Don't Ever Look Back: A Mystery (Buck Schatz Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

crimes was what had kept him from serving any long stretches in prison for his petty offenses. Detective work was kind of like fishing: it was sometimes a good idea to throw the little ones back, so that you might reel in some big ones later on. And Schulman was a strong candidate for catch-and-release because he could be counted on to spill whatever he knew, anytime I roughed him up a little. There are few things more valuable to a detective than a reliable snitch.
    But on that particular evening, at the synagogue, Schulman saw my car and he took off running.
    Like I explained, there’s a lot of luck involved with police work; and knowing how to capitalize on that luck solves more cases than a capacity to make obscure deductions or a good eye for tiny clues.
    A crime novelist gave a speech a couple of years ago at the Jewish Community Center, and he said coincidence is anathema in a mystery. He said that all crime stories are about how the universe is fundamentally an orderly place, and how disorder, in the form of crime and corruption, is systematically expunged. Therefore, the story must also have order; everything must follow logically. Everything must fit together neatly.
    I don’t know much about narrative structure or overarching themes of order and disorder, but I know a bit about crime and how it gets punished. I worked plenty of cases that got messy, and I’ve seen more than a few that broke on account of coincidence.
    If my son hadn’t been studying at the synagogue with the rabbi, I wouldn’t have been there to pick him up. If Schulman’s father hadn’t died that year, he wouldn’t have come to the evening Maariv service to say Kaddish. If he’d kept his cool, I probably would have ignored him; I wasn’t particularly interested in him that day. And if I hadn’t chased him down, I might never have found any kind of lead on Elijah.
    But I was there, and he was there, and he ran when he saw me. And if somebody thinks they have a reason to run away from me, I assume I must have a good reason to chase them. Thus, I pursued.
    When Schulman bolted, I was halfway into a parallel space on the street, so I cut the wheel and worked the shifter, and the Dodge lurched back into the road. My son was shouting something at me, but I couldn’t hear what it was over the sound of the engine. I popped the clutch and the car jumped forward. I caught Schulman at the end of the block and drove over the curb and onto the sidewalk to cut him off. He was running as fast as he could, leaning forward and off balance. I think he’d been planning to try to dash across the intersection through oncoming traffic and lose me that way, but he wasn’t fast enough.
    He put a hand on my car to steady himself and turned to try to run away in the other direction. But I had more experience catching bad guys than he did in fleeing from cops. Before he could pivot and dash off, I kicked my door open and caught him in the back of his legs with the corner of it. He pitched forward and staggered a couple of steps, which gave me enough time to jump out of the car and and smash him between the shoulder blades with my Discretion.
    The flesh and bone rippled under the weight of the lead, and the spring flexed, so the club bounced off his back with a satisfying, hollow sound. Hitting somebody with the blackjack felt like banging a bongo drum with a hard rubber mallet. The impact of the blow spiked Schulman straight to the ground. He didn’t even have a chance to get an arm underneath his face before it hit the pavement.
    “Seems like you have something you want to tell me, Paul,” I said.
    He spit a big wad of wet stuff onto the sidewalk, and I saw there was some blood in it. “I don’t. I swear.”
    “If you lie to me, I might get angry with you. And if I get angry, you’ll get hurt.”
    “Oh, God. Please don’t.”
    “If you have nothing to hide, why’d you run from me?”
    He paused just long enough to anticipate the consequences, before