The driver also didn't believe that. With one scornful look at Algy, he said, "He's no hostage, Ralph. He looks like one of us."

"I do, you know," Algy said.

The driver squinted toward his rearview mirror, filling up with nearing patrol cars. "A hostage is a fourteen-year-old girl, Ralph," he explained. "Get in the car."

At last Ralph released Algy's sleeve and jumped into the black sedan, which lunged away into traffic, through the inevitable red light, and on around the corner, with all at once three gumdrops in hot pursuit, and more coming.

One cop car slid to a wheel-locked stop by Algy and the fire hydrant as the two bank guards came running out, both of them pointing at Algy and shouting, "That's one of them!"

"Hey," Algy said.

The two cops got out on both sides of their car to hike up their tool belts and give Algy the fish-eye. "What's your story?" the nearest one wanted to know. His partner was a woman, built low for stability.

"I'm walking by," Algy started.

"They were talking to him," a guard argued.

The woman cop, being the smarter of the pair, pointed at Algy and said to the guards, "Was he in the bank?"

"Well, no," both guards said.

The first cop went back to the first question. "So what is your story?"

"I'm walking by," Algy started again, "and the guy come out and run into me, and his car showed up, and he wanted me for a hostage, but the driver said no, a hostage is a fourteen-year-old girl, so they went off to find one."

Wide-eyed, the woman cop said, "They're on their way to kidnap a fourteen-year-old girl?"

Algy shrugged. "I dunno. That's what they said."

The woman cop hopped back into her patrol car to report this development, while her partner abruptly became surrounded by victims from inside the bank, both customers and guards. Over their bobbing heads, the cop called to Algy, "Stick around. You can identify them."

"Sure thing," Algy said, with his most honest smile. Holding the smile, he walked casually backward to the corner and around it, the way, as a kid, he used to sneak into movie houses by looking as though he was coming out. Once away from the sight lines of all that drama, he legged it on out of there.

Big Hooper did not take subways. The cars cramped him, and let's not even talk about the turnstiles. If he had to travel any distance (within the five boroughs, of course-where else is there?), he'd promote the cash he needed one way and another, then phone for a stretch limo, preferably black. The white ones were just a little flashy. He'd take the limo to somewhere near his destination, pay in cash, and if he needed a lift back, he'd call a different service.

Today he'd decided to give the limo driver an address just a few blocks beyond the Sunnyside branch of Immigration Trust, so he could eyeball the place before de-limoing, just in case it might seem like a good idea not to drop in after all.

So they were tooling along eastbound across Queens, maybe a mile, two miles, from their destination, with Big watching a soap opera on the TV in the back of today's (white, what the hell) limo, when it gradually occurred to him that they weren't moving, and they hadn't been moving for quite some little while.

When he looked up from the girl in the hospital bed trying to remember who she was, he saw a lot of stopped cars and the backs of a lot of gawking people. He could tell they were gawking because they kept going up on the balls of their feet, trying to see over the top of one another.

Big offed the TV and said, " 'S it?"

"Some kinda cop thing," the driver said, looking at Big in his interior mirror. He was apparently from some remote, probably mountainous part of Asia that hadn't started outbreeding until very recently. "They got the street closed," he went on.

"Well, take another way," Big told him.

"Can't," the driver said.

"Whadaya mean, can't?"

"Nothing's open." The driver ticked items off on his fingers. "Hunner twenny-third torn up by Brooklyn Gas, shut till Thursday. Prospect closed to ve-hic-ular traffic till eleven p.m., block party. Jay blocked by construction until April. Wheeler closed down, a demonstration about charter schools."

Big said, "For or against?"

"Who cares? Then there's Hedlong, they-"

"All right, just a minute," Big said. "Lemme see about this."

He got out of the limo, the driver watching with the look of a man who'd been here in New York City from far-off remotest Asia long enough to know nothing ever helped around here. Regardless, Big walked forward, slicing a V through the gawkers like a bowling ball through lemmings, until he reached the center of attention, beyond a line of blue police sawhorses.

The center of attention, in a cleared semicircle of sidewalk, turned out to be a loony with a knife. Maybe forty years old, in blue and white vertically striped pajamas, ratty maroon bathrobe, barefoot, hair all messed around like a shag rug after a party, unshaved, eyes full of goldfish. He stood with his back against the brick wall of a Neighborhood Clinic, whatever that is, and he kept waving this huge meat cleaver of a knife back and forth, holding off the half-dozen uniformed cops crouched in a crescent in front of him, all of them talking to him, gesturing, explaining, pointing out, none of them holding a gun.

Big knew how that went. Things rode along easy for a while, and whenever the cops met a loony like this on the street-which happens now and again in New York City, though most of them were crazy before they got here-they would just cheerfully blow him away, then explain in the report how the knife or the hammer or the postage meter had seemed at the time to be a serious threat to the officer's life, and that would be that. But then a few incidents would pile up, and the cops would decide to dial down for a while, so, when confronted with a prime prospect for the Off button like this one here, they'd do cajole instead, which never works, but which might possibly keep the loony contained until EMT could get here with the net.

Which hadn't happened yet, and who knew when it would. Big went sideways along this sawhorse to the end, stepped through the gap, and when a lot of cops reached out to restrain him, he said, "Yeah, yeah," shrugged them away, and walked straight to the loony.

The crescent of cops stared at him, not knowing what this was supposed to be. Big ignored them, kept walking toward the loony, stopped well within cleaver range, stuck out his left hand, and said, "Gimme the knife, bozo."

Now, we know this loony really was a loony because, when confronted by Big, he did not immediately say yessir and hand over the cutlery. Instead of acting like a sane person, he went on acting like a loony, lunging forward with the cleaver slicing around in a broad sidearm swing, intending to bisect Big at the waist.

The middle of Big's body curved inward as his left hand lifted out of the way of the slashing cleaver, then closed almost gently on the hand behind it. Hand and cleaver stopped as though they'd hit a glass door. With the loony's arm and body still thrusting forward, Big made a quarter turn to his right, like a partner in a very formal dance. His left hand flicked up-down. The crack of the loony's wrist snapping caused a flinch and a queasy look on every cop in the neighborhood.

The cleaver clattered to the ground; so did the loony.

Turning away from his good works, Big nodded at the assembled cops. Before strolling away, "Next time," he advised them, "try a little tenderizing."

Stan was a very law-abiding driver, since the cars he drove invariably belonged to somebody else. For that reason, he obeyed every traffic regulation everywhere, and if he'd had a license, it would have been clean as a whistle. So he was astonished, and not happy, when the county cop on the motorcycle up ahead on the Long Island Expressway suddenly pulled off onto the shoulder, stopped, hopped out of the saddle, and briskly waved Stan down.