Read Online Dirty Fire by Earl Merkel - Free Book Online Page A

you might have kept this money.”
    “I’m the son of a cop, Father,” I said. “He worked in Chicago, back when even a traffic stop involved a shakedown, likely as not. My dad sold his share of ten-dollar pencils to drivers who ran a stop sign; the scores just got bigger after he made detective lieutenant. He used to tell me that on the job, nobody gave you points for being stupid.” I chuckled softly. “I know he would have kept it. He always did.”
    “Davey, had you ever taken money before?”
    “No.”
    “Then perhaps you’re trying too hard,” Father Frank said. “Sometimes we try to assign ourselves guilt where there is none. Usually we do it because we feel we have sinned in other ways, ways that we cannot admit to ourselves.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “I mean your divorce, Davey.”
    “Ellen and I were a mistake, Father. We always were. In less than five years of marriage, we were separated half a dozen times.”
    “And you always came back together again.”
    “I always came back to her. It was never the other way around.”
    “Because she is the woman you married. Because you love her.”
    It was not a question, but I chose to answer it as one.
    “I don’t know that, either,” I said. “I think that Ellen and I are both difficult people to love. What we felt—all right, what I still feel—may be more of an addiction.”
    “You know the Church doesn’t recognize divorce, Davey.”
    “You can’t divorce an addiction, Father,” I said. “In that way, at least, the union is still intact.”
    He shook his head, though whether in regret or impatience I could not tell.
    “About the money—merely to experience temptation is not a sin,” the priest reminded me. “I can only absolve you of what you do, not for what you may have been thinking about doing. And I can’t ‘absolve’ you for agreeing to a divorce; it’s not a sin, per se —it just doesn’t exist under Church law. You’re still a married man.”
    “I’m not asking to be forgiven for the divorce,” I said.
    “Maybe not,” Father Frank said. “But don’t be too sure.”

Chapter 8
    By the time I was arrested for soliciting a bribe, Chaz Trombetta had been my partner for almost four years. It was a record of sorts: almost three years longer than any of the others had lasted.
    On our first day together, Chaz had laid out the ground rules.
    “You’re supposed to an asshole, but good at detective work,” he had told me, without pretext. “Me, too. Do your job, let me do mine.” He had waved off the response his new partner was about to make. “I don’t figure we’ll ever whisper sweet nothings in each other’s ears—but I’ll try real hard to live with the disappointment. We understand each other?”
    Within a month, we were fast friends. By the end of the year, our record of clearing cases was among the best in the detective bureau.
    It helped that Chaz was smart and a savvy investigator. Where I might have been impulsive, Trombetta was reflective. People kept making the mistake of underestimating him. Chaz took it as a compliment and kept putting them in jail.
    I pulled to a stop outside a two-story house. The yard was meticulously groomed, and shrubbery artfully placed provided an accent to the pale gray of the brickwork. I was midway up the stone pathway to the porch when the front door opened. A man of moderate height and with a permanent five o’clock shadow stepped outside, his hair dark and curly and his arms knotted with thick muscle. He carried a half-filled green bottle in one hand.
    “Hey, J.D.!” Chaz Trombetta yelled. He lunged forward and engulfed me with a bearlike embrace, wrapping both arms around me. He slapped an enthusiastic tattoo across my back and side with the hand not occupied with his bottle, and mock punched me lightly in the stomach. Then he stepped back, his face smelling of Old Spice and his breath of Rolling Rock.
    “Junie! Look what the cat dragged in!”
    Junie