Inherit the Dead

least of her phone.
    “Careful, Watson. You do a friend like that a little favor, and the next thing you know, you’re on IAB’s shit list.”
    Perry turned toward the intruding voice. It was from a short-haired, pink-faced man in a dress shirt that stretched across his belly. He was no looker, but the Donald Duck tie suggested that even he managed to have a kid in his life. Perry didn’t recognize the man, but the man obviously recognized him.
    It was also obvious the man wasn’t done making noise. “Doesn’t matter how many years go by, Christo. You walk into a house, someone’s gonna notice.”
    Perry felt his fists clench on impulse. Did this smart-ass think he was the first self-righteous cop to make a wisecrack about the Internal Affairs Bureau at Perry’s expense? Did he believe that his jabs wereany kind of penalty compared to the price Perry had already paid? The job. His wife. His daughter, Nicky.
    How many times had Perry seen the dirty looks and heard the snide comments? He’d lost count, but every single time, he found himself wondering the same thing: Did these high-minded cops sit in judgment over Perry for what he supposedly did, or for getting caught supposedly doing it? Invariably, the ones who were loudest in their disdain for him were the ones who used racial epithets, joked about domestic violence, and referred to bribes as “consulting fees.” Perry always suspected that their sole reason for casting dispersions was to mask their true approach to doing the job.
    And Perry had learned from experience that there was no point in offering a retort. Instead, he turned his back to the man, like he always did. But today, Perry wasn’t alone to hear the gibes.
    He saw something in his friend Watson’s face that was unfamiliar. Embarrassment. Sympathy. Pity.
    “I’m sorry, man,” Watson offered. “We should’ve met at a diner or something. But don’t mind that hump, okay? Dude’s one flask away from a liver transplant.”
    Perry started to tell Watson not to worry about it. That it wasn’t the first time and it wouldn’t be the last. That he was almost used to it after all these years.
    But sensing Watson’s guilt, he did something else instead. He flashed a smile, patted his friend on the back, and said, “So about Angel’s cell phone. Let me write down that number for you.”

9
JOHN CONNOLLY
    T            here is, thought Perry, nothing like progress. With Watson on his side, the possibility of finding Angel had at least taken a step from the shadows of improbability without yet emerging, blinking, into the light. This sudden surge of optimism made him glance back at the 19th Precinct, with its blue window frames and terra-cotta trimmings. It looked almost festive when considered in the right frame of mind, at which point he decided that he was getting carried away, and that pretty soon he’d be looking at half-empty glasses in a whole new way.
    This part of the Upper East Side had always boasted a dual nature: in a sense, Perry encompassed it in himself through his lineage. At the end of the nineteenth century, the western edges had housed the city’s cigar makers in the new tenements. The tenements doubled as factories, with the cigar manufacturers buying or renting whole blocks and subletting them to the cigar makers and their families. It was, effectively, the industrialization of a process that had been ongoing for years, ever since cigar makers paid to the manufacturers a deposit of double the value of the tobacco supplied before taking their stock home and rolling the cigars in their rooms.
    His great-grandfather had been one of those men, although hehad died of tuberculosis long before Perry was born. Perry’s grandfather used to joke that his old man smoked so much tobacco it was a wonder anyone else ever got to try his product. He had been a union organizer, and had been instrumental in pressuring the union to accept women as members in 1867, one of only two national unions to have done so at the time. Perry suspected that his great-grandfather had probably been a hard man: back then, union organizers had had their skulls broken, and had broken skulls in turn. These days they were the whipping boys for everything that was wrong with the economy, as though the days of child labor and dismissal without cause had never happened.
    Meanwhile, his great-grandfather’s brother Petros had found less gainful employment in the precinct’s eastern