Parker stepped back.

“Get out of the car.”

“Why? We ain’t done nothing wrong.” The tone of the boy’s voice changed, and Parker heard the adult in him come through. “Besides, you still ain’t shown us no ID. You might not be a cop at all. You could be a thief, or a rapist. We ain’t moving until I see a badge.”

The boy watched as the flashlight wavered for a moment, and knew that the cop was uncertain now. He had his suspicions, but they weren’t enough to act on, and the boy was enjoying taunting him, although not as much as he would enjoy leaving him with the knowledge that he had been unable to save his son from death.

But it was the girl who spoke, and doomed them.

“So, what you gonna do, Officer Parker?” she said, giggling.

There was a moment of silence, and the boy realized that she had made a terrible mistake.

“How do you know my name?”

The girl was no longer giggling. The boy licked his lips. Maybe the situation could yet be rescued.

“I guess someone pointed you out to us. Lot of cops around here. Guy was naming them off to me.”

“What guy?”

“Someone we met. People are friendly to strangers in this town. That’s how I know who you are.”

He licked his lips again.

“And I know what you are,” said Parker.

The boy stared at him, and he changed. He had an adolescent’s inner rage, an inability to control himself in adult situations. Now, as the cop challenged him, the old thing inside him was revealed for an instant, a thing of ash and fire and charred flesh, a thing of transcendent beauty and untrammeled ugliness.

“Fuck you, and your child,” said the boy. “You have no idea what we are.”

He turned his left wrist slightly, and the symbol on his arm was revealed to Will by the flashlight’s beam.

And in that instant, what was fractured inside Will Parker came apart forever, and he knew that he could take no more. The first shot killed the boy, entering just above his right eye and exiting through the back of his head, burying itself in the rear seat amid blood and hair and brain matter. There was no need for a second, but Will fired one anyway. The girl opened her mouth and screamed. She leaned over and cradled the ruined head of her lover, then gazed at the one who had taken him from her again.

“We’ll come back,” she whispered. “We’ll keep coming back until it’s done.”

Will said nothing. He simply lowered the gun and shot her once in the chest.

When she was gone, he went back to his car and placed his gun on the hood. There were lights coming on in nearby porches and hallways, and he saw a man standing in his yard, looking over at the two cars. He tasted salt on his lips, and thought that he had been crying, but then the pain came and he realized that he had bitten his tongue.

In a daze, he got back in the car and began to drive. As he passed the man in the yard, he saw recognition brighten the witness’s face, but he didn’t care. He didn’t even know where he was going until the lights of the city appeared before him, and then he understood.

He was going home.

They questioned him for most of that night, once they got him back to Orangetown. They told him that he was in trouble, having left the scene of a shooting, and in response he gave them the least elaborate lie that he could concoct: he had seen the car on waste ground as he was heading home, having been alerted to its presence by someone who had recognized him at an intersection, but whose name he did not know. The car had flashed its lights, and he thought that the horn might have sounded. He stopped to check that everything was okay. The boy had taunted him, pretending to reach for something inside his jacket: a weapon, perhaps. Will had warned him, and then had fired, killing the boy and the girl. After he had gone over the story for the third time, Kozelek, the investigator from the Rockland County DA’s office, had requested a moment alone with him, and the other cops, both IAD and local, had consented. When they were gone, Kozelek stopped the tape and lit a cigarette. He didn’t offer the pack to Will, who had already declined a cigarette earlier in the interview.

“You weren’t driving your own car,” said Kozelek.

“No, I borrowed a friend’s.”

“What friend?”

“Just a friend. He’s not involved. I wasn’t feeling so good. I wanted to get home as quickly as possible.”

“So this friend gives you his car.”

“He didn’t need it. I was going to drop it back off in the city tomorrow.”

“Where is it now?”

“What does it matter?”

“It was used in the course of a shooting.”

“I don’t remember. I don’t remember much after the shooting. I just drove. I wanted to get away from it.”

“You were traumatized. Is that what you’re saying?”

“That must have been it. I never shot anybody before.”

“There was no gun,” said Kozelek. “We looked. They were unarmed, both of them.”

“I didn’t say that they were armed. I said that I thought the boy might have been armed. & Rht=an>rdquo;

Kozelek drew on his cigarette and examined the man seated opposite him through the smoke. He had appeared detached from the whole process from the moment they had taken him in for questioning. It could have been shock. The IAD detectives had arrived from the city with copies of Will Parker’s service record. As he had just said, he had never killed anyone before, either officially or, from what Kozelek could ascertain, unofficially. (He had been with the NYPD himself for twenty years, and he had no illusions about such matters.) His responsibility for the shootings of the two young people would be difficult for him to accept. But that wasn’t how Kozelek read the situation: it wasn’t so much that Will Parker was in shock, but that he seemed to want the whole thing to be over and done with, like a condemned man who seeks only to be taken straight from the courtroom to his place of execution. Even his description of events, which Kozelek believed to be a lie, was halfhearted in its absence of truth. Parker didn’t care if they believed him or not. They wanted a story, and he had given them a story. If they wanted to pick holes in it, they could go right ahead and do it. He didn’t care.

That was it, thought Kozelek. The man didn’t care. His reputation and career were on the line. He had blood on his hands. When the circumstances of the killings began to emerge, the press would be baying for his blood, and there would be those within the department who might be prepared to throw Will Parker to the dogs as a sacrifice, as a way of showing that the department wouldn’t tolerate killers on the force. Already, Kozelek knew, that discussion was taking place, as men with reputations to protect balanced the advisability of weathering out the storm and standing by their officer against the possibility that to do so might further tarnish the reputation of a department that was already unloved and still reeling from a series of corruption investigations.

“You say that you didn’t know these kids?” said Kozelek. The question had been asked more than once already in that room, but Kozelek had caught a flicker of uncertainty in Parker’s face each time he had denied any knowledge of them, and he saw it again now.

“The boy looked familiar, but I don’t think I’d ever met him.”

“His name was Joe Dryden. Native of Birmingham, Alabama. Arrived here a couple of months ago. He already had a record: nickel-and-dime stuff, mostly, but he was on his way to greater things.”