The Darkness - Jason Pinter [60]
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Jason Pinter
"Tourists," I said. "The dollar is so weak that people
from pretty much all over the world can come here and
buy anything basically half off. They pay it because they
can, and we get stuck with the inflated prices because we
have no choice."
"The rich get richer and...you know how the rest
goes," Curt said. "But right now there are parts of the city
with less cops. And less cops means less supervision,
means the bad guys get emboldened."
"But the NYPD?" I said, confused. "Isn't that one area
they don't have a choice but to keep fully loaded?"
"They're trying," Curt said. "Louis Carruthers, the
Chief of Department, said the brass is looking into more
funding, but it might take a little while. At the state and
city level right now, they have less money than Michael
Jackson. A lack of money means the city is cutting back
on pretty much everything that the government picks up
the tab on. Overtime, patrol routes, even new recruits.
Starting pay for a first-year police officer is just below
your average hot dog vendor."
"Which is just above that of a journalist," I said with
a smile.
"Yeah, at least you get those fancy suit jackets with
elbow pads."
"I've never heard anybody claim to be jealous over
those."
"You can never guess where fashion trends go. If
tomorrow Kanye shows up with one of those tweed
jackets, five million kids will show up at Diesel begging
for them. So what do you got for me on this guy besides
hair color?" Curt said.
"First off, you need to know that anything you do
could come back and bite you in the ass."
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"Isn't that why we're friends?" Curt said. "I don't have
enough problems at work or at home, so I come to you to
satisfy my daily craving for emotional and physical trauma."
"Your breath is terrible," I said.
"Point proven," Curt said.
"Seriously. It smells like you ate a hot dog, then burped
up that hot dog, then fried the burped-up hot dog, ate it,
and burped it up again."
Curt stared at me. "I think my stomach just threw up
inside of itself."
"Then my job here is done."
"You're a laugh riot. Go on. Tell me what you know
about this dude."
"I was outside of Brett Kaiser's building right before
it turned into something out of Dante's Inferno. The
doorman told me a guy with blond hair came and went
at freaky hours."
"You told me this. That's not a hell of a lot to go on."
"I'm not done. You know Paulina Cole, right?"
"Of course. Hot piece of ass who works at that dirt rag
and has no love lost for you. Am I close?"
"Enough for a shave."
"I don't know her personally, but I've heard some of
the guys talking about her. She doesn't have a lot of
friends in the department. Ever since she wrote that article
accusing NYPD recruits of being underqualified and unmotivated. Things like that tend to rub cops the wrong
way. Rumor has it they won't give her scoops anymore
because of the crap she's written, so she has her lackeys
covering the crime beat act as spies for her."
"Yeah, well, that's part of the problem. Turns out she
was kidnapped a few days ago, and I'm ninety-nine
percent sure the guy who did it is the same one who char-172
Jason Pinter
broiled Brett Kaiser. Her description of him matched the
same one I was given by Kaiser's doorman to a T. Blond,
late thirties or early forties, muscular."
"Does she know the same guy is a suspect in the Kaiser
murder?" Curt said.
"No. You're the only person I've told."
"So I'm looking for a blond guy, about six-one or sixtwo, two hundred ten pounds or so if he's well built."
"Sounds like a ballpark to work in."
"Right. That ballpark narrows it down to about ten
thousand men in New York."
"There's one more thing," I said. "Paulina said he's
involved in drugs."
"Drugs."
"Yeah."
"Care to elaborate on that?"
"That's all I know. Let's just say she was a little secretive on that part."
"So we have a blond guy. Somewhere between six
feet and six foot two, two hundred and ten pounds, who
for all we know has smoked weed sometime