"Mike Resnick - Dog In The Manger" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

Fictionwise
www.fictionwise.com

Copyright ┬й1995 by Mike Resnick


NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser.
Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means,
including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method
constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines
or imprisonment.

To Carol, as always,
And to my good friend Ross Spencer,
the funniest mystery writer yet hatched


1.

Go be an honest cop. See where it gets you.
It got me on television (all except NBC, which was busy covering the World Series), and it got
me intoNewsweek (two paragraphs, one photo), and it got me my very own 192-page
paperback biography that was churned out by some hack writer in one weekend. (We were
going to split our zillions 50-50 and then sell the movie rights to Brian de Palma or maybe
George Lucas; I think we each came away with seven hundred and fifty dollars, and I never
did see a copy of the book on the stands.)
I'm a real, bonafide hero. Of course, I'm flat broke and I live in a two-room furnished
apartment on Cincinnati's less-than-posh west side, right between an elegant auto junkyard
and Proctor & Gamble's swank old-line parking lot, and the phone company keeps
threatening to disconnect me. But I'm a hero.
Let me tell you, the hero business isn't all it's cracked up to be.
When I got out of the armyтАФI was busy defending Italy from the Communist Menace while
most of our boys were fighting a minor skirmish in VietnamтАФI joined the Chicago Police
Force. I kept my nose absolutely clean, didn't take any more graft that was absolutely
necessary (if you've ever been to Chicago, you'll know what I'm talking about), and rose to
the rank of lieutenant after a decade.
Then our new police commissionerтАФChicagoalways has a new police commissionerтАФ
declared the city's umpteenth all-out war on the drug trade. This time we kept clear of the
ghettos, mostly because the press didn't like to follow us to West Madison Street, and we
started hitting the high class dealers and dens in the Lake Shore Drive area. I was still dumb
enough to think we meant business, so when I busted Bennie the TurkтАФ(no, that's not why
I'm a hero)тАФI looked at his little address book and found the names of two U. S.
Representatives and half a dozen state Senators. I should have wised up when everyone on
my team started calling in sick, but I went ahead and put together my evidence and arrested
both Congressmen and three Senators for illegal possession of cocaine. (No, not yet.) It was
explained to me that I had made a grievous error, that these were men of honor who couldn't
possibly have had any dealings with the Turk, and besides boys-will-be-boys-ha-ha, but I
figured thatsomebody would give a damn, so I went ahead and testified against them. (It's
okay to cheer now: that's how I madeNewsweek and had my little chat with Dan Rather.) Of
course, the case was thrown out.