THE FOURTH WATCH Read Online Free

arrest them, make the state prosecute them, I don't care
what it costs. When that's gone, I'll give you more, just find
them."
    I took the check in my hands and looked at it
with all its lovely zeros, written in a small, cramped hand, the
biggest retainer check I'd ever taken. Somehow I didn't drool on
it. For twenty-five thousand dollars she would have seen a junior
associate at Andreason, Mallack, Windsor & Spree, and half of
it would have been gone before she got back on the elevator. Here
at the Law Offices of Michael J. Knight, however, twenty five large
would buy a great deal of my time and effort. "We1l if Alex said
I'd help you then I guess he must think it's worth the effort.
Let's see what I can find out."
    "Thank you, Mike," she said, her beautiful
green eyes swimming, her lovely face still damp from her tears. She
took one of my cards, and wrote her phone number and address on the
back of another, then we shook hands and she was gone. Her perfume
lingered after her. I sat there behind my scarred old desk in the
medium sized rectangle that was my office and drank the scent of it
in, and wondered if I had just taken twenty-five G's off of a
broken-hearted girl who was chasing the ghost of her accidentally
drowned father. Gee, I thought, what a wonderful vocation I've
found for my life's work.
    "Ah, with my luck, the check will probably
bounce anyway," I said aloud to the empty room.
    But it didn't.

    2
    WORCESTER IS THE RODNEY
DANGERFIELD of American cities. It is the
second largest city in New England, but until recently the commuter
trains didn't stop here. Even now, with only three trains to Boston
each morning, and three back each evening, the schedule seems
um...reluctant. The population is more than 160,000, but candidates
for statewide office rarely campaign here. The businesses downtown
fold in an absurd rotation inspired by erratic and seemingly
meaningless regulation. There is a shopping mall downtown, but it
has gone through several cycles of prosperity and despair. When it
was built, the brain trust that conceived it, surrounded it with a
massive indoor parking garage. All manner of human depravity has
manifest itself inside these walls down through the years. Women
shoppers from the surrounding suburbs - the very lifeblood of any
mall's economic success - are just simply afraid to go in there,
and people that live within walking distance of it can't afford
anything sold there. So it cycles down until it becomes an
embarrassing gang controlled vipers den, and the city sends in the
cops and pumps in the taxpayer dollars to spruce it up for another
run.
    The AUD, once a proud center for the
performing arts, had fallen into such a pathetic state of
disrepair, that the company contracted by the city to manage it,
couldn't book an act of any kind that would play it, so it folded.
Its collapse sparked a year of political combat. Elected officials
got their friends appointed to high paying jobs and studies were
commissioned to determine the next best use of the property. A
mountain of taxpayer money was spent and in the end, the building
was left two thirds vacant and the Juvenile Court, which had been
located in another crumbling city building, was moved in to the
remaining third. It is now an irregular maze of offices and
courtrooms populated by rats and stone-faced employees that can
turn even the simplest of tasks into impossible
problems.
    The Superior and District Courts of Worcester,
where I ply my trade, offer, perhaps, the best evidence of
Worcester's status in the Commonwealth. The Main Street Courthouse
is the busiest court building in Massachusetts, bar none. It is
packed to the rafters with criminal and civil litigants day in and
day out. The hallways are clogged with lawyers squeezed into
corners, working out deals with one another. Criminals, the tall
and the small, are hauled in from the jail each day and caged like
cobra and mongoose in pathetically tiny cells off the main
courtrooms. They howl