"I'll tell you where a weed spot is. I'll tell you where fifty is. I can get you better shit than this for half what you paid seven days a week with blindfolds on."

The kid sighs, tries not to look at the barely curious locals coming out of the Banco de Ponce ATM center and the Dunkin' Donuts, the college kids hopping in and out of taxis.

"C'mon. Do right by me, I'll do right by you." Lugo absently tosses the baggie from hand to hand, drops it, picks it up.

"Do right like how?"

"I want a gun."

"A what? I don't know a gun."

"You don't have to know a gun. But you know someone who knows someone, right?"

"Aw, man ..."

"For starters, you know who you bought this shit from, right?"

"I don't know any guns, man. You got forty dollars a weed there. I paid for it with my own money, 'cause it helps me relax, helps me party. Everybody I know is like, go to work, go to school, get high. That's it."

"Huh ... so like, there's no one you could call, say, 'Yo, I just got jacked in the PJs. I need me a onetime whistle, can I meet you at such and such?' "

"A whistle?"

Lugo makes a finger gun.

"You mean a hammer?"

"A hammer, a whistle ..." Lugo turns away and tightens his ponytail.

"Pfff . . ." The kid looks off, then, "I know a knife."

Lugo laughs. "My mother has a knife."

"This one's used."

"Forget it." Then, chin-tilting to the other kid: "What about your sidekick there."

"My cousin? He's like half-retarded."

"How about the other half?"

"Aw, c'mon." The driver lolls his head like a cow.

Another patrol car rolls up, this one to pick up the prisoner.

"All right, just think about it, OK?" Lugo says. "I'll see you back in holding in a few hours."

"What about my car?"

"Gilbert Grape there, he's got a license?"

"His brother does."

"Well then tell him to call his brother and get his ass down here before you wind up towed."

"Damn." Then calling out: "Raymond! You hear that?"

The cousin nods but makes no move to retrieve his cell phone from the car hood.

"So you never answered my question," Lugo says, skull-steering him into the rear of the cruiser. "You ever been locked up before?"

The kid turns his head away, murmurs something.

"It's OK, you can tell me."

"I said, 'Yes.'"

"For?"

The kid shrugs, embarrassed, says, "This."

"Yeah? Around here?"

"Uh-huh."

"How long back?"

"On Christmas Eve."

"On Christmas Eve for thisT Lugo winces. "That is cold. Who the hell would . . . You remember who collared you?"

"Uh-huh," the kid mutters, then looks Lugo in the face. "You."

An hour later, with the kid on ice back at the Eighth, good for another hour or two's worth of gun-wrangling, which would probably go nowhere, and a few more hours' worth of processing for Daley, the arresting officer, Daley good and taken care of, they were out again looking to get one for Scharf, a last-call drive-around before settling on one of the local parks for an if-all-else-fails post-midnight curfew rip.

Turning south off Houston onto Ludlow for the fiftieth time that night, Daley sensed something in the chain-link shadows below Katz's Deli, nothing he could put his finger on, but . . . "Donnie, go around."

Lugo whipped the taxi in a four-block square: Ludlow to Stanton, to Essex, to Houston, creeping left onto Ludlow again, just past Katz's, only to come abreast of a parked car full of slouched-down plainclothes from Borough Narcotics, the driver eyeballing them out of there: This is our fishing hole.

Chapter One.

WHISTLE

At ten in the morning, Eric Cash, thirty-five, stepped out of his Stanton Street walk-up, lit a cigarette, and headed off to work.

When he had first moved down here eight years ago, he was seized with the notion of the Lower East Side as haunted, and on rare days like today, a simple walk like this could still bring back his fascination, traces of the nineteenth-century Yiddish boomtown everywhere: in the claustrophobic gauge of the canyonlike streets with their hanging garden of ancient fire escapes, in the eroded stone satyr heads leering down between pitted window frames above the Erotic Boutique, in the faded Hebrew lettering above the old socialist cafeteria turned Asian massage parlor turned kiddie-club hot spot; all of it and more lying along Eric s daily four-block commute. But after nearly a decade in the neighborhood, even on a sun-splashed October morning like this, all of this ethnohistorical mix n' match was, much like himself, getting old.

He was an upstate Jew five generations removed from here, but he knew where he was, he got the joke; the laboratorio del gelati, the Tibetan hat boutiques, 88 Forsyth House with its historically restored cold-water flats not all that much different from the unrestored tenements that surrounded it, and in his capacity as manager of Cafe Berkmann, the flagship of come-on-down, on the rare days when the Beast would take one of its catnaps, he enjoyed being part of the punch line.

But what really drew him to the area wasn't its full-circle irony but its nowness, its right here and nowness, which spoke to the true engine of his being, a craving for making it made many times worse by a complete ignorance as to how this "it" would manifest itself.

He had no particular talent or skill, or what was worse, he had a little talent, some skill: playing the lead in a basement-theater production of The Dybbuk sponsored by 88 Forsyth House two years ago, his third small role since college, having a short story published in a now -defunct Alphabet City literary rag last year, his fourth in a decade, neither accomplishment leading to anything; and this unsatisfied yearning for validation was starting to make it near impossible for him to sit through a movie or read a book or even case out a new restaurant, all pulled off increasingly by those his age or younger, without wanting to run face-first into a wall.

Still two blocks from work, he stopped short as he came up on the rear of a barely creeping procession that extended west on Rivington to a point farther than he could see.

Whatever this was, it had nothing to do with him; the people were overwhelmingly Latino, most likely from the unrehabbed walk-ups below Delancey and the half-dozen immortal housing projects that cradled this, the creamy golden center of the Lower East Side, like a jai alai paddle. Everyone seemed to be dressed up as if for church or some kind of religious holiday, including a large number of kids.

He couldn't imagine this having anything to do with Berkmann's either, and in fact the line not only went directly past the cafe, but solidly and obliviously blocked the entrance; Eric watching as two separate parties gingerly tried to break through then quickly gave up, stopping off to eat somewhere else.

Peering through one of the large side windows, he saw that the room was uncharacteristically near empty, the midmorning skeleton staff outnumbering the customers. But what really got his gut jumping was the sight of the owner, his boss, Harry Steele, sitting alone in the back at a deuce, his perennial sad man's face shrunken by agitation to the size of an apple.

At least from where Eric stood now he could finally see where the line was headed: the Sanaa 24/7, a mini-mart run by two Yemeni brothers, three blocks west of Berkmann's at the corner of Rivington and Eldridge.

His first thought was that they must have had a huge Powerball winner the day before, or maybe the state lottery had climbed into the hundreds of millions again, but, no, this was something else.

He followed the line west past the fresh ruins of the most recently collapsed synagogue, past the adjoining Peoples Park, until he got to the corner directly across the street from the Sanaa, the shadows cast by its tattered two-year-old grand opening pennants playing across his face.

"Hey, Eric . . ." A young Chinese uniform, Fenton Ma, working the intersection, nodded his way.