Devil's Heaven by Thomas Adcock

Author:Thomas Adcock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

There are two things I know just as surely as a nun knows her beads. One is, I shall go to heaven when I die.

This would only be right, since turnabout is fair play, and a halfway honest career with the New York Police Department is deserving of a get-out-of-hell-free card. Especially my career, as I am the long-suffering type. Not by choice, as I recently learned the hard way, but by the accident of Irish birth.

I enjoy neither comfort nor pride in seeing a company of angels at the far pass. Many people and most Catholics would classify this as ingratitude and spiting God the Father, and therefore a cardinal sin. But I do not feel sin. Instead, I feel a sad patience. For I know this, too: Before I die, the world will have broken my heart many times over.

Not many would recognize a great patience in me. Most people would call it something else. Foolish maybe.

Some years ago, for instance, way back in the days before the body snatchers got me, Inspector Neglio and I were out drinking the night away someplace. The occasion was a celebration of my taking down some penniless nonentity who went off his nut and eliminated a quantity of his fellow New Yorkers.

“The poor sod,” I said. I was naturally blue at the end of the great chase. And feeling charitable, too, as I always do after bagging somebody the whole city imagines to be a stone crazy monster man. This one was a little squeak of a guy. They usually are. “He’ll spend the rest of his life up in Attica with the mentals, for what that’s worth to us. No belt, no shoelaces, his food all cut up on the plate for him.”

“Better the lousy dirtbag should croak. If we had justice in this state, he’d be on death row wearing slippers every day until one cold morning it’s time to do the shuffle-shuffle down the dance hall for a sit-down on Old Sparky.” Inspector Neglio, since he is a man of the bureau instead of the street, said this with the same abstract savagery that allows politicians and other such deep thinkers to compare the hardships of the poor with the unhappiness of the rich.

“That you call justice?”

“You don’t, Hock?”

“No, I don’t. Justice is when you try and figure out what’s gone so wrong that people get hurt, and when you try to figure out what everybody concerned is going to do about it. This squeak, he killed some people. And then, in the name of the people, what did we do? We collared him, then the judge sent him up.”

“What’s the problem?”

“It’s too easy. So easy it’s going to happen all over again. Tomorrow some other squeak out there nobody ever heard of is going to kill somebody else, and he’ll get busted and sent up. And then the day after tomorrow the same thing will happen. Then the tomorrows will keep on coming—and so will the squeaks.

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