30 Blood Relatives by Ed McBain

Author:Ed McBain
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781612181578
Publisher: AmazonEncore
Published: 2011-12-20T06:00:00+00:00

Cops know crime statistics.

Which is why hardly anything surprises a cop. Shocks him, yes. He is capable of being shocked. Surprised, rarely. Not where it concerns crime. Carella was shocked when he saw the torn and mutilated body of Muriel Stark in the hallway on Fourteenth and Harding, but he was not surprised that a knife had been the murder weapon. He was not surprised because he knew that 40 percent of the annual murders in this city were caused by the use of knives or other sharp instruments, whereas only 27 percent were caused by the use of firearms. He suspected this was due to the city’s stringent gun laws; in the United States as a whole, a staggering 54 percent of all murders were committed with firearms, the most lethal weapon used in assaults to kill, seven times more deadly than all other weapons combined. Despite whatever the National Rifle Association had to say about man’s inherent right to bear arms and to go romping in the woods in search of game, Carella (and every other cop in the city) would have liked nothing better than a law forbidding private citizens to own or carry a gun of any kind for any purpose whatever. But police officers did not have a powerful lobby in Washington, even though they were the ones who daily reaped the whirlwind while the gun manufacturers reaped the profits.

Statistics.

It shocked Carella, too, that Andrew Lowery had most probably killed his own cousin. It shocked Carella, but it did not surprise him, because he knew that whereas 20 percent of all homicides stemmed from lovers’ quarrels, an overwhelming 30 percent resulted from family conflicts of one sort or another. In real life, you rarely got anyone planning a brilliant murder for months and months, and then executing it in painstaking detail. What you got instead was your brother-in-law hitting you over the head with a beer bottle because he was losing at poker. Your brilliant murders were for television, where the smart cop always tripped up the dumb crook who thought the cop was dumb but who was really dumb himself, heh-heh. Bullshit. Carella always turned off the television set whenever a cop show came on. He sometimes wondered if doctors turned off the set when a doctor show came on. Or lawyers. Or forest rangers. Or private eyes. Carella didn’t know any private eyes. He knew a lot of cops, though, and hardly any of them behaved the way television cops did. But a lot of them watched television cop shows. Probably gave them ideas on how to deal with the good guys and the bad guys. Television cop shoves a pistol at a thief, tells him, “This ain’t a pastrami on rye, sonny,” gives the real-life cop an idea. Next time the real-life cop makes an arrest, he remembers what the television cop said. So he shoves his piece at the thief, and he says, “This ain’t a pastrami on rye, sonny,” and

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