It was a perfectly cushy gig, especially for someone who, at forty-four, still saw closing his eyes at night as a punishment, who liked the feel of unreported cash in his hand as much as any cop, and who enjoyed watching the making of drinks last seen, he imagined, at the Stork Club.

And now the gig was over, his only consolation on this last night the inadvertent violation of the hands-off-the-mixologists rule; inadvertent as in, she started; a new hire, tall, dark, and moody like a long twist of smoke, eyeing him all evening, slipping him samplers across the bar when the Baby King wasn't looking, then giving him the high sign on her 3:00 a. M. break; Matty following her out through the rear loading entrance into the hidden tenement-ringed courtyard. After he passed on her offered joint and watched her take a few hits, she just hopped on up, her arms around his neck, her legs locked over his hips, and he commenced, more for traction and for relief on his lower back than out of passion, whamming her against the brick wall. She had to be fifteen years younger than him, but he couldn't even relax enough to appreciate it, to go exploring, it was all about the hop up, the hoisting, the whamming, until alarmingly, she started weeping, at which point he started whamming her more tenderly, at which point she dried up on the spot: "What are you doing?"

"Sorry," going back to hard whamming like moving a credenza: Over here, lady? Like this, lady? The sex had been unnerving, not exactly fun, but still, it was sex. Besides, she seemed happy again, back to weeping. So.

Regarding the call from Night Watch . . .

He could let them handle the investigation until his tour began at eight or jump in now; Matty deciding to jump because the bar was so close to the crime scene he could see the fluttering yellow tape from where he stood. What would be the point of going home for only a few hours' sleep?

Besides, his sons had come down for a few days to stay with him and he didn't particularly like them.

There were two: the one he always thought of as the Big One, a jerk of a small-town cop in upstate Lake George, where his ex-wife had moved after the divorce, and the younger one, whom he naturally thought of as the Other One, a mute teen who had still been in diapers when they broke up.

He was at best an indifferent parent but didn't know what to do about it; and the boys themselves were pretty conditioned to think of him as a distant relative down in New York City, some guy obliged by blood to let them crash now and then.

Additionally, about a month earlier, his ex-wife had called to tell him that she was pretty sure the Other One was dealing weed at his high school. Matty's response was to call the Big One at his upstate precinct house; who said, Til take care of it," a little too quickly, Matty knowing then that they were in it together, and letting it be.

Better to keep working . . .

When he made it to the scene at 4:35, twenty minutes after the call, it was still dark, although the first bird of the day could be heard chittering in a low tree somewhere close, and the ancient tenement rooftops of Eldridge Street were beginning to outline themselves against the sky.

Directly beneath the streetlight in front of the building, a yellow plastic evidence cone was next to a spent shell, Matty guessing a .22 or .25, but the two bodies were gone: one whisked away by an ambulance, leaving an almost acrylic-bright runnel of blood worming its way to the curb; the other now upright and puking over the siding of a stoop a few doors south, his eyelids askew with liquor. A uniform stood babysitting discreetly downwind, smoking a cigarette.

Matty preferred his outdoor crimes to come about in the wee hours, the eerie repose of the street allowing for a deeper dialogue with the scene; and so he now pondered the shell casing, .22 or 25, thinking, Amateurs, 4:00 a. M. the desperado hour, the shooter or shooters young, probably junkies looking for a few bucks, didn't mean to use that piece of shit, now they'll hole up for a little, look at each other, "Oh, man, did we just . . . ," shrug it off, get high, then come back out for more, Matty telling himself, Look at who just got out, talk to Parole, to Housing, hit the dope spots, the dealers.

Nazir, one of the two Yemenis who worked the twenty-four-hour mini-mart, was back inside his store, sitting glumly behind his just-cracked front-window display of hangover-themed pharmaceuticals, the rarely used riot gate pulled down over the narrow door, Matty assumed, at the request of the cops.

He counted six uniforms, four sweatshirts, but no sport jackets.

Then Bobby Oh, the Night Watch supervisor who had called him, came out of the vestibule of 27 Eldridge.

"It's just you?" Matty asked, shaking his hand.

"I'm stretched like piano wire tonight," Bobby said. He was a short, trim middle-aged Korean with an all-business manner and hectic eyes. "We had a bar shooting in Inwood, a rape in Tudor City, a hit-and-run in Chelsea . . ."

"... a Scout troop short a child, Khrushchev's due at Idlewild . . ."

". . . and a cop beaned with a marble up in Harlem."

"With a what?" Matty began scanning the street for surveillance cameras.

"Guy was a lieutenant." Bobby shrugged.

"So what's the story," pulling a steno pad from the inside of his jacket.

"Story is . .