Die Next by Jonathan Stone

Author:Jonathan Stone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2020-04-13T16:00:00+00:00

37.

In his neat new three-bedroom on eastern Long Island, sitting on his little porch with a cigar in the morning, Detective Lopez, NYPD, 11th Precinct, Ret., puts down the newspaper. He’s read the two paragraphs closely three times now, and they reveal nothing more than he already knew.

He’s so used to the failure of the justice system over his thirty years on the force that it no longer bothers him. Usually.

This one bothers him a lot. Because in this one, he had intervened. He had personally been there to keep the kid and his girlfriend alive. It had been a matter of seconds between life and death. Two nice young kids are walking around today because of Lopez’s instincts and quick judgment. It isn’t usually so personal and close as that.

And this is a bright kid. Unusual kid. Bravery with brains. With modesty. With curiosity. Straightforward, honest. And this is a kid who’d come in looking for police help, who sensed he could trust and count on the police—even if he got spooked and didn’t stay.

On the job, Detective Lopez’s weight issues had finally gotten the better of him. He joked about it—I only move fast if I have to—and they joked right back at him in the station house until it was no longer seen as a joke. He was a hero, a highly decorated cop, but he suffered from morbid obesity, and he and the department had differed on the issue of treatment. They wanted him to have a procedure. They’d pay for it and his recovery but he explained and believed that this is simply who he is, how he is, and they should accept it. And rather than everyone being dragged into court or arbitration over the issue, the department had offered him a package.

His service had been meritorious from day one, and he took the package and sits now, looking out on the sun rising over a potato field—but reading about an assassin going free. An assassin whose eyes he had looked directly into, at the moment the guy was about to pull the trigger, and Detective Lopez, from amid his deep reservoir of experience and intuition, did not like what he had seen. He wouldn’t mind seeing whatever it was—whatever was in those eyes—through prison bars, but he sure as hell minded the idea of those eyes and what’s behind them, what he sensed, being out on the street.

He called his friends on the force immediately. To make sure this guy Richter is being monitored. To make sure the correct mechanisms are in place. He even went so far as to ask who is on the detail and how smart they are, how alert, how streetwise.

“We’ve got a couple of good kids on it, Sanders and Singh.”

Lopez frowns. A couple of “good kids” is not at all adequate.

“No worries, Detective. The guy is pretty predictable. We staked out his old apartment and his parents’ house, and sure enough he shows up at both places less than an hour later.

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