"Is he dead?" Matt asked.

"I don't know," Mickey replied, and then matter-of-factly turned and put his fingers to the unconscious man's jugular. "Not yet, anyway," he added.

"Look at my leg," Matt said.

"What's wrong with your leg?"

"You tell me."

He propped himself up, awkwardly, and watched as Mickey pulled his trouser leg up.

"Looks like you got it there too," Mickey said. "Not much blood. It hurt?"

"No, not much," Matt said. "It feels like I got hit with a rock or something."

"There's only one hole," Mickey said. "The bullet's probably still in there. I don't think anything is broken."

When Matt let himself fall back on the stretcher, he saw that the man he had shot was bleeding from the nose and mouth. There was a froth of bloody bubbles on his lips. Matt looked away, wondering if he was going to be sick to his stomach.

Matt suddenly started to shiver. Mickey looked around the interior of the van.

"Hand me one of those blankets," he ordered. A gray, dirt-spotted blanket appeared, and O'Hara draped it over him.

"Throw one on him too," Matt Payne ordered.

Two minutes or so later the van leaned on its springs as it made a turn, then bounced over a curb. It stopped and the doors were jerked open.

Three men in hospital whites and a nurse with a purple, sequindecorated sweater thrown over the shoulders of her whites peered into the van. One of the men grabbed the handles of the stretcher and Matt felt himself sliding down the van's floor.

Once the stretcher was out of the van, he felt himself being moved, and then he realized he had been transferred to a gurney; he could feel the cold plastic beneath the thin sheet on his stomach.

"Get the handcuffs off him!" he heard his nurse order angrily. "He's unconscious, for Christ's sake!"

Matt's gurney began to move into the hospital. There were two sets of doors. The gurney slammed into the outer set, and then the inner set.

"Out of the way!" the nurse's voice called, and Matt's gurney was moved to the wall, where it stopped. He saw a second gurney being pushed, at a trot, by two of the attendants, down the corridor.

And then Staff Inspector Peter Wohl's face appeared next to his.

"How are you doing?"

"I'm all right," Matt said.

Why the hell did I say that?

"They'll take care of you in a minute."

"Why not now?"

"Because the guy you shot is in a lot worse shape than you are," Wohl said matter-of-factly.

"Is he going to live?"

"I don't think they know yet."

"Shit, my car!"

"What about your car?"

"It's in the playground. With the keys in it."

"I'll take care of it," Wohl said. "Don't worry about it."

"I think I'm going to be sick to my stomach."

All of a sudden, Matt found himself looking at Peter Wohl's stomach.

He must have had to squat to get down to me.

"Get me a towel or a bucket or something," Wohl ordered.

Matt rolled on his side, and then completely over, onto his back.

That's better. Now I won't have to throw up.

He propped himself up on his elbows, and then the nausea came so quickly he barely had time to get his head over the edge of the gurney.

He now felt faint, and his leg began to throb.

The gurney began to move. He looked up and back and saw that he was being towed by a very tall, six feet six or better, very thin black man in hospital greens.

He was pulled into a cubicle walled by white plastic curtains. A new face appeared in his. Another black one. "I'm Dr. Hampton. How you doing?"

"Just fine, thank you."

Dr. Hampton removed the handkerchief, jerking it quickly off, and painfully prodded Matt's forehead.

"Nothing serious," he said. "It will have to be sutured, but that can wait."

"What about my leg?"

"I'll have a look," Dr. Hampton said, and then ordered: "Get an IV in him."

Somebody got him into a sitting position and he felt his topcoat and jacket being removed, and then his shirt.

"I'm cold."

He was ignored.

He felt a blood pressure apparatus being strapped around his left arm, and then his right arm was held firmly immobile as a nurse searched for and found a vein.

"Nothing broken. There's no exit wound. There's a bullet in there somewhere. Prep him and send him up to Sixteen."

"Yes, Doctor," the nurse said.

Peter Wohl watched as the gurney with Matt on it was wheeled out of the Emergency treatment cubicle, and then ran after the doctor he had seen go into the cubicle.

"Tell me about the man you just had in there," he said.

"Who are you?" Dr. Hampton asked.

"I'm Inspector Wohl."

"You don't look much like a cop, Inspector."

"What do you want to do, see my badge?"

"No. Take it easy. I suppose I said that because I was just thinking he doesn't either. Look like a cop, I mean."

"Actually," Wohl said. "He's a pretty good cop. How badly is he injured?"

"A good deal less seriously than most people I see who have been shot with a large caliber weapon," Dr. Hampton said, and then went on to explain his diagnosis and prognosis.

Wohl thanked him, and then went to one of the pay phones mounted on the wall between the outer and inner doors of the Emergency entrance and took first a dime from his pocket and then his wallet. Inside the wallet was a typewritten list of telephone numbers, on both sides of a sheet of paper cut to the size of a credit card, and then coated with Scotch tape to preserve it.

He dropped a dime in the slot and then dialed one of the numbers. There was an answer, surprisingly wide awake, on the third ring: " Coughlin."

"Chief, this is Peter Wohl."

"What's up, Peter?"

"Matt Payne has been shot."

There was a just perceptible pause.

"Bad?"

"He's got a.45 bullet in his calf. It apparently was a ricochet off a brick wall. And his face was hit, the forehead, probably by a piece of bullet jacket. It slit the skin. Not serious, take a couple of stitches."

"But the bullet in the legis serious?"

"There's not much damage. I don't know for sure what I'm talking about, but what I think happened was that the bullet hit the wall, a brick wall, and lost most of its momentum, and then hit him. It's still in him. They just took him into the operating room."

"Where is he?"

"Frankford Hospital."

"What the hell happened, Peter?"

I have just become the guy who is responsible for getting Denny Coughlin's godson, the son he never had, shot.

"At five o'clock this morning, we picked up the doers of the Goldblatt job."

"'We' presumably meaning Highway," Coughlin said coldly. "I didn't know that Matt was in Highway. When did that happen?"

"ACT Teams from Special Operations, working with Homicide, made the arrests. Simultaneously-"

"Not Highway?"

"No, sir. Not Highway."

"Go on, Peter."

"Mickey O'Hara was there. I invited him. I sent Matt with him to make sure Mickey didn't get in the way, get himself hurt.

One of the doers, a scumbag named Charles D. Stevens, apparently saw either the cars, or more likely the Homicide guy sitting on him, and then the cars. As the ACT cars were getting in place, he-this is conjecture Chief, but I think this is it-made his way to either the next house, or the house next to that, and tried to get away through the alley. O'Hara and Matt were at the head of the alley. He-Stevensstarted shooting. And got Matt."

"Did you get Stevens?"

"Matt got Stevens. He shot at him four times and hit him twice. Once in the arm, and once in the liver. Stevens was brought here. I have the feeling he's not going to live."

"But Matt is in no danger?"

"No, sir. I don't even think there is going to be much muscle damage. As I said, I think the bullet lost much of its momentum-"