House Reckoning Read Online Free PDF

D’s.
    Quinn also married above his station. His wife was a good-looking woman but more important, her father was a federal judge and her mother was the daughter of serious Wall Street money. Quinn’s mother-in-law was beaucoup rich and she was Quinn’s ticket into the inner circle of the people who really ran New York. She was most likely disappointed her daughter had fallen for an Irish cop, but over time she would become quite impressed with her son-in-law.
    So Quinn was going places. He was getting a law degree at night and Carmine figured that within a year he’d have a detective’s shield, and after that, as bright and connected as he was, the sky was the limit for young Officer Quinn.
    But as smart as he was, Carmine owned Quinn because being smart doesn’t help when it comes to bad luck.
    Brian Quinn had done one stupid thing in his life, maybe the only stupid thing he ever did or would ever do again: he shot an unarmed man and lied about it.
    He was working the graveyard shift in Queens when he and his partner—an overweight, not-too-bright Polack named Dombroski—got a call from dispatch saying a man just tried to break into a woman’s house. The burglar was white, over six feet tall, wearing a black jacket and a blue or black stocking cap. The attempted robbery happened less than three minutes before they got the call, and Quinn and Dombroski were right there in the neighborhood.
    Dombroski drove around hoping to spot the burglar on the street, and Quinn caught a glimpse of a man walking down an alley. (Quinn found out later the alley was a shortcut the guy sometimes used.) Quinn told his partner to drive to the other end of the alley to block off the guy’s escape, and Quinn went into the alley on foot after the man. Quinn’s version of the story was that he yelled at the man to put his hands up, the guy spun around, pointing a gun, and Quinn had to shoot him. What actually happened was the guy was holding a can of beer and when Quinn yelled, the guy was startled, he swung around fast, and all Quinn saw was something metallic in his hand so he fired.
    He ran to the man to see if he was still alive. He wasn’t. Quinn wasn’t a particularly good shot but he had hit the guy right in the heart. Then he saw the beer can and realized he had just shot his career in the heart. He now had about five seconds to make a decision because Dombroski was jogging down the alley toward him, so he did what he knew other cops had done. He pulled his backup piece out of his ankle holster, placed it in the man’s hand, and tossed the beer can under a Dumpster.
    Quinn’s story stank right from the start, and everybody knew it.
    The man he’d killed was a drunk named Connors who worked in a paint store. The good news, at least from Quinn’s perspective, was that Connors had a record. When he was eighteen—which was twenty years ago—he and another dumbass broke into an old lady’s house, stole a few things, and then tried to pawn the shit to the only honest pawnbroker in New York. He did seventeen months for that. But that was the only good thing about Connors in terms of him being a viable suspect.
    Connors had never owned a gun in his life. He was five foot seven and fat, not over six feet tall. The jacket he was wearing the night he was killed was red, which might have looked black in the right light, but he didn’t have a stocking cap. NYPD detectives—guys who worked for Quinn’s rabbi, the chief of D’s—showed the woman Connors’s picture and the detectives got her to admit that yeah, Connors was maybe the man she saw for three seconds trying to jimmy open her window. It was strange that Connors didn’t have a jimmy on him; he must have tossed it, they concluded, when he tossed the stocking cap.
    In the end, thanks to his rabbi and his father-in-law, the federal judge, and a call from Quinn’s mother-in-law to the mayor, it was deemed a good shooting and a fat drunk who worked in a paint store became a