you, Chief,” Peter said. “I appreciate the vote of confidence.”

“I owe your father one,” Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin said, matter-of-factly. “He saved my ass, one time.”

****

“Hello?”

Peter’s heart jumped at the sound of her voice.

“Hi,” he said.

“I thought it might be you,” she said. “You don’t seem thrilled to hear my voice,” Peter said.

“I don’t get very many calls at midnight,” she said, ignoring his reply.

“It took me that long to get up my courage to call,” he said.

“Where are you, home? Or out on the streets, protecting the public?”

“I’m in Atlantic City,” he said.

“What are you doing there?”