Copp In Deep, A Joe Copp Thriller (Joe Copp Private Eye Series) Read Online Free Page B

private sector, and the cloud says that Joe Copp is trouble looking for a place to happen. Don't know how I ever got such a rep because that really is not me. What I am really is a pussy cat and always a soft touch for a sob story—well, to a point—and I never believed that a policeman's job should be fully defined in any book. If you're a cop, dammit , then you're a cop all the time, in every circumstance, with every person. The cop is there to make a society work. Society is made up of people. A cop is part of that people, like white blood cells in a living body, and a good cop always responds appropriately to any attack upon that body. So sometimes there is no time to sit down with a textbook to find a proper response. You just have to do it—quickly, decisively, always with the best intentions, and with a little heart sometimes.
    That's the way I cop.
    Sometimes it gets me in trouble.
    But I had never been in trouble like this before. And yeah, I was really scared.
          
           On top of everything else, it seems that I had taken on the care and feeding of a homeless waif, one evicted by practical necessity and totally vulnerable to whatever may be coming down the pike toward her. She had no family in this country that she knew of, no friends whom she could trust under the circumstances, and she was scared out of her skull. So we rounded up some of her things and tossed them into a small bag and I took her the hell out of there with me. I knew a place near the high desert where one could hibernate for a while in comfort and safety; what the hell, I couldn't just walk away and leave the kid with a stiff on her hands.
    I stopped along the way and called a homicide cop I know at LAPD, reported the shooting. Told him I'd done it, told him who the guy was, and as much of the circumstances as I felt ready to divulge. Of course he immediately wanted me to come in and make a full statement and I immediately told him to go to hell. "Just put it in the record that I called it in," I requested. "I'm not coming in until I get the thing unraveled."
    I hung up while he was still trying to argue me in; for all I knew, someone had been expecting me to call and was already tracing it. In these days of computerized switching, a trace can be fearfully swift if you are already set up to run it. And, see, I was already totally paranoid.
    I made another stop, at an all-night supermarket in the East Valley for vital groceries, then took my charge straight from there to the hideout. Place belongs to a friend who now lives in Mexico, it's away up in the boo- nies in San Bernardino County about 75 minutes from the L.A. Civic Center, and I've had a key for a long time. Good spot for fishing and philosophizing, sits on the bank of a little mountain stream that runs strong and steady during the snow and melt, reduces to a step- across trickle during the summer but is always pretty and even fishable at trickle state.
    It was nearing onto four o'clock when we got up there, and my frightened nymphet had calmed enough to fall asleep on my shoulder. She'd been curled up there for at least twenty minutes and awoke with a disoriented start when I killed the engine. Guess it isn't proper to refer to her as a "nymphet" although she sure looked like one, especially sleeping. See, I'm six-three and weighed two-sixty last time I looked. I'm just a bit on the down side of forty, too, and though I make this "kid" at twenty-eight at a minimum, considering her history, she has the slender undeveloped look of an undersized teenager—and the face doesn't help you that much, either, because it looks an old-soul fourteen. You know what I mean—that sweet-sober look of super intelligence that some kids have and never lose no matter how old they get. This one looked very frail and vulnerable on top of it, but I was to discover the illusion of that before the night was over.
    The place is built sort of like a ski chalet, you know, all woodsy and