DESTROYER 37: BOTTOM LINE

by Richard Sapir and Warren Murphy

CHAPTER ONE

If distrusting people had been an Olympic event, Zack Meadows would have scored perfect tens.

He did not trust jockeys with Italian names. He was convinced they sat around in the clubhouse, hours before the races, deciding who was going to win what. How they always managed to select winning horses on which Zack Meadows didn't have a bet, he ascribed to simple Mediterranean devious-ness.

He didn't trust policemen. He had never met a cop who wasn't on the take and who didn't have a summer house. Nor did he trust civil service examiners. Because three times they had turned him down for appointment to the police department, a job he wanted badly so he could go on the take and buy a summer house. He also didn't trust real estate people who sold summer houses.

Zack Meadows did not trust women who came to him and said they wanted their husband followed because he was running around with another woman. This usually meant the wife was hooked on another man at the moment and was thinking of divorce but would probably soon change her mind and try to beat Meadows out of his fee. Meadows handled this

by first following the wife who hired him to find out who she was running around with, then if she dropped him later, he would peddle the information to the husband.

Nor did he trust swarthy people, guys who sold hot watches, blacks, liberals, cab drivers, Jews, doctors, bookies, life insurance companies, American car manufacturers, foreign car manufacturers, and places that claimed they could replace your car's muffler in twenty minutes for $14.95.

Not that he regarded himself as distrusting. He thought he was softhearted, the original patsy, just occasionally working his way toward realism. Being suspicious was just part of an urban survival kit in dog-eat-dog New York City. Zack Meadows sometimes thought he might be happier living in the north woods in a log cabin. But he didn't trust well water and who in his right mind would trust animals not to attack when your back was turned?