The Last Good Day Read Online Free

river running the wrong way, had taken Harold aside and said, “Son, it’s time we give that big stick to one of our own.”
    So how was he supposed to say no? He would’ve been letting down not just his family, who’d been going to the church for three generations, but the whole community on Fenton, Shantytown, Bank, and all the other crooked little dogleg streets down by the river, all the people he’d sat next to in church and shared barbecue with since he was a boy. Still, on a day like this, he longed to be sitting quietly in an anonymous back room with a stack of pink invoices and an IBM calculator.
    “Anyway,” Mike said, “you want to have a couple of extra officers handling calls for dispatch?”
    “That’s a good idea. For the next few days, we’re probably going to need all hands on deck.”
    “I promised all the moms I’d do soccer practice from four-thirty to five-thirty, but I’ll shit-can it,” said Mike, watching Paco smooth down the foot impressions.
    “No, don’t,” said Harold. “At least put in an appearance. Make them feel like everything’s normal and under control.”
    “All right. I’ll stay just a few minutes and then come back here ’til midnight.”
    “What about Marie?” Harold knew they were at each other’s throats about hours lately.
    “I’ll call and see if we can get the Mexican girl to stay late. It’s all right. I’m a dead man at home anyway.”
    “Thanks, buddy.” Harold touched him lightly on the shoulder. “You know, I’d have your back if things had broke the other way.”
    “Yeah, I know.”
    The wind had suddenly subsided, leaving a slightly unnatural calmness along the shore. The gulls that had been walking along the bank with pieces of yellow crime scene tape stuck to their beaks flew away, and the ducks that had been floating nearby like bystanders drifted off. Violent death in the outdoors always changed the ecosystems around it, Harold noticed. Blood seeped into soil, green bottle flies swarmed, gases expanded, putrefaction set in, eels wriggled in the shallows.
    “You know what this is going to turn out to be, don’t you?” Mike looked back at the body under the sheet. “This is going to be another dump job from upstate, like the one we had in May.”
    “What makes you say that?” asked Harold.
    “It’s obvious. Somebody goes to the trouble of cutting the head off a victim so she can’t be identified, and right away you have to start thinking organized crime. This is probably another drug dealer’s skanky girlfriend from Newburgh who pissed the old man off, got herself whacked, and then was driven down and tossed out in our parts. And it’ll turn out that people around here will have gotten their bowels in an uproar over something that has nothing to do with them.”
    “Excuse me, but I don’t think so,” Paco, the new man, spoke up as he knelt beside the body, waiting for the plaster to dry.
    He was a short pugnacious Hispanic guy from the Bronx, with a shaved head, a little earring, and a goatee that looked like a small dark hand over the bottom of his face. He’d been working his way up through the ranks of the NYPD when he discovered that there was a much faster route to promotion—not to mention a better chance of owning his own home—in these suburban towns with rapidly expanding Latino populations and no other Spanish-speakers on the job. Of course, some of the older guys in the Riverside Department resented getting leapfrogged and subtly insinuated that the ethnics were sticking together when Harold gave the newbie his shield this summer. But hey, Harold told them, they could always take night classes at Berlitz.
    “So, what do you think it is?” Harold asked.
    “Come over here and check it out.”
    Paco gingerly lifted the side of the sheet with his thumb and forefinger as Harold navigated down the incline in his loafers, with Mike close behind. Underneath the little tent was the mottled moonscape of a flank.