BooksBarbecue
Back Dirty Work
Chapters (62)
  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53
  54. 54
  55. 55
  56. 56
  57. 57
  58. 58
  59. 59
  60. 60
  61. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  62. AUTHOR’S NOTE

“What am I going to do?” Dino asked. “These people are not visiting policemen. They’re fucking spies. They do things in secret. You think they’re going to let me in on their plans?”

“Maybe I can find out something.”

“I don’t want to know,” Dino said. “And if you want to keep rolling around in the hay with Miss Felicity Devonshire, you’d better not want to know, either.”

“You want to know why there are no charges against La Biche in Europe?” Stone said.

“No, but I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.”

“Because the Brits got their information on her by torturing and killing her friends, so there’s nobody left to give evidence against her.”

“I didn’t want to know that,” Dino said.

“It’s how they work. These people don’t arrest criminals and try them. They put them in cellars while they extract information from them with tools, and when they’re done, their captives are done, too. They’re outside the law. They’re above the law.”

“Well then, if I were you, I wouldn’t piss off Carpenter.”

“When you and I were cops together, we had a common view of the law,” Stone said. “We believed in doing it by the book.”

“Well, not always strictly by the book,” Dino said.

“All right, we slapped around a few people, frightened a few guys, but we didn’t murder anybody.”

“And I’m not going to start now,” Dino said.

“But you’re going to turn a blind eye to what these people are planning?”

“Stone, in this case, a blind eye is all I got.”

“You don’t want to see it.”

“You’re right, because, unlike you, I understand that there are two whole different worlds existing right alongside each other: There’s your world and mine, then there’s their world, where a crazy woman holds a grudge against their people and goes around killing them, plus a few other people along the way. How do we prosecute that? There’s never any evidence. And suppose I could, somehow, stop them from killing La Biche? What would I do with her? Pat her on the head and send her back to Europe to kill a few more people? I don’t have any evidence against her. Jesus, somebody’s got to stop her, and it ain’t going to be me.”

“This is depressing,” Stone said.

“It’s not depressing if you don’t think about it,” Dino replied.

35

Carpenter rushed into the building, went to her temporary office, deposited her coat, and picked up her notes. She made it to the conference room just as Architect took his seat.