The Fifth Script: The Lacey Lockington Series - Book One Read Online Free PDF Page A

or thereabouts. Their white-toothed smiles were ingratiating. They could use a few bucks, they told Lockington.
    Lockington took the revelation under consideration and said well, this was probably true, but then couldn’t just about everybody?
    The Hispanics said sí, quizá, but apparently Lockington was overlooking one highly-compelling factor—just about everybody didn’t possess switchblade knives like theirs. They showed their switchblade knives to Lockington. They were expensive switchblade knives, chrome-trimmed, bone-handled with white plastic inlays; their blades glittering menacingly in the pinkish glow of the only streetlight on the block.
    Lockington nodded. Magnificent, utterly magnificent, he said.
    Ciertamente, the Hispanics said before inquiring as to how Lockington would like to have one of their utterly magnificent switchblade knives inserted in his vientre boton .
    Lockington wasn’t on speaking terms with the Spanish language, but he managed to interpret enough of the question to grasp its meaning, and he was duly impressed by the ramifications thereof. He was so duly impressed by the ramifications thereof that he hauled out his .38 police special and shot the Hispanics, one through the liver, the other through the left lung.
    He stepped carefully over his twitching, groaning ex-tormenters, retracing his steps to the little Italian restaurant where he telephoned the police, ordered another bottle of beer, and stepped into the men’s lavatory. Following his first ten or twelve bottles, beer had a habit of going through Lockington like Grant tore through Richmond, although Lockington didn’t know for a fact that Grant had ever been within fifty miles of Richmond. He had only his old American history book’s word for it—history is written by the winners—and Lockington had flunked American History three times running.

8
    Monday’s Chicago Morning Sentinel hit the streets with a bang—KILLER COP STRIKES AGAIN, SLAYS TWO! Gone were Stella Starbright’s flowery phrases, Stella got right at it—the Hispanic kids could have been talked out of their aborted mugging attempt had Sergeant Lacey Lockington quieted his itchy trigger-finger long enough to appeal to their better natures. There was absolutely no excuse for an off-duty, thrice-decorated Chicago police officer gunning down two underprivileged lads in the flower of their manhood without making an honest effort to dissuade them. It was a hard-hitting column in which Stella branded Lacey Lockington as a man with two more notches in the handle of his gun, a creature driven by an irresponsible Dodge City mentality, prone to gross violence, a born exterminator, undoubtedly an incurable psychopath, and she concluded her terse piece by recommending that Lockington be suspended pending a painstaking investigation of his having transformed Chicago’s northwest side into a shooting gallery. When, Stella Starbright demanded to know, “Oh, Dear God in Heaven,” when would some form of corrective action be taken?
    Lockington, whose aging torso bore several switchblade scars accumulated in police service, was oblivious to Stella Starbright’s third broadside—he didn’t read the Chicago Morning Sentinel, he rarely read the Chicago Chronicle save for its excellent sports section, and he avoided as many television newscasts as were avoidable. He was a man fed up with reports of prissy-assed, self-serving congressional investigating committees telling military people how to conduct military affairs, he was weary of left-leaning, publicity-grabbing press piranhas boosting themselves to national star status by constantly harassing officials of state under the protective blanket of wanting to know the truth. The media angered Lockington greatly. Lockington was a conservative.
    And so was Chicago Police Superintendant Nelson G. Netherby, to an extent—to a greater extent when the pendulum of public opinion swung pronouncedly in that direction, to a lesser