You know that lady knows something.”

“I believe she does.”

“You know she’s been down to North Carolina must be like nine or ten times in the last year—just going up and back on the bus, as heavy and old as she is? I swear, Big Daddy, something’s eating her to death. She can’t even sit still in her own living room, watch TV no more.”

“I’m on it.”

“All units wanted for carjacking in the South District. Nineteen ninety-one Toyota Camry, four-door, color beige, New Jersey reg 665 Gamma Delta. Roger.”

Lorenzo lowered the volume on his radio.

“Yeah, I heard that she was the first one walked in the apartment, found the bodies,” Ruth said, seeming to retreat slightly from the coconut-scent deodorizer hanging from his rearview “Yeah, she was.” He nodded solemnly.

“Must of put the fear of God in her, seeing that,” Ruth said, getting teary now.

“Must’ve.”

“She knows something, Daddy.” Ruth grabbed his forearm. “Please make her say it.”

“I’m tryin’.”

He had gone as far as grabbing up Miss Bankhead’s grandson on an old unexecuted warrant, offering to swap the kid’s freedom for her information, but even the kid had said it—“My grandmother gonna take that to her grave”—forcing Lorenzo to go through with the arrest.

“All units, further information on South District carjack. Vehicle occupied by black male, five foot ten to six feet tall, shaved head. Last seen driving west on Hurley.”

“How ’bout you, Mommy? You got anything to help me out with?”

Ruth looked right, left, then pressed her dry cleaning up against the driver’s door.

“Give me a card,” she said, low and urgent.

He produced one from his cup caddy, holding it upright in his lap. Ruth reached in through his open window, crumpled the card in her fist like tissue paper, and slid it under the dry cleaning, Lorenzo thinking that it must be the fiftieth card he’d given to this woman since her son died.

“I’ll call you, all right?” Ruth said out the side of her mouth, eyeing the buildings.

He nodded, not holding his breath over this announcement. “Ruth, you get yourself some sleep. You look tired.” Then he slowly rolled off.

“Sleep, that’s all I do,” she called after him. Then, louder, “And tell Housing to get them damn refrigerators out of the Bowl. They give me the creeps.”

Lorenzo drove to the emergency room musing on the call: carjack, female victim, Hurley Street. It was an unlikely crime for the location, a potholed cul-de-sac at the bottom of the Armstrong hill, a broad strip of asphalt canyoned between the high-rises climbing to the east and a sloped Conrail retaining wall to the west, ending in a grubby pocket park that straddled the city line with neighboring Gannon. Hurley was more of a half-assed parking lot for the tenants than a bona fide street. The combination of murky desolation and a spongy borderline made it a good dope spot and, by extension, no place for a violent crime that would only draw police and shut down business.

Lorenzo entered the ambulance bay of the medical center with a wave to the guard, the grinning and glad-handing starting immediately. Everybody knew Lorenzo “Big Daddy” Council in this city, and vice versa. He pointed and laughed at the personnel behind the nurses’ station, greeting six people at once while scanning the room for Penny Zito, the triage nurse, and shaking hands with the goateed guard, a kid he had once arrested for possession with intent. He had secured this job for him when the kid came back out.

Given Lorenzo’s effusive and tireless presence, his social ability to bat from either side of the plate, it was inevitable that there existed word, mostly pie-in-the-sky 4:00 A.M. diner talk, that if his buddy Michael Hooks, director of the Urban Corps, made a successful run for mayor, Big Daddy Council could become the new police commissioner.

“Mister, Mister,” Lorenzo said, beaming down at the guard, taking in the pierced nostril, the stumpy ponytail. “How you doin’?”

“Hey, you know, one day at a time, right?” The kid almost blushed with pleasure.

“I hear you,” he responded, in an Amen singsong.

Penny Zito entered the hall from the waiting room, most likely returning from an outdoors cigarette break. Lorenzo sought her eyes over the guard’s head, looking for a quick eyeball read on the carjack victim: Bullshit or for real.

Penny coughed loose and crackly into her fist, shrugging in response to Lorenzo’s raised chin: Tough call. She was a good reader who could give him an accurate thumbs down for a whacked-out lush screaming bloody murder or cock her head toward the examination room, meaning, “You better get in there.”

“How you been, Pen?” he called out loudly, already laughing in anticipation of whatever she would say—not that she was so funny but because that’s the way Lorenzo was. “Number one Nana, huh?”

“I’m telling you…” She coughed in her fist again, the breakup sounding like radio static.

“Yeah, I hear you. Where’s she at?”

“In twenty-three, with the most dangerous man on earth.”

He laughed hard, staggering forward as if the wisecrack had whacked him in the small of his back. “Che Guevara, huh?”

“What?” the question came from right behind him, like a throw-down challenge. Lorenzo wheeled around.

“I said put out the smoke,” the security guard snapped, up on tiptoe, going in the face of a black man with a shaved head, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth.

The guy glared one-eyed through the ascending drift of his own smoke at the much shorter guard. “Get the fuck out my goddamn face.” He would have smacked the kid down if it hadn’t been for the infant lying in his arms. “The fuck is wrong with you,” he said, the squinted eye narrowing, his other one a reddening homicide beam.

Lorenzo thought the baby might be dead.

“Put out the smoke,” the guard snapped again, reverting to jail head—inching up closer, his ear to his shoulder, doing the D-Town matador dance.

Lorenzo leaned in between them, crooning “Army, Army,” carefully taking the cigarette from between the guy’s lips while blocking out the guard with his body. Army reared back, ready to deal, baby or no, until he saw who it was.

“Lorenzo!” Army gestured with his chin to the baby girl in his arms, then to the guard. “Get this Swiss Navy nigger out my face before he ends up in one a these beds here.”

The guard opened his mouth, but Lorenzo gave him a look: I got it covered. He put a hand to Army’s shoulder and eased him around until he was facing the nurses’ station.

“She all right?” Lorenzo peered down at the infant swaddled in a yellow bath towel, her tiny heart-shaped face exuding an unnerving stillness, nothing akin to natural sleep.

“Naw, she ain’t all right.” Army twisted his mouth in derision.