Don't Ever Get Old Read Online Free

them were Mexican. The officers looked a lot younger than they used to as well, and more of them were black.
    The changes threw my equilibrium a little bit, but I was counting on the power of progress. My detecting skills were state-of-the-art as of 1973, but I didn’t have anything approaching an idea about how to use a computer to track down a Nazi fugitive.
    I wondered if Tequila was right that we could find Ziegler using the databases. I saw those things spitting out surprising and crucial information every week on the police procedural programs on television, but it always seemed like an expediency, a story device to get the cops to the killer in fifty minutes with commercials. Surely police work hadn’t gotten that easy. If it had, the criminals would all be out of business.
    I took a seat on a bench in the squad room, next to a handcuffed teenager who had tattooed some kind of tribal pattern on his face and neck in an unsuccessful attempt to hide his acne scars. I waited long enough to burn through three Luckys before a young officer asked me why I was there. He was a white kid, maybe twenty-five or twenty-six, but already overweight and balding. I asked to see half a dozen people who were pretty green when I left, people I thought might still be around. They had all died or retired, so I told the kid to send me to somebody in homicide.
    â€œI’ll call up there now and see if anybody can talk to you,” he said. “What case are you here about?”
    â€œOh, I want to see if you folks can help me look some information up in the police computer, and maybe I could look at some old mug shots. I used to be a cop.”
    He picked up his telephone receiver. “You got a name, Officer?” he asked me.
    â€œI’m retired detective Baruch Schatz.”
    â€œBaruch?”
    â€œYeah. It’s Jewish.”
    He squinted at me. “Wait, you’re not Buck Schatz, are you?”
    â€œPeople call me that.”
    His authoritative cop frown broke into a broad grin. “Holy shit, man, you’re a legend. I can’t believe you’re still alive.”
    I rolled my eyes. “Most days, neither can I.”
    The kid shouted to a black cop who was messing with the coffee machine at the back of the room. “Yo, Andre? Guess who this old motherfucker is right here.”
    â€œIs that your new boyfriend?” Andre was a little taller than the kid at the desk, and in better shape, with close-cropped hair and straight teeth.
    â€œThis is Buck Schatz.”
    â€œFuck you, you lying piece of shit.”
    â€œNo lie. And fuck you.”
    Not everything had changed; cops still talked pretty much the same way they always had. Nobody ever tells a man with a gun to watch his language.
    They paged somebody from homicide to come to see me, and while I waited, they asked me the same questions young cops always ask:
    Yes, it’s true that I hunted down a serial killer and brought him in on my own, while the rest of the department sat around scratching their asses. No, I didn’t break his legs; I just smashed his nose with the butt of my pistol.
    No, it’s not true that Clint Eastwood followed me around to learn to be Dirty Harry, but Don Siegel, the Jewish guy who directed the picture, did call me on the phone to ask me some questions.
    Yeah, it’s true I once ventilated three heavies that a crooked city councilman sent after me. No, they were white men; that happened way back when all the crooked politicians in town and most of the thugs who worked for them were white.
    For the record, it ain’t true that I was the leading cause of death among scumbags in Memphis from 1957 to 1962. People used to say that, and it sounded good. But somebody actually counted it up once, and I was only tied for fourth, behind other scumbags, drug overdoses, and other cops. The tie was with car accidents.
    â€œDamn, Buck. You used to be one hard-ass son of a bitch.”
    â€œUsed