The Probability Broach Read Online Free PDF

white station wagon, road dirt covering the license tag. I leveled the S & W, but they were gone. Others who’d followed me out or charged from the building opposite helped me get the body inside. A bus wheezed to a stop over the bloodstains and opened its doors. Nobody got on.
    Procedural rituals took a writhing three hours, yet somehow, not enough, not fitting. They stuffed him into a steel drawer and shoved it in the wall, the catch clanging shut on a friend of half my lifetime. There was no record of Mac’s decision to take me off the case. I kept my mouth shut, and also failed to mention what I thought were broken windows on the station wagon. Maybe I’d just wanted them to be there.
    I made the last bus home. Mac had been a born administrator, and I was just a gumshoe, but we’d grunted and strained together through CLETA, gotten bawled out over imaginary grime in our revolvers, stood proud while his folks snapped us in our first real uniforms. The bus stank of alcohol and human bodies. It seemed odd to miss the traffic I used to curse—the city was seamy, deserted, and Mac was dead.
    “God knows who” had murdered Vaughn Meiss and Roger MacDonald. I didn’t relish finding out where I stood. When the bus reached my stop, I stayed with the group, managing half the eight blocks to my apartment in the relative safety of numbers.
    It’s basically a place to hang my other suit: a high-rise at Twelfth and Vine allocated to City and County people and the odd Federal Finance worker. Lights were still on in the lobby, but the power would be off by now in the apartments. I didn’t rate elevator service, but I was in no mood for good citizenship. I rode the machine upstairs and let myself in.
    For once I was ahead of the game: more room than I really needed—but jealously accepted nevertheless. Two bedrooms, bath and a half when the water was running, and a Coleman camp stove perched atop the useless gas range. I drew the curtain and switched on the lanterns.
    The bedroom door was ajar!
    A wave of fear went through me. It hadn’t been closed since Evelyn had decided she’d rather be a cop’s ex than a cop’s widow. That’s the way she’d looked at it. When I finally picked up my one and only slug, she served papers on me right in my hospital bed, and died five weeks later in a smashup on I-70. I never figured out if I’m widowed or divorced, and haven’t been so much as scratched in the line of duty since.
    Now might be different. I stretched out on the floor, feeling silly in my own apartment, and slowly levered out the S & W. They should have hit me coming in. They were going to pay for that mistake. I planned to punch several soft, custom-loaded 240-grain slugs into whoever was behind that door. Crawling painfully on knees and elbows, I tried to remember to keep my butt down.
    A damned good thing I didn’t pull the trigger. Creeping closer, I noticed a fine, shiny wire stretching from the doorknob. I’d always cursed that streetlight shining in my window; now it had saved my life. I laid the forty-one on the carpet and carefully traced the wire to a menacing shape attached to the frame inside. It looked vaguely like a striped whiskey bottle, but I knew those “stripes” were cut deeply into the casing to assure proper fragmentation. The wire led to a ring, one of four clustered at the top. An easy pull would raise and fire the striker.
    A Belgian PRB-43: common in New Guinea, a favorite with domestic terrorists, too. I felt grateful they’d left something I was familiar with. Three or four ounces of plastique—the neighbors would think I was only moving furniture.
    Pretty subtle, for SecPol.
    Groping for my keychain, I reached around carefully and slid a key into the safety slot, blocking the striker. I used nail clippers to cut the wire, and ran nervous fingers up and down, feeling for others. Nothing. I eased the door open to face the mine, its little stand hammered into the woodwork. Ruining my