Why Me? Read Online Free PDF

phone went guk-ick, guk-ick, guk-ick . “That’s it,” Dortmunder said. “Good-bye.”
    â€œJohn! Just hold on a second!”
    Dortmunder hung up and carried his coffee back to the kitchen and sat at the table and studied the watch some more. 6:10:42:08.
    The phone rang.
    Dortmunder turned the watch around and around in his hands. He sipped coffee.
    The phone went on ringing.
    Dortmunder hit the watch against the tabletop, then pressed the button on its side: 6:10:42:09. “Ah-hah,” Dortmunder said. He looked at the clock on the kitchen wall—eleven-fifteen, more or less—and waited while the sweep second hand went halfway round the face. (The phone still rang.) Then he pressed the button on the side of the watch. 6:10:42:09.
    â€œMm,” said Dortmunder. He hit the watch against the tabletop, pressed the button. 6:10:42:10. Hit; press. 6:10:42:11.
    Fine. If you started at ten minutes after six, and if you hit this watch against the tabletop six thousand times a minute, it’d keep perfect time. Leaving the watch on the table, Dortmunder went to the living room, walked past the ringing phone, put on his other jacket—the one with no tools in it—put the plastic bag with last night’s proceeds in his pocket, and left the apartment.
    8
    You don’t get to be top cop in the great city of New York by squattin back on your heels and spittin between your knees; no, sir. You get to be top cop in the great city of New York by standin up four-square with your fists at the ready and smash-in the face of every pest and nuisance as gets in your way, bedad. And by then you’re makin enough money—with your salary and what dibs of undeclared cash happen to fall from time to time into your open palm—so you no longer have to live in that smelly awful city of New York at all any more, but can have a lovely big house in Bay Shore, out in Suffolk County on Long Island, a nice water-frontage house lookin out at Great South Bay. And you can have your own power boat (called Lucille , after your wife, to keep her quiet), and three ungrateful children, and a summer cottage over on the beach at Fire Island, and a beer belly, and the satisfaction of knowin you’ve done about the best any man could do with the hand you were dealt.
    Nine-thirty a.m. Chief Inspector Francis Xavier Mologna (pronounced Maloney), having driven into the city three hours earlier than his usual habit, and having been rigorously briefed for the last thirty minutes, followed his beer belly into the big conference room at Headquarters (One Police Plaza, downtown behind City Hall, a lovely building, all tall and dark brick, built like a giant pinup), and got introduced to a lot of damn new faces. There was no way a man could remember all those names, but fortunately Chief Inspector Mologna didn’t have to; he was accompanied by Leon, his secretary, whose job it was to remember things like that and who happened to be very good at it.
    But what a lot of people had crowded into this conference room for this conference. Most of them men, most of them white, but here and there women, here and there black. In addition to Chief Inspector Mologna and Leon and two detectives from New York’s finest, there were also representatives from the Housing Police, the Transit Police, the DA’s office, the State CID, the FBI, the CIA, the United States Mission to the United Nations, United States Customs, the Chicago Natural History Museum, Turkish Intelligence, and the Turkish Mission to the United Nations. The first fifteen or twenty minutes of the meeting was just spent with people introducing themselves to one another. “Pronounced Maloney,” Mologna kept saying, and relied on Leon to remember who everybody was.
    An FBI man named—Mologna raised an eyebrow at Leon, seated to his left at the long oval conference table, who wrote Zachary on his yellow pad—Zachary got the ball rolling by