There was no sense anymore in ignoring this. He picked up the telephone receiver, and sighed another thousand-year-old sigh. The machine continued recording.
Father Kelly replied to his past, with the words he had long ago been instructed to say in response to the question posed: “True patriots have guns in their hands and poems in their heads. Nevermore!”
CHAPTER 3
Anybody who is a New York cop, and a shamrock Catholic besides, has good reason for winding up a cynic or a bit of a mystic. Or as in my case, both.
There are probably eight million stories about Irish cops in my naked city. Irish cops—what will they think of next? On this very popular subject, I never read a book nor watched a movie or television show that failed to tell me half the tale. This is because cynicism is easy to come by and easier told, and because writers are a particularly lazy race of man.
A New York cop becomes a cynic along about the tenth time he has to knock down some apartment door to rescue some screaming woman with puffy black eyes and blood gushing out her nose and she takes a snarling swing at him from behind when he tries to put the collar on her old man for what he did to her. A dark mood will protect a cop from heartbreak such as this, the way an asbestos suit protects a fireman from flames. Writers, of course, suck down cynicism with their mother’s milk.
But to believe in things mystical, this is the finer side of police work. I myself believe the pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple; I believe in the secret work of uneventful days; I believe in questioning coincidence very closely; I believe devoutly in the saints and most other unseen and noiseless forces; I believe in the Holy Ghost, and ghosts who are something less than consecrated souls.
Once, I thought this was all very sound-minded of me to believe in what I do, maybe even intellectual. But thanks to my commanding officer, Inspector Tomasino Neglio, I know now it is only due to a certain imagination I own.
The inspector invited me out for steaks one night a few years back, in honor of my finally joining the detective ranks. After a number of drinks and his fine big show of presenting me with the gold shield, encased in genuine eelskin, I was naturally feeling pretty good and so was Neglio; naturally, we had a number of more drinks. After which, the inspector was moved to reveal to me the real basis of my promotion. “Hock,” he said, “you’ve got an imagination that’s very full and active, and just this side of being lunatic. It’s what I always look for in a detective.”
Often, though, I wonder, Is it entirely my imagination?
There was I, sitting with a ghost on a brightening Saturday morning, long before my customary rising hour, which is the crack of noon. With my eyes wide from strong black coffee and a stern face-washing, like a lunatic I believed I had just conversed with a photograph. To the mystic in me, it was all true enough.
I imagined the root questions of a cop’s career: questions of time and distance, the quick and the fallen, right versus wrong. And could it be me alone putting such questions in my head?
No, for there was now something more; more than just the picture of my father. For the first time, there were words, just now discovered, penned to the back of Aidan Hockaday’s photograph. Were they answering the questions of my life? Could they begin to help me know? Do you really want to know?
I know that most of us believe in at least some of the Ten Commandments. Or at least we preach them.
We say it is wrong to kill, among other things.
But we kill spiders and pigs and rain forests and burglars and people of unglamorous races, and time and innocence and enemies, and disagreeable ideas and initiative and joy. We kill everything we can get away with killing, except fear.
And so, a New York Irish-Catholic cop such as myself takes some comfort in realizing that God is not so good at being a cop Himself.
Buy Drown All the Dogs Now!
About the Author
Thomas Adcock (b. 1947) is an Edgar Award–winning novelist and journalist from Detroit. Since 1985, Adcock has written over a dozen short stories and anthologies, in addition to his popular crime thrillers starring New York–based detective Neil Hockaday. Adcock was involved in PEN International, The Mystery Writers of America, and cofounded the North American chapter of the International Association of Crime Writers. He currently resides in New York.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright 1991 © by Thomas Adcock
Cover design by Jason Gabbert
ISBN: 978-1-5040-6002-8
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