Chapter 23. I was not looking forward to this. They had buried Ted Holm earlier this morning with all of the ritual and fanfare that the law provides for in its fallen heroes, even when their heroes fall while off duty out in front of a bar.

The news of the impending funeral and the Sea of Blue that would be

in attendance had been the lead story in every paper in town. Every paper except the Gazette,

that is. Mike Rogers had spun a pair of loose ends into an epic web of deceit, cover-up, and general

police impropriety, and half the city was abuzz with the notion that Jack Justice might

actually be innocent. The boy at the impound lot had made nice and posed for a picture, and

repeated his story about the multiple visits local law enforcement had made to Jack's car,

no doubt in the process earning the wrath of the proprietors of reliable towing, who counted

on a certain amount of police goodwill

to do their jobs. Alas, poor Dwayne. Of even greater interest, no doubt, was the implication that an

employee of the San Paolo Fixit Shop was an associate of a criminal that Justice and Holm had busted

together many years before. And that said criminal had only recently been released after serving a lengthy sentence

for narcotics trafficking and was at large somewhere in the city.

Mike had steered clear of talk of Grant's conviction being aframed, so the whole thing was still

paper-thin, but Mike did manage to paint a picture of Jack trying to solve a mystery.

And he had a photograph of Mitchell heading back to work trying to hide his face from the camera,

which always makes people look incredibly guilty.

The Gazette was the only paper selling this morning, that much was for sure.

I was no journalist, but I had a general idea of how the marketplace worked, and it seemed

likely that the rest of the city's yellow journals would pick up the threads in the evening edition. I also had an idea of how the world worked. A cop killer on the run held the city in terror, for a man who killed a policeman would kill anyone. An innocent man on the run from the law, however, was a folk hero in the making, and as much as I powerfully did not want Jack to gain that sort of status, it did make it less likely that every granny he passed on the street would call emergency at the next payphone.

So I was going to call that a job well done.

The flip side of that, of course, was that some police are very dim.

...