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

extent when it didn’t. Nelson G. Netherby was demogogically flexible, rolling with the tides, reading both Sentinel and Chronicle, never missing a television news program, keeping a finger on the pulse of politically sensitive issues local and national, particularly local. Netherby was a political creature with lofty political ambitions, gifted with the acutely responsive devices visited upon that vile and despicable breed, and the panels of his early warning systems were lighting up like Christmas trees. A storm was brewing here, a crusade was in the formative stages—that muckraking Chicago Morning Sentinel and its rabble-rousing Stella Starbright were out there in the concrete jungle, beating the drums, whipping up controversy where there was no controversy to be whipped up, gathering a posse, and posses must be cut off at the pass. Chicago Police Superintendant Nelson G. Netherby knew something about the interception of posses.

9
    On the hazy Monday morning following his four-day break, Lockington sat straddling a splintered brown locker room bench, smoking a cigarette and sucking on a cup of atrocious coffee while awaiting muster and assignment. Chances were they’d send his ass back to Division Street, there to sit in the tail end of a stuffy Chevy van across the street from a run-down tavern he’d never set foot it, peering through a rusty chink, awaiting the arrival of a man he’d never laid eyes on who’d probably skipped to Emlenton, Pennsylvania, three months ago, and this would go on and on until somebody filled Grand Canyon with potato chips or Christ returned to set up His earthly kingdom, whichever came first. Well, what the hell, as long as he was doing that, he wouldn’t be doing anything else. There was a heavy clomping out in the hall and the bulk of Officer Kevin O’Malley darkened the locker room doorway. O’Malley boomed, “Hey, Lacey, you in here?”
    Lockington peered around the corner of a row of battered olive-drab lockers. He said, “I’ll let you know when I finish this coffee.”
    Kevin O’Malley said, “Super wants to see you in his office.”
    Lockington growled, “When?”
    “Like pronto—he’s probably gonna give you the fucking croix de guerre .”
    Lockington frowned, checked his watch, tossed his coffee container into a trash can, and drove over there, reaching the dim, dingy foyer of the rapidly deteriorating three-story red brick building at 8:00 on the button. The Police Superintendant’s suite was off a dusty blue-carpeted east wing hall and Lockington stopped at the receptionist’s desk. He said, “Okay to go in? I got an appointment.”
    Henrietta Mosworth glanced up from a check list she’d been perusing, putting it down to study Lacey Lockington as she’d have studied a pile of steaming moose manure. She smiled the smile of a vampire in a blood bank. She nodded, rasping, “Oh, brother, do you ever! Certainly, hurry right in!”
    There’d been a marked absence of cordiality in his dealings with Henrietta Mosworth since he’d nixed her explicit proposition of a few weeks earlier. He hadn’t nixed it, exactly, he’d attempted to step around it. He’d told Henrietta that he had a ticket for the White Sox game that night. Henrietta’s mouth had tightened at the corners. She’d said, “All right, tomorrow night then?”
    Lockington, beginning to get that hemmed-in feeling, had said, “That’d be just great, but, oddly enough, I got a ticket for tomorrow night’s White Sox game, too.”
    Henrietta Mosworth’s eyes had glittered like little stainless steel ball bearings. She’d said, “You really dig baseball, don’t you, Lacey?”
    Lockington had said, “Yeah, great game, baseball—very scientific!”
    Henrietta had said, “Well, you lying sonofabitch, you’d better take a look at a schedule—the fucking White Sox are in fucking Seattle !”
    Lockington, a Chicago Cubs fan who’d known less about the Chicago White Sox than he’d known about