I mean, you could get a good bottle of fifty-dollar cognac or Johnnie Walker Black, leave it on the table, he won’t even crack the seal. Something tastes like a purple candy bar? Watch out.”

“I want my damn medal back!” Woody yelled from farther away in the apartment.

“Sir, what did I just say to you?” Stupak’s voice flattening with anger.

“Start a new life…” the girlfriend muttered. “All the pawnshops around here got me on speed dial for when it comes in. Hell, he wants to take off? I’ll loan him the money, but this here is a piece of American history.”

Billy liked her, he just didn’t understand why a woman this lucid didn’t keep a cleaner house.

“So what do you want me to do?”

“Nothing. I’m sorry they sent you. Usually some uniform guys from the precinct come up, mainly just because he was a famous athlete, and we play Where’d she hide it this time, but you’re a detective, and I’m embarrassed they bothered you.”

When they opened the bathroom door, Woody was back in the living room, sprawled on the vinyl-covered couch watching MTV with the sound off, his jellied eyes dimming into slits.

Billy dropped the medal on his chest. “Case solved.”

Walking with Stupak to the elevators he checked the time: three-thirty. Ninety more minutes and the odds were he’d have gotten away with murder.

“What do you say?”

“You’re the boss, boss.”

“Finnerty’s?” Billy thinking, What the hell, you cannot not celebrate, thinking, Just a taste.

*   *   *

“I ALWAYS WANTED TO GO to Ireland,” Stupak shouted over the music to the dead-handsome young bartender. “Last year we had reservations and everything but, like, two days before the flight my girlfriend came down with appendicitis.”

“You can always get on a plane by yourself, you know,” he said politely enough, looking over her shoulder to wave at two women just coming through the door. “It’s a very friendly country.”

And that was that, the guy leaning across the wood to buss the new arrivals and leaving Stupak to blush into her beer.

“I’ve never been to Ireland myself,” Billy said. “I mean, what for, I’m around Micks all day as it is.”

“I never should’ve said ‘girlfriend,’” Stupak said.

His cell rang, not the Wheel, thank God, but his wife, Billy race-walking out onto the street so she wouldn’t hear the racket and start asking questions.

“Hey…” his voice downshifting as it always did when she rang him this deep into the night. “Can’t sleep?”

“Nope.”

“Did you take your Traz?”

“I think I forgot but I can’t now, I have to get up in three hours.”

“How about you take a half?”

“I can’t.”

“All right, just, you know, you’ve been here before, worse comes to worse, you’ll have a tough day tomorrow but it won’t kill you.”

“When are you coming home?”

“I’ll try and duck out early.”

“I hate this, Billy.”

“I know you do.” His cell began to vibrate again; Rollie Towers on line two. “Hang on a sec.”

“I really hate it.”

“Just hang on…” Then, switching over: “Hey, what’s up.”

“Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.”

“Fuck you, what do you got.”

“Happy St. Patrick’s Day,” said the Wheel.

*   *   *

BY THE TIME BILLY AND most of his squad made it to Penn Station and then to the long, greasy, lower-level arcade that connected the Long Island–bound commuter trains to the subway platforms at the opposite end, the cops who were on the scene first, both Transit and LIRR undercovers, had taken control of the situation better than he would have expected. Not sure what to preserve of the one-hundred-yard blood trail, they had cordoned it all off with tape and garbage cans like a slalom run. They had also miraculously managed to round up most of the sodden homebound revelers who had been standing under the track information board when the assault occurred, corralling them into a harshly lit three-sided waiting room off the main concourse. Taking a quick peek into the room, Billy saw the majority of his potential witnesses sitting on hard wooden benches gape-mouthed and snoring, chins tilted to the ceiling like hungry baby birds.

“Looks like the guy got slashed under the board here, took off running, and ran out of gas by the subway,” Gene Feeley announced, his tie unknotted and dangling like Sinatra at last call.

Billy was surprised to see Feeley there at all, let alone first detective on the scene. But then again, this was Feeley’s thing, the old-timer usually disdaining any run unless there were at least three dead or a shot cop, front-page stuff.

“Where’s the body?” Billy thinking he’d be lucky to see his kids by dinnertime.

“Just follow the yellow brick road,” Feeley said, pointing to the red-brown sneaker prints that marked the way like bloody dance-step instructions. “It’s one for the scrapbooks, I’ll tell you that.”

They arrived at the subway turnstiles just as a southbound express pulled into the station, more pie-eyed revelers disembarking onto the platform, ho-shitting, laughing, stumbling, blowing vuvuzelas, everyone assuming the wide-eyed stiff was just drunk except for the two middle-aged detectives from the Crime Scene Unit who had opted to take the subway to work, their forensics kits making them look like down-at-the-heels salesmen.

Billy snagged a wandering Transit detective. “Listen, we can’t have trains stopping here right now. Can you call your boss?”

“Sarge, it’s Penn Station.”

“I know where we are, but I don’t want a fresh herd of drunks stomping all over my scene every five minutes.”

The victim lay on his side, neck and torso compressed into a hunch, his left arm and leg thrust straight out before him as if he were trying to kick his own fingertips. It looked to Billy as if the guy had been trying to jump the turnstile, bled out mid-vault, then froze like that, dying in midair before dropping like a rock.

“Looks like a high hurdler just fell off the front of a Wheaties box,” Feeley said, then wandered off.

As a CSU tech began teasing the wallet out of the victim’s formerly sky-blue jeans, Billy stopped marveling at his live-action lava cast and took his first good look at his face. Mid-twenties, with wide open, startled blue eyes, arched pencil-thin eyebrows, milk-white skin, and jet-colored hair, femininely handsome to the point of perversity.

Billy stared and stared, thinking, Can’t be. “Is his name Bannion?”

“Hold the phone,” the tech said, pulling out the guy’s driver’s license. “Bannion it is, first name—”

“Jeffrey,” Billy said, then: “Fuck me sideways.”

“Why do I know that name?” the CSU tech asked, not really interested in an answer.

Jeffrey Bannion … Billy immediately thought of calling John Pavlicek, then considered the hour and decided to wait at least until daybreak, although Big John might not mind being woken up for this one.

*   *   *

EIGHT YEARS EARLIER, A TWELVE-YEAR-OLD BOY named Thomas Rivera had been found beneath a soiled mattress in the tree house of his City Island neighbors, the Bannions. He had been bludgeoned to death, the bedding atop his body spattered with semen. John Pavlicek, back in the late ’90s Billy’s partner in anti-crime but at the time of the murder a detective assigned to the Bronx Homicide Task Force, was called in when the body was found by a cadaver dog three days after the boy went missing.

Jeffrey Bannion’s oversized, learning-disabled younger brother, Eugene, admitted to the jerking off—the tree house was where he always went for that—but said that when he discovered the boy, he was already dead. Nineteen-year-old Jeffrey told Pavlicek that he himself was sick in bed that day, said Eugene had already told him that he had done it. But when the cops turned the lights on the younger Bannion, Eugene not only stuck to his story but couldn’t even begin to speculate on how Thomas Rivera had come to be in the tree house or talk about what kind of weapon had done the deed, no matter how much trickery or cajoling the Homicides employed, and it made no sense that a fifteen-year-old that dim could hold out on them.

Pavlicek liked the older Bannion for it from the jump, but they couldn’t shake his sick-bed story, and so the younger brother went to the Robert N. Davoren juvenile center at Rikers, a Bloods, Ñetas, and MS-13 petri dish, where he was placed in Gen Pop without the requisite psych eval, a big oafy white kid who tended to throw indiscriminate punches when he was freaked, and his murder, only five days into his incarceration, racked up nearly as many headlines as that of the boy he had allegedly killed.

Within days, despite Pavlicek’s full-bore campaigning, the Rivera homicide was marked “closed by arrest,” formally shutting down any further investigative work.