He was pulled from his car by enraged neighbors and within five minutes of the accident, he was dead with a bullet in his brain.

Big Chief yawned. “I thought you had the do-ers on that. The Gonzalez brothers, no?”

“Yeah, but this kid here says he knows the guy who gave them the gun and hid it afterwards—some fuck we’ve been looking for named Nelson Maldonado.” Rocco bent over to retie his shoe; when he straightened up, his face was red and his temples were throbbing. “I want that gun, so … How many vials you catch him with?”

“Ten on his person, forty in a bag by his feet.” Big Chief got up from the sofa, adjusted the color on the TV; the two other cops, sneakers up, sipped beers and made wisecracks about the characters in “Cheers.” Rocco felt a twinge of envy for the clubhouse atmosphere here. The Fury was a tight unit, all handpicked from the Dempsy P.D.—city cops working for the city. The Homicide squad in the prosecutor’s office, on the other hand, was composed of a dozen investigators, and most of them—including Rocco and Ma-zilli—Were detectives on loan from the City of Dempsy or the three other police departments in Dempsy County. There was also a handful of county appointees, test takers who had never even gone to the police academy, and the result was a cold and paranoid squad, everybody mainly out for themselves and those who came with them from whatever township, city or political tit that had been their point of origin.

“The kid wants to walk.”

“Hey, if he gives you Maldonado? We’ll eat the forty, how’s that?”

“Good.” Rocco stood up, took a long last pull on his beer and walked back to the gloomy end of the room. Mazilli had already paged the nighttime assistant prosecutor on call.

“So Stan, you and Maldonado, you guys good friends?”

The phone rang before the kid could answer.

“Rocco!” Down by the sofa, Big Chief held the receiver high and Rocco picked up his extension to hear “Cheers” playing on the prosecutor’s TV too.

“Hey, who’s this? Hey Gene, how you doin’? I got a kid here says he can serve up Nelson Maldonado on the Henderson job. Housing snatched him with ten bottles on his person, forty in a bag. He’s looking for a noncustodial; can I offer him a deal to walk if he pleas out on the ten? If he doesn’t give me Maldonado, the deal’s off.”

The assistant prosecutor was chewing something, the sound of which drove Rocco nuts. Rocco waited for the guy to swallow, take another bite of whatever it was he was eating and say, “Sure, no problem.”

Rocco hung up and slid close to Stan the Man, talking soft and to his eyes.

“Stan, what I want from you is to know exactly where Nelson Maldonado is, right now.” The kid opened his mouth but Rocco put up his hand. “Before you answer, let me tell you what I don’t want to hear. I don’t want to hear, ‘He’s in town.’ I don’t want to hear, ‘He’s on the boulevard.’ I don’t want to hear, ‘He’s on the hill.’ Right now, exactly. Where is Nelson Maldonado?”

“Where? Well, right now I’d have to say he’s at this club.”

”What club.”

“In like Paterson.”

“What’s its name.”

“I don’t know the name. I would, like, have to take you.”

“Fuck you.” Rocco stood up, faked a yawn.

“Yo wait, wait. You said right this second. That’s all I know for right this second. I mean I’ll tell you where’s he’s living.”

“Where?” Rocco stayed on his feet for the heat of it.

“With his father, but he don’t like come home until like two, three in the morning ‘cause of the police looking for him.”

Rocco turned toward Mazilli, who had been sniffing around the father’s bodega on and off since the kid had vanished.

“Where’s the father live?” It was the first thing Mazilli said since they got out of the car.

“On Ramsey, like Twelve Hundred Ramsey.”

Mazilli and Rocco exchanged a glance: the address was right. The kid could be telling the truth, and Rocco felt a surge of old-time adrenaline, although he’d be goddamned if he’d hang around until three-thirty, four in the morning to grab some piece-of-shit number-three man on a homicide—the little prick didn’t even pull the trigger. After all, Rocco had a wife and child now; it wasn’t like the old days when he had nothing better to do.

“So what do you want to do?” Rocco asked Mazilli, not hiding his unhappiness.

Mazilli put on his coat and uncuffed the kid from his chair, taking his time.

“Why don’t you go home,” he finally said. “I’m gonna be up all night anyhow on shit. I’ll grab some guys off the midnight tour, stake out the house. We’ll take care of it.”

“No hey, I’ll do it.” But Rocco was just saying it now that he was off the hook.

“No big thing.” Mazilli gave Rocco his back as he returned Stan the Man to Big Chief’s crew.

“I owe you one,” Rocco called after him, tossing off a small salute as Mazilli disappeared out the door. Thumper and Crunch followed him, escorting Stan the Man to the car. The kid wouldn’t be eligible for his noncustodial until Maldonado was arrested, so he had to be taken over to County.

Rocco intended to go straight home, but then he remembered his half-drunk beer down by the recreation end of the room and thought: First a word from our sponsor. And two hours later, well past midnight, Rocco sat spread-legged and shiny-eyed on the Housing police sofa, watching David Letterman with Big Chief. All the lights were out and both of them were bathed in the shifting silvery cast of the TV screen. At eleven o’clock, the unofficial end of the tour, the beers had turned to vodkas, and for the last thirty minutes Rocco had been eyeing the Mr. Coffee machine. But the coffee didn’t pour itself, so nothing had come of it.

“Rocco, yesterday?” Big Chief whacked his chest to force a belch. “Thumper raced with this kid in Roosevelt, some fucking idiot named Futon.”

“What do you mean, a chase?”

“A race. We did a pincers on the benches there, came up empty, so we’re just sniffing around, bullshitting with the yoms, this kid Futon says to me, ‘Yo Big Chief, you-all can’t catch me. I’m the black Jesse Owens.’”

“The black Jesse Owens.” Rocco squinted at a plastic milk crate filled with harshly graphic porno magazines under the TV stand.

“Yeah, so him and Thumper raced.