Good Day to Die Read Online Free

in a sheet of newspaper. A perfect little double-edged dagger that I miss to this very day.
    The pimp should have killed me on the spot. (God knows he had plenty of reason; I’d been in his face for months.) But he didn’t pull the trigger right away. What he did was indulge his ego, telling me that I was a piece of shit he had to scrape off his shoe. What I did was grab the knife with the fingers of my right hand, then sweep the gun aside with my left hand while I dragged the blade across his throat. He stood there for a moment, pumping blood all over my Evan Picone jacket, then dropped like a rock. Leaving, I’m happy to say, his Glock 9mm in my hand.
    (I’m not trying to make myself out to be a hero. There was no risk at all. The asshole had made two mistakes. Not only had he gotten too close, he’d let me make the first move. He could not have pulled the trigger before I hit his hand. I had no doubt about it then. I have no doubt about it now. Taking him out amounted to no more than having the confidence to do it without hesitation.)
    “What’s the point, Captain? The killing was investigated and I was cleared.”
    “The point is that I have to know whether you’re a run-of-the-mill hotdog or a genuine psychotic. The department took you off the streets because it couldn’t make up its mind.”
    “You want proof? I can’t give it to you. You want evidence on the other hand, take a look at the last ten months. I came into work, on time, every day. I peered through a microscope until my eyes refused to focus. And I never complained. Never. I know I’m on probation, Captain. I’m not a fool. But the question I have to ask is if there’s anything I can do to redeem myself.”
    I let my eyes go hard for a moment, trying to show her a little righteous indignation. Hoping she’d fall for it. The truth, as far as I could see it, was that the NYPD would be much better served by keeping me right where I was. The truth was that I’d never been a team player and never would be. The truth was that what I wanted from the job had very little to do with a paycheck and a pension. I felt like a game warden trying to explain how an out-of-season deer got into his trunk.
    “It wasn’t the first time, was it?” Her expression didn’t change. It refused to change. She wasn’t going to let me wriggle off the hook until her question was answered. I’ve known any number of ranking officers who pretended to be hard asses because that’s what they thought they were supposed to be. Vanessa Bouton, Captain, New York City Police Department, wasn’t pretending.
    “The first time?”
    “The first time you killed someone. I believe you were still on patrol the first time it happened.”
    That one got a genuine smile. “The first time happened long before I joined the department, Captain. In a country called Vietnam. You wanna hear about it?”
    “Not especially.”
    “Not especially? Listen, you say I’m a hotdog? You say I worked on my own time when I could have been drinking in some cozy cop bar? When I could have been rubbing against some aging cop groupie? I say it was that extra hustle that got me out of uniform. That got me knocked up to grade one. That got me those commendations you don’t wanna talk about. And I’ll tell you something else, Captain. I’ll never be the kind of cop who does his tour and goes home. Never. I’d leave the job first.”
    Suddenly I was disgusted. Why was I sucking up to this fatass desk jockey? For Captain Vanessa Bouton, creeping down a dark hallway in some abandoned South Bronx tenement was the cop equivalent of jumping out of a helicopter without a parachute. For me, it was the ultimate superfly dope.
    “What do you know about King Thong?”
    That got me. I actually burst out laughing, then continued to laugh at Vanessa Bouton’s unchanging expression. I don’t know which one of the tabloids gave that name to New York’s latest serial killer. (At the time, I’d thought it