Copp for Hire by Don Pendleton

Author:Don Pendleton [Pendleton, Don]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780595153084
Publisher: Backinprint.com
Published: 1987-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

IT WOULD BE a severe understatement for me to say that I was disappointed in the way this case was turning. The only one of the princ1pals I really cared about and wanted to bring through smelling like a rose was instead smelling more and more period with every new development.

I refer, of course, to the bewitching Belinda.

I really did not care, now, to learn any more

about the lady.

And I damned near walked away from the whole thing, right there outside Sandra's house.

I did not, after all, have a client, and it was now obvious that I was not going to have a client in this case. This case? What case? I had no case. What I had it seemed, was a passel of whores and their pimps, and somebody was knocking them off. Whoopee. Meanwhile I was out two hundred bucks in expenses.

But I couldn't let it go.

I'm too selfish. Just couldn't stand to think of some strutting savage getting away with this kind of stuff. I mean, I live here too, you know. It's the only damned place I've got. Give it back to the savages, where am I going to sleep tonight? In a cave?

Besides, I had not given up entirely on Linda.

Whatever, I could not walk away from it.

So instead I went back to Ed Jones's town- house. It was a few minutes past noon when I got there. Half a dozen preschoolers were playing in the street. A little boy of about three was riding a stick-horse. He pulled a toy gun on me and I raised my hands but the little shit shot me anyway.

I said to myself bullshit, I'm not falling down for you, kid; you shot me with my hands in the air, what kind of game is this?

I went on up to Jones's front door and was confronted with the same game played on a different stage. Ed wasn't home but his expectant wife was, and evidently he'd beaten her since the last time I was there. She had a black eye and a split lip, bruises on the throat, bruises on the arms; dress torn half off of her; I would not have been surprised to find footprints on her swollen belly.

The door was ajar and I could hear her crying from the porch so I went on in. She lay curled on the couch; gave me a startled look as I went through looking for Jones. I didn't find him, needless to say, and I guess it's a good thing because I would have killed the sumbitch with my bare hands if I'd found him there.

I stopped off in the bathroom and wet a towel, found some disinfectant, carried it back to the couch and went to work on her hurts. She'd stopped crying; seemed very embarrassed by the whole thing. Why are battered wives always embarrassed for their pricks? I'll never understand it; and here's one for you judges: it ought to be justifiable homicide to catch the sumbitch in his sleep and blow him away.

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