Read Online You Can Die Trying by Gar Anthony Haywood - Free Book Online Page A

to him. You know, so he’d appear to be clean.”
    “Tossed it where?”
    “I don’t know. Over a fence, up on the roof of one of the garages … Who knows?”
    “The gun was lying around somewhere, Kupchak, somebody would have come across it, don’t you think?”
    “Look, Gunner, how many times do I have to tell you? The goddamn alley was dark! Maggie and Lugo could’ve missed an elephant in there that night!”
    “Maggie and Lugo, maybe,” Gunner said. “But not the bloodhounds from Internal Affairs. The way I hear it, those guys search the area surrounding an officer-involved shooting like their lives depend upon it.”
    “They search as hard as they wanna search,” Kupchak said, with evident contempt for the subject.
    Gunner paused. “And the two slugs from Washington’s gun? Or the powder burns on his hand? Would they have missed those, too?”
    “It wouldn’t have been the first time.”
    He’d said this last with the same note of casual loathing in his voice, and this time Gunner decided to call him on it. “I get the feeling you don’t think they did a quality job on McGovern’s case,” he said.
    Kupchak inventoried the faces around them before answering. “I think they did exactly what they set out to do,” he said.
    “You want to spell that out?”
    “No. I don’t. I think you know what I’m saying.”
    “I know what it sounds like you’re saying. It sounds like you’re saying they fucked him over.”
    “Does it?”
    “But you’re not saying how.”
    “You’re a detective. You figure it out. The goddamn gun never turned up, and neither did anything else that might have done Maggie’s case any good. That doesn’t sound like a rear-ender to you?”
    “It might. If I thought the people you’re talking about had something against him.”
    “Oh, they had something against him, all right. The same thing they have against a lot of good cops: he wasn’t their cup of tea. He was too much his own man, too independent a thinker.” He shook his head. “But that’s not what cost him his badge.”
    Gunner gave him all the time he needed to elaborate.
    “The assholes in IAD, they may be bloodsuckers, but they don’t generally make a celebrity out of a guy when they take him down unless somebody tells ’em to. You understand what I’m saying?”
    “Somebody was pulling their strings on this one.”
    Kupchak nodded his head.
    “You know who that somebody might have been?”
    Kupchak shrugged. “I’ve got a few ideas. But none I’d care to discuss here. Why don’t we just say it was somebody with an office downtown, and leave it at that?”
    It wasn’t an idle suggestion; it was a directive.
    Acquiescing, Gunner said, “Okay. You don’t want to talk about the who, let’s talk about the why.”
    “The why’s a gimme, Gunner. They went after Maggie because of the Dexter Hardy thing.”
    “Dexter Hardy?”
    “That’s right. Dexter Hardy.”
    “What did McGovern have to do with Dexter Hardy?”
    “Nothing. That’s what’s so nuts about it. He was nowhere near the scene that night.”
    “Then how—”
    “How could he get blamed for what happened? I’ll tell you how. By training three of the four officers who were there that night. That’s how. Tripp, Benzinger, and Ammolino, they all rode with Maggie when they first came up.”
    Gunner shook his head. “I don’t get it,” he said.
    “Maggie was their probationary officer, Gunner,” Kupchak said. “He was the one who taught ’em to be cops. Get it?”
    Now Gunner understood. Dexter Hardy was a thirty-eight-year-old garage mechanic and part-time armed robber who had had fame beaten into him by a small army of LAPD officers during a routine traffic stop in Carson eighteen months earlier. Because a neighbor with a camcorder had taped the entire incident, Hardy was today a maimed celebrity rather than a corpse, the star of a horrific home video depicting four Caucasian policemen—among them, three officers named