The red diamond tuck upholstered door of the Punch Drunk Bar opened a fraction.

“I’m a friend of Frank’s.” Jason said in a low voice, but kept his face disguised by his fedora.

The door opened wide enough to allow Jason to enter and move down the smoke-filled hallway, where he turned to a corner booth where Frank Mulroney, the retired cop, sat with his back to the wall.

“Can I have a seat?” Jason asked, and resisted the temptation to turn and look around him, which might give others in the bar a clearer look at his face.

“Sure.” Frank gestured with a lit cigarette to the spot in the booth opposite him. “I thought you were paralyzed.”

“I was, beyond any shadow of a doubt,” Jason replied, “yet here I am. I still can’t outdance Rudolph Valentino, but I can walk.”

Frank raised a hand to the bartender, when Jason stepped in to order. “Make it a rum and soda, please.” He feared that his signature gin Rickey might be recognized by someone in the Punch Drunk, and although they were all retired cops, the fewer who knew of his existence, the better.

“Rum and soda here, please, on my tab.” Frank took a drag on his cigarette, and slowly exhaled. “So what happened?

“I figured they’d come in through the window—that’s how they got into Father Milligan’s room to murder him. I was on a ledge above the window, so anyone coming in through the window couldn’t see me—I was lying right over their heads. I also put a jingle bell in the drain pipe. A squad of five of the mayor’s hatchet men, almost literally hatchet men, because they carried butcher knives, crept into the room. All of them were mandrills.” Jason nodded his thanks when the bartender brought him his rum and soda. “They went into a stabbing frenzy on the dummy I’d shaped on the bed, and I would have met a Harlem Sunset, except I opened up with both automatics and cut them all down.”

“Those mandrills are bad news. I’ve seen guys take a bite with both fangs right through the nape of the neck, and it’s curtains.” Frank rested his smoking cigarette on the rim of his ashtray and sipped his old fashioned. “The weakest of them is stronger than any two men combined.”

Jason took a sip of his drink. “What I didn’t see, though, was the mayor’s right-hand man, standing right under the ledge. He fired several shots upward, one of which hit me right under the left shoulder. Luckily the bullet was slowed by passing through the wood platform I was lying on. Then the chimp pulled down the shelf I was on, yanked it right out of the wall. That’s when I got paralyzed, landed on top of one of my snubbies in the small of my back. The damn chimp took his time to reload while I was lying helpless. He fired another shot into my calf, and the next was going right for my crotch, when I caught him with a ten gauge and blew him to hell.”

“The ten gauge was a contact round.” Frank stated it simply, but it was clear that he had access to all police and autopsy reports, and nothing happened in law enforcement without him being aware of it. “That’ll end anybody in an instant.”

“Don’t believe any bullshit about the chimp being some remote acquaintance of the mayor; they were joined at the hip. I told you about the time I was unarmed in the mayor’s suite. The mayor was the brute force, the public face of the city, but that chimp was the brains running everything quietly.”

“I knew it was bushwa.” Frank shook his head and took his cigarette back into his fingers. “They say the chimp mastermind has already been replaced. You know I’ve seen a lot of ugly things as a cop, faces beaten beyond recognition, dead bodies fished out of the harbor that the crabs had gotten to, and I remember finding a fetus wrapped in newspaper in an attic. It would be nice if something good happened, doesn’t even have to be a miracle.”

“I was ready to lie in bed doing card tricks for the rest of my life. Thank God it didn’t end like that.” Jason took a drink of his rum and soda. “I’ve realized that I’ve been much too high profile, and can’t have my name broadcast as a boxer, as the guy running the shelter. I’ve got to go underground, and you can’t tell anyone that I’m here or that I ever got out of the hospital.”

“No problem. Did you see this?” Frank stubbed out his cigarette and pulled up a newspaper from beside him. “Paralyzed Priest Kidnapped from Hospital.” The article was below the fold, under the mayor announcing a new aide, an army veteran, Max Viglio. The picture accompanying the article about the “paralyzed priest” both of which were false, in that Jason was neither a priest nor paralyzed, showed the referee raising Jason’s hand following his victory over Maxie Rosenbloom.

Jason took the newspaper from Frank and read that police were adding a security presence at Divine Sisters of Mercy Hospital. It was believed that because the father had stood up to the local gangs, which everyone understood to be the Rowdy Murphys and the Flannigan Boys, even if they weren’t mentioned by name, they had retaliated against the priest.

“Don’t worry if you want to go underground.” Frank told him as he read. “That news cycle will last two days, a week, and then it will be Jason who?”

“They weren’t a street gang, no Irish street toughs.” Jason folded up the newspaper and handed it back to Frank. “They were Satan worshippers who came into my room. Latin chants, robes, the whole nine yards. They came for the seed of a dead priest, and I was paralyzed, and almost ended up as a dead sperm donor.”

“Whew, kid, you’re living on borrowed time.” Frank drained his drink and raised his glass to signal that he was ready for another. “One of the sisters came by, told me you wanted me to have your guns. I assume that’s why you’re here.”

“Yes, I feel like I’m a marked man. The Department of Health has also been poisoning bottles of alcohol. One of the men I worked with died this morning, and somebody’s got to pay.” Jason resisted the temptation to look up when the bartender came to the table.

Frank rose and waved to Jason. “No one’s touched your guns. Let’s go to the back room.”

* * *

“Jeremy Stapleton, Syracuse Department of Health. I’d like to speak with Clarence.” Jason looked at the receptionist, the woman whose brown hair curled inward right at her collar.

“Clarence?” she asked warily.

“Clarence Huntsman, he’s the program manager.” Jason looked like someone important who had places to go and people to meet.

“I’ll buzz him.” The receptionist picked up the phone, but Jason was already climbing the stairs. “Uh, um, excuse me sir, Sir! but you just can’t go upstairs without…”

The security guard followed the receptionist’s gaze and saw Jason ascending the curved stairway. The guard shouted, but Jason kept marching upward. The guard dashed ahead to stand several stairs above Jason and try to speak while climbing the steps backward.

“Ex, uh, cuse me, uh sir,” he huffed.

“Oh good, you’re here to escort me to 207.” Jason smiled and continued his brisk climb until he reached the landing.

The guard huffed and fell into line, following Jason, and scrambling to keep up. When they reached 207, the guard dashed ahead and knocked for him.

“Mr. Huntsman, uh, there’s some here to see you, huh,” the guard announced while trying to regain his breath.

“Send him in,” the voice called from behind the door.

The guard opened the door for Jason, who nodded. Jason stepped in and took a chair in front of Huntsman’s desk without waiting to be offered a seat. “Jeremy Stapleton, Syracuse Department of Health.”

“And what brings you here?” Clarence sat back in his well-padded seat as the guard closed the door. “And you can take off the facemask.”

Jason noted that the security guard wore a facemask, as did the receptionist, and the janitor, but that Clarence Huntsman didn’t wear a facemask, nor did any of the other employees on the second floor. There appeared to be one set of rules for the underlings, and a different set of rules for their masters.

“What, and get Mitral? Thanks, but I’ll keep it on. In Syracuse we’re looking to emulate your program. The liquor ban has run into some snags because the rubes and the souses refuse to stop drinking.” Jason shook his head angrily.

“Oh, yeah, the Infiltration Program, that’s what we’re calling it.” Clarence’s slick hair was reflected in the glass on the picture frame holding a picture of his wife and kids. “We purchase a case of illegal bootleg bottles, fill them with methyl alcohol, and then replace them at random locations. That way, none of the lawbreakers knows which bottle is poisoned. We create suspicion, so customers turn on their dealers, and dealers turn on their suppliers.”

“Some of the guys at the bureau thought that the poisoning was unnecessarily slow and painful.” Jason crossed one leg over the other, and looked at the trophies lining the wall behind Clarence. “And there’s talk that the governor might want to recognize you for your innovation.”

Clarence lit up at the suggestion. “Look, it’s got to be made slow and painful to make an example, so the other drunks are afraid to keep drinking. Let a guy kick off in his sleep and where’s the moral lesson in that?”

Jason smiled. “True.”

“A lot of those guys are bums, a public health hazard an eyesore, and a drain on the economy.” Clarence clapped his hands together. “Nobody makes anybody violate the mayor’s orders—they decided to do that on their own. If we let all the drunks in town keep drinking, Mitral is going to spread like wildfire. It’s a matter of public health.”

“Like my mom used to say, ‘you made your bed, now you’ve got to lie in it.’” Jason then switched tacks. “Is this your own project, or are other agencies involved?”

“I’d like to take credit—I mean, it was my idea, but it’s a team effort.” Clarence worked at putting on an “aw shucks” display, when it was clear that he soaked up praise and recognition like a sunflower tracking the sun. “Everybody here on the second and third floors has helped to implement the program and make it a success, while the mayor’s Revenue Accountability and Policy Enforcement men have done a lot of the legwork on the ground, in the docks where the illegal booze comes in.”

Jason felt heavy, and it was as though the world sat on his shoulders. “I knew one of those guys. He was a drunk, a bum…his name was Dwight. Went into Perpetual Succor last night, hallucinating that Santa Clause was trying to kill him. He was blind. I heard his last confession, because he thought I was a priest. He both loved and hated his father and step-brother, and didn’t know how to handle the guilt and the anger he felt, so he drank. It was the only thing he had in life, except maybe a friend or two at the shelter, and someone poisoned his bottle.”

Clarence looked at Jason in confusion. He’d liked the part where he was being praised for his creative program, and the governor was thinking of recognizing him, but where was this guy headed with his rambling story?

When he started playing the Midas Game, Jason thought how cool it would be to be a superhero, flying around in a cape, having bullets bounce off his chest, and socking bad guys in the jaw. Yet here he was, in a government office, where mediocre bureaucrats poisoned men to death to enforce the mayor’s dictatorial liquor ban. It didn’t make him happy, and there was nothing cool or glamorous about it: Jason was going to have to kill this guy.

Jason had been vacantly staring at his sap, revolving it slowly in his hands.

Clarence was slow to grasp that he was going to die, that he was about to meet karma. Jason got up at the same time Clarence rose to his feet and waved with his palms out and his pudgy fingers outstretched. ‘Hold on here. I don’t know what you have in mind, but anyone who drinks is clearly defying the mayor’s very plain mandate.”

Jason kicked the desk forward, slamming the desk into the big man’s waistline, knocking him into the trophy case behind him and doubling him over. The sap struck the back of the man’s head once, and his forehead knocked on the desk when he went limp and collapsed, but remained standing, with the desk pinning his legs against the trophy case.

Jason left Huntsman’s office, and locked the door behind him. He walked down the stairs until he arrived at the reception area. He motioned to the receptionist and the security guard. “Clarence said that in view of the holidays, he’d like the two of you to take the day off early.”

The two employees looked at each other, and disbelief was evident in their faces.

“Did I tell you Clarence and I go way back?” Jason looked sincere. “With New Year’s coming up, he realized he’s been a self-centered asshole, and that he needs to start treating the little people—his words, not mine—in his life better.”

These last few words struck the two of them as more like the truth, and Jason hoped they believed it, because it was for their own safety. The Department of Health was about to be hit by a cataclysm.