Holy Terror Read Online Free

days, but those that had stayed loyal to him would have described him as the most complicated of all the straight-forward men they had ever met. He believed in justice, absolutely, but he didn’t necessarily believe that justice was best achieved by being either logical or ethical.
    His complexity didn’t show in his face. He had inherited his father’s height and his broad Kerry features, with his eyes as green as the sea off Ballinskelligs Bay and the deep O’Neil cleft in his chin ‘when your great-great-great-grandfather enraged one of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the fairies, and was struck with a tiny silver ax’. However, he hadn’t inherited his father’s freckle-spattered Irish complexion. His gorgeous Sicilian mother had given him her thick wavy black hair and her grace of movement and her open sensuality, too. At parties, other men’s wives would make a point of catching his eye, and holding it.
    He had been bom 37 years ago into a celebrated dynasty of New York police officers. His older brother Gerald had become a successful bedding salesman (‘World of Throws’) but there had never been any question that Conor would be one of the finest of the Finest. He had graduated with honors from the Police Academy with only one blemish on his record, a disciplinary matter involving a female fingerprint expert. At the age of 26, in an undercover operation that had nearly cost him his life, he had almost single-handedly broken the Barocci crime family. By the time he was 30 he was the youngest captain of detectives in the city’s history – confident,charismatic, with his pretty young well-connected wife Paula and their three-year-old daughter, Fay.
    But a little over three years ago, John ‘Three Fingers’ Negrotti had been shot nineteen times in the barber shop of Loew’s New York, right opposite the 17th Precinct, and that shooting had changed Conor’s life for ever. There had been lots of blood, heaps of menthol shaving foam, but no witnesses. At first it was thought that Negrotti was the victim of a classic contract hit. But Conor had unique contacts with the Mafia Commission – the unofficial association of leading Mafia families. Gradually, he had begun to uncover the existence of a secret death squad made up of New York police officers. They called themselves the Forty-Ninth Street Golf Club. For more than six years they had been forcing the Mafia in Manhattan and Brooklyn and Queens to pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars every week. If they didn’t, they would be executed without warning, their wives and children, too.
    As Conor’s investigation plowed up more and more evidence of extortion, torture and murder, he and his family were threatened with every kind of terrible retribution. They were going to firebomb his apartment. They were going to kidnap his daughter. They were going to castrate him and mail his genitals to David Letterman. Paula and Fay had to be guarded round the clock. By the time the case of the Forty-Ninth Street Golf Club came to court, his marriage was wrecked by strain and fear. Paula had taken Fay and gone to Darien to live with her WASPish parents.
    In the witness stand, an accused detective namedWilliam Sykes protested that the Golf Club were ‘simply doing their job, only a little more so’. He justified their extortion of Mafia profits by saying that ‘stealing money that’s already stolen doesn’t make it any more stolen than it was in the first place’.
    But it was the
capo di capos
, Luigi ‘The Artist’ Guttuso, who made the court’s scalps prickle. In what was little more than a whisper, he said, ‘I was brought up never to show no fear to no man. Never. Some lowlife threatens to cut off your hands with a sausage-slicer and what do you do? You spit in his eye. But I have to impress on Your Honor that me and my family was mortally afraid of the Forty-Ninth Street