Detroit Combat Read Online Free PDF

Hawker sat in his rented bungalow not far from Jefferson Beach on the shore of Lake St. Clair. The bungalow had the sparse, vacation furniture of a summer house. In the stone fireplace, black logs hissed beneath translucent flames. Through the window, Hawker could see the gray beach beneath the gray sky and the winter expanse of the lake. He said into the phone, “There’s no way the department can come out looking good on this case, Paul. Hell, don’t blame yourself. To break it, you would have to keep shaking the tree until someone inside turned informer. Then once you got the information you needed, you would have to go through the courts to get the search warrants and the wire taps necessary to build a case. Once there was sufficient evidence, then—and only then—could you do a proper bust and free the kidnap victims. That would take months. And the citizenry doesn’t like sitting around on its thumbs while high-school girls and young mothers are being raped, sodomized, and forced to have group sex in porno films. Either way, you’re the bad guys.”
    Paul McCarthy chuckled. “So what else is new?”
    â€œValid point.”
    â€œYeah. Yeah, it is a valid point. I guess that’s why we had to do it, Hawk. That’s why a couple of other nameless detectives and I finally took a stand. When we finally decided we needed your help, it was like telling the system to go screw itself”—he laughed again—“privately, of course.”
    â€œOh, yeah?”
    â€œYeah. Stupid of us, probably, but we did it anyway. See, we’d heard all these neat rumors about some auburn-haired hot shot terrorizing bad asses all around the country. We heard he hit the street gangs in L.A. and blew apart some kind of commie revolutionaries down in Florida. Like most the cops in this country, the grapevine told us about his sticking it to the Libyans in Vegas and some right-winger down in Texas. So we made up our minds to get in touch with this superman and see if we couldn’t get him in here, convince him to skip all the legalities, and just kick the ass of these sickos before they brutalized someone again.”
    Hawker played along. “Yeah. And you were very convincing.”
    â€œUntil I finally saw you. Then I wasn’t so sure I wanted to be convincing. Turns out superman looks more like an auburn-haired James Garner—but uglier. A lot uglier.”
    â€œHah!”
    â€œIt’s true. And instead of wading in with a club, he sits back for two weeks working at his computer and going over files and memorizing photographs. Turns out our superman—this notorious rogue cop who is fast becoming a national legend—is just like any other cop, only he works harder.”
    â€œAnd I’m lucky,” Hawker put in.
    â€œYeah, you’re lucky. And I’d rather be lucky than good. Say, Hawk, how did you track down Brenda Paulie, anyway?”
    â€œI didn’t. I was downtown and crossed the street to buy a steak-on-the-stick from a vendor, and there she was.”
    â€œJust like that? You picked her out of the crowd?”
    â€œNo, first I picked out the jerk who was pimping her. Had that look about him. You know: nervous eyes, fidgety hands, chip on his shoulder. Then I took a close look at her. The trick to memorizing people from their photos is to look at the photo and see them as they’d look completely bald. Even then, I wasn’t sure. So I followed them. You know the rest. I called you right after I called an ambulance for Brenda. How’s she doing?”
    â€œAfter only twenty-four hours of freedom, she’s doing damn well—physically, anyway. The doctors are still going over her, but they say she’s going to make it. They said you didn’t get her out of there any too soon. She lost the baby, of course, and there is a real danger of peritonitis. Emotionally she seems to be holding up, but the doctors have