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you’re planning on being a gangster.”

 
    2
    A DIRTY JOB
    It was shaping up as another banner year for Reilly Associates. And the banner said, “ GOING OUT OF BUSINESS .”
    I was so broke that I was even considering scheduling an appointment with a crooked new Indian psychiatrist I’d heard about who was clearing ex-cops like me to go back on the job, years or even decades after we’d gone out on “mental disabilities.” I had it all figured out: after I got the okay to go back on the job, I’d take a three-week refresher course at the academy, then go out to the range, fire one of the new weapons, take a fall from the recoil and refile for my seventy-two-percent tax-free disability, calculated at the new, higher, post-twenty-five-percent pay raise rate.
    Of course I was going to have to move fast, because a scam like this goes around the world at the speed of sound while a new cure for cancer is still putting its pants on in the morning.
    First things first though. I had some duties to attend to in the oppo-research end of my racket, I mean “business.” I’d set the alarm clock for 6:30, because I had to meet the TV crew in Brighton at 8:30. I’d already given them the golf-course video of the mark we had lined up—the first deputy superintendent chief of the fire department, along with his car. The camera crew knew which golf course he was headed for—Woodland, in Newton. But I didn’t want to take any chances on a screwup. This was a $3,000 job, maybe even more—a good score by my standards, which had been slipping lately.
    I’m a private detective, so-called. Another description for my line of work is confidential investigator, and confidentially, business sucks. People say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but you can’t prove it by me. I’ve got the kind of reputation money can’t buy, and you wouldn’t want to even if it could. I don’t give out business cards anymore. If somebody’s caught with one of mine on him, it just gives the cops probable cause to suspect … just about anything they want to suspect.
    I know what they say in Hollywood: self-pity is not good box office. But after a while, the suck of it all just wears you down.
    Today I was working for a guy in the Boston Fire Department who wanted to take out his boss, which would enable him to move up to first deputy. He could have just dropped a tip in an envelope with no return address, and sent it via snail mail to the “investigative” reporters in town. But that would be like putting a note in a bottle, throwing it into the ocean and hoping for the best. My client wanted results, guaranteed. He wanted a guy who could go directly to some reporter, in this case a TV guy, and make the pitch directly. He also wanted no fingerprints.
    It’s a dirty job, and somebody dirty has to do it.
    So this morning I was a finger man. I had to point out the deputy chief. Today there was a new camera crew working, and God forbid they should videotape the wrong guy, and then confront some poor schmuck on his day off from a real job. They’d lose the mark and I’d be out three grand.
    I drove my Oldsmobile out to Soldiers Field Road and parked at the edge of the parking lot on the Charles River across from Channel 4. Heard something on the radio about a murder in the North End, but I didn’t pay much attention. Figured it was another Yuppie walking alone at 2:30 in the morning like he was in Wellesley or someplace.
    I’d been sitting there about ten minutes when a guy in a trench coat and a scally cap came over and tapped on the window. He was the investigative reporter—that’s why he was wearing a trench coat. Basically, he was Ron Burgundy. And now he was about to sternly expose an abuse of the taxpayers’ funds—a deputy fire chief who took out an undercover car with “untraceable” plates to play golf