Slow Burn Read Online Free Page B

been very fat, and very comfortable, for a very long time. And very, very old.
    My party ended the moment Doyle got pushed out of New York at the end of a gun. I thought Doyle had his hooks too deep into this city to ever get run off, but I guess I was wrong. He’d gotten shot up pretty bad in a street war with a rival named Howard Rothman. I didn’t think Rothman had the muscle, but again, I was wrong. Doyle took off, Terry Quinn disappeared and so did my partner, Jim Halloran.
    Everyone seemed smart enough to leave town except for me. I stayed and swore I’d help Chief Carmichael find a way to work with the Jews and Italians who’d stepped in to take over Doyle’s rackets. That had been two years ago.
    But Chief Carmichael had other plans. He surprised me and everyone else when he signed on with Roosevelt’s Reformers instead of Lucania and his crowd. I’d known the Chief since we were kids, so I knew he’d always been an enterprising boy. Trouble was, Carmichael’s treachery actually made sense.
    The Reformers had the full weight of an ambitious governor behind them: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Reformers had momentum. Reform was the future. Reform was now. Doyle was gone and Tammany was the past. Tammany was too big and too old to change.
    Carmichael smelled the change in the wind and adjusted his sails accordingly. He signed on with Roosevelt’s Reformers and saved his own ass. His conversion validated their cause and they were all too glad to have him.
    The Reformers might’ve been dreamers, but they weren’t fools. Carmichael had to prove his new loyalty by purging old ties to the Tammany Tiger. They demanded that he repent for his sins. I was the oldest tie he had. I was his oldest friend.
    I was part of his penance.
    Carmichael had been every bit as crooked as me, but he had rank to protect him. All I had to bank on was the detective shield Doyle had pulled strings to get for me and forty years of friendship with the chief. Friendship turned out to be mighty poor currency. Reform was the coin of the Roosevelt realm, and I had empty pockets.
    The Reformers had demanded my badge at first. They wanted to arrest me and put me on trial for a career of corruption and bribery. But Carmichael knew I had enough dirt on him and half the department to put them all behind bars for a very long time.
    So Carmichael cited friendship and managed to save my job. Not for my sake, but for his. He kicked me off his special detail and banished me instead. He vowed to put the Tiger in the cage and pledged to clean up the department.
    But Carmichael had been smart enough to only tease the Tammany Tiger so much; feeding the Reformers low-hanging fruit from the poisoned tree to get in their good graces. It was vintage Carmichael: playing both sides against the middle.
    It had been all wine and roses between the Chief and Albany from then on. And with Roosevelt having a good shot at the White House, Carmichael’s bet was looking like it might pay off. I hadn’t complained when the dirty money rolled in and things broke my way. I knew I had no right to kick now that things turned against me. But it still burned, and burned bad. Yes, I’d gotten myself into this mess.
    And I was the only one who was going to get myself out of it.
    Something told me this dead girl could serve as my own kind of penance for all the times I’d looked the other way. Well, maybe not all of it, but some of it anyway. Guys like me couldn’t get greedy. We had to take what we could get.
    I knew the daytime detectives wouldn’t work overtime looking for her killer. I knew what they’d say: people who got themselves killed in places like The Chauncey Arms usually had it coming.
    Maybe finding her killer could be my redemption. Carmichael had gotten his. Why not me? Or maybe this was just the pipe dream of a desperate hack looking for a new start. I didn’t know what it was, but I was damned well going to find out. For the girl’s sake. And for