Upside Down

72

Suggs looked down at the caller I.D. and shoved the unit into his desk drawer. Bennett!

Jerry Bennett had called Suggs while Massey and Adams were inside Canal Place, to see if the girl was in custody, but the nightclub owner hadn't bothered to mention that an FBI agent and a deputy U.S. marshal had been to his club minutes earlier. They had dropped that little bomb on him at Canal Place. Suggs had told Tin Man to get word to Bennett that he would get back to him when he could. It was bad enough that Bennett was in the Feds' sights, but that arrogant little bastard had implicated Suggs when there was no imaginable reason to have done so. God knows what that suicidal idiot said to them.

If they took Bennett down, that little prick would turn on Suggs, dragging in Tin Man, Doyle, and God knew who else up the ladder. Suggs had never liked Bennett, had never trusted him, but he had never before seen their mutually profitable arrangement as a threat to his freedom. Over the past twenty years Bennett had paid him a tax-free fortune, but not enough to go to prison over. In his career, Suggs had seen scores of his fellow police officers go to jail, and it wasn't going to happen to him.

Mike Manseur had control of both cases, and he would have to say that Suggs gave him everything he needed to solve them. Any evidence was open to interpretation, and he could justify taking the case from Manseur to his superiors.

Suggs had never killed anybody for Bennett-if you didn't count framing Horace Pond for two murders Bennett had committed. And Pond had been a nobody, human refuse, whose only accomplishment in life had been using his dick to add to the numbers of snot-nose nigger kids on the welfare rolls or populate the jails and prisons.

The only thing that Suggs had to do now was to make Bennett vanish so he could never talk. Suggs would have to do that deed himself, and in such a way that it would never point back to him.

That settled, Suggs felt the hollow burn in his stomach receding, cooled by the knowledge that all he needed was to calm down and devise a simple plan that would tie up the loose ends.