The Assassin (Badge of Honor 5)

"I saw that in the papers," Malone said. "We're going to have that? There's not a hell of a lot of time…"

"We'll have to manage somehow."

"Who are they going to move into command?" Malone asked. "Did the commissioner say?"

Wohl shook his head, no. He was more than a little embarrassed that he hadn't considered that.

"One of the chiefs probably," Mike Sabara said. "It's the Vice President."

"They're not going to move anybody in," Peter Wohl said, softly but firmly. "If this is a Special Operations responsibility, we'll be responsible."

"You'd be putting your neck on the line, Peter," Mike Sabara said. "Let them send somebody in, somebody who's familiar with this sort of operation."

"Let them send someone in here with the authority to tell our people what to do?" Wohl replied. "No way, Mike. We'll do it. Discussion closed."

****

Corporal Vito Lanza had not been the star pupil in Bishop John Newmann High School's Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced Typing courses, but he had tried hard enough not to get kicked out of the class. Being dropped from Typing would have meant assignment as a library monitor (putting books back on shelves), or as a laboratory monitor (washing all that shit out of test tubes and Erlenmeyer flasks), neither of which had great appeal to him.

Almost despite himself, he had become a fairly competent typist, a skill he thought he would never use in real life after graduation, and certainly not as a cop, chasing criminals down the street on his Highway Patrol Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

There was a two-and-a-half-year period after graduation from Bishop Newmann High, until he turned twenty-one and could apply for the cops, during which Vito had had a number of jobs. He worked in three different service stations, worked in a taxi garage, and got a job cleaning Eastern airliners between flights at the airport. He hated all of them, and prayed after he took the Civil Service Examination for the cops that he would not be found wanting.

Officer Lanza had quickly learned that being a cop was not what he thought it would be. Right out of the Academy, he had been assigned to the 18^th District at 55^th and Pine Streets. He spent eight months riding around the district in a battered Ford van, with another rookie police officer. Hauling prisoners (a great many of whom were drunks, not even guys who'd done a stickup) from where they had been arrested to the holding cells in the District Station was not exactly what he'd had in mind when he had become a law enforcement officer. Neither was hauling sick people from their houses to a hospital.

(Philadelphia Police, unlike the police of other major American cities, respond to every call for help. The citizens of Philadelphia have learned over the years that what one does when Junior falls off the porch and cracks his head open, or Grandma falls on an icy sidewalk, or Mama scalds herself with boiling water on the stove, is to call the cops.)

And Vito learned that while it was certainly possible that he could become a Highway Patrolman and race around the streets on a Harley, or in one of the antennae-festooned special Highway Radio Patrol Cars, fighting crime, that would have to be some time in the future.After he had four, five, sixgood years on the job, he couldapply for Highway. It was police folklore-which is not always accurate-that unless you had done something spectacular, like personally catch a bank robber, or unless you knew somebody in Highway, or had a rabbi, some white shirt who liked you, your chances of getting in Highway were about as good as they were to win the Irish Sweepstakes.

But one night, after he had been pushing the van for eight months, the sergeant at roll call had asked, "Does anybody know how to type good?"

Vito had always thought that typing was something girls did, and was reluctant to publicly confess that he could do that sort of thing, but maybe it would get him out of the fucking van for the night.

"Over here, Sergeant," Officer Lanza had said, raising his hand.

"Okay," the sergeant had said. "See the corporal. Sweitzer, you take his place in the van."

"Shit," Officer Sweitzer said.

The district was behind in its paperwork, the corporal told Officer Lanza, and the captain was on his ass, because the inspector was on his ass.

It had not taken Officer Lanza long to figure out that (a) while he was not a really good typist, compared to anybody in the district he was a world fucking champion and (b) that sitting behind a desk in the district building pushing a typewriter was way ahead of staggering around in the ice and slush loading a fat lady into the back of a van.

That particular typing job had taken three days. Over the next two years, Officer Lanza had spent more and more time behind a typewriter in the office than he had spent in an emergency patrol wagon, in an RPC, or walking a beat.

When he had almost three years on the job, he had taken the examinations for both detective and corporal. He hadn't expected to pass either first time out-he just wanted to see what the fuck the examinations were like-and he didn't. He found that the detective examination was tougher than the corporal examination. Probably, he deduced, because he had been doing so much paperwork, which is what corporals did, that he had come to understand a lot of it.

Two years later, when there was another examination for both detective and corporal, he figured fuck the detective, I think I'd rather be a corporal anyhow, detectives spend a lot of time standing around in the mud and snow.

He passed the corporal's examination, way down on the numerical list, so it was another year almost before he actually got promoted. He did four months working the desk in the Central Cell Room in the Roundhouse, and then they transferred him upstairs to the Traffic Division, where he had met Lieutenant Schnair, who was a pretty good guy for a Jew, and was supposed to have Chief Inspector Matt Lowenstein, the chief inspector of the Detective Division, for a rabbi.

Obviously, pushing a typewriter for the Traffic Division in the Roundhouse was a lot better than standing in the snow and blowing your whistle at tractor trailers at some accident scene for the Traffic Division, and Vito tried hard to please Lieutenant Schnair.

When Schnair got promoted to captain, and they gave him the Airport Unit (which, so far as Vito was concerned, proved Chief Lowensteinwas his rabbi), he arranged for Corporal Lanza to be transferred to Airport too, after one of the corporals there got himself killed driving home from the shore.

It was a good job. All he had to do was keep on top of the paperwork, and everybody left him alone. The lieutenants and the sergeants and the other corporals knew how good he got along with Captain Schnair. If he came in a little late, or left a little early, no one said anything to him.

It never entered Corporal Vito Lanza's mind to ask permission to leave his desk in the Airport Unit office at 11:15. He simplytold the lieutenant on duty, Lieutenant Ardell, that he was going to lunch.