One Monday We Killed Them All by John D. MacDonald Page A

cop. A city has to have cops, mailmen, meter readers, trash men, street cleaners, ambulance drivers and telephone operators. About an hour from now Skip Johnson will belly up to the men’s bar out there at the Brook Valley Club, and Skip will tell old Paul what a stubborn, arrogant old son of a bitch I am. If Jeff Kermer suddenly got hold of seven billion dollars in cash, all his own and tax free, he couldn’t get into Brook Valley if helived to be four hundred years old. They let him into the Downtown Club and that’s about as far as he goes. Old Paul and Skip know one of my officers is brother-in-law to McAran. To them it is a strange little fact they don’t have to try to understand. You’re not important enough to mean as much to them as the bartender fixing their drinks, and they’re not going to think of your problems on any personal basis of understanding. The best way we’ll be home free is if Jeff Kermer is more nervous than I think he is.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “If he happened to be very nervous, he could ask for a little help in return for what he skims off the top and sends out of town. He hasn’t had to ask for that kind of help for over ten years.”
    “Oh. A specialist.”
    “In and out, like a fumigation job, with perfect timing and the ever-popular twelve gauge, and a pleasant trip home.”
    “But he isn’t that nervous.”
    “No. But I have the hunch he should be. The years have softened him. He’s had it his own way a long time. He’s got too many kinds of letterhead stationery these days, and too much tax accounting and too many Rotarians calling him Jeff. What harm can come to a man who always gets a box for the World Series and comes up with a four-figure check for the United Fund?”
    “We both know McAran thinks Kermer crossed him up, but—”
    “But what”
    “I can’t see Dwight doing anything where—he didn’t stand to make out pretty well.”
    “In five years a man might be able to think up a nice way to kill two birds, using a few things he could have learned while he was working for Kermer. I guess all we can do is wait it out and keep an eye on your—”
    He lunged over to the speaker and twisted the volume up. It was a fire in a paint store on the north end of Franklin Avenue, and the first car there recommended four more be hustled along for traffic and crowd control. We went across the hallway to look out the windows on the north side. We heard sirens, saw the distant upward billowing of dirty saffron smoke into the gray afternoon sky, and saw a twinkling of flame inside the smoke, like lightning in a thunderhead. Ifollowed Larry back into his office. He went over to the photo-map of the city which covered one complete wall—souvenir of the days when Brook City could afford such embellishments.
    “In this block,” he said. “Right about here. It’s blown the roof, so it should take the ones on either side, but there’s nothing directly behind it. Let’s go take a look, Fenn.”
    He has always been like a kid about fires. We went out there. It burned hot and stubborn, with fumes which dropped a few firemen when they moved in on it, in spite of the masks. I went back to work. Johnny Hooper brought in one of the three men who had stolen the wipers. The man was eager to make a detailed statement implicating the other two, in return for a little special consideration. The moist chill night closed down across the flat expanse of the valley. I worked right on through the change of shift, checking the new duty sheet, reviewing the backlog that is always with us, comforting myself with the familiar pattern of the work. It is always the same. In the quiet times you assign your people to the legwork necessary to cut down the backlog, and you keep some of them loose to go to work on the new stuff coming in, and you ride hard on the clerks to keep your files and records as current as possible.
    But you can’t get so tangled in the routine you forget to be braced for