"Hey, Pop. Tony Harris has been good to me. And Matt Payne is sort of a friend of mine."

"'Sort of a friend'?" Mrs. Lewis asked.

"Well, I haven't been invited to the Rose Tree Hunt Club yet, but yeah. We're friends. We get along well. If Harris wasn't sick, I would have liked to be one of the guys sitting on him."

"I don't like the idea of one police officer using the word 'honky' to describe another," Lieutenant Lewis said.

"Pop, I didn't use it. Carter did."

"You repeated it."

"My mistake," Tiny said, a hint of anger in his voice. "Where did you see Wohl-InspectorWohl?"

"You know that your friend Payne is being protected in his apartment?"

Tiny nodded.

"I was supposed to have the midnight to eight tour before-my boss – got me out of it."

"I was driving by and saw some activity in the garage. A lab van, specifically. So I stopped. Someone, presumably the low-lifes who are calling themselves a Liberation Army, did a job on his car."

"What kind of a job?"

"Slashed the tires. Scraped the paint."

"That's going too far!" Tiny said. "That's absolutely sacrilegious! That's not an automobile, it's a work of art!"

"Now it's a work of art with flat tires and a scratched paint job," Lieutenant Lewis said.

"And Wohl was there?"

"InspectorWohl was there. And nearly as offended by the desecration of the work of art as you are."

"What kind of a car are you talking about?" Mrs. Lewis asked.

"A Porsche 911."

"Very expensive," Lieutenant Lewis said. "Only rich people can afford them-lawyers,doctors, people like that-"

"Stop, Foster!" Mrs. Lewis said. "Not one more word!"

"What's the matter with you?"

"You know damned well what's the matter. You are not going to needle him the rest of his life about not being a doctor! He wants to be a cop. What's wrong with that? I'm married to a cop. You should be proud that he wants to do what you do!"

Lieutenant Lewis looked at Officer Lewis.

"The lady used profane language, Officer Lewis. Did you pick up on that?"

"Yes, sir. I heard her."

"I guess that means she's serious, huh?"

"Yes, sir, I guess it does."

"Then maybe you and I better get another beer and go in the living room until she calms down, what do you think?"

"I think that's a fine idea, sir."

"Don't try to make a joke of it, Foster. I meant every word I said!"

"I somehow had the feeling you did," Lieutenant Foster said.

When Chief Inspectors Dennis V. Coughlin and Matthew Lowenstein and Staff Inspector Peter Wohl filed into the Commissioner's Conference room at eight-ten the next morning, The Honorable Jerry Carlucci, Mayor of the City of Brotherly Love, was already there, his back to them, looking out the window, supporting himself on both hands.

Commissioner Taddeus Czernick, holding a cup of coffee in his hands, stood by the open door to his office. Coughlin, Lowenstein and Wohl stood behind chairs at the table, waiting for the Mayor to turn around.

He took his time in doing so, prompting each of them, privately, to conclude that the first psychological warfare salvo had been fired.

Finally, he turned around.

"Good morning," he said. "I'm aware that all of you have busy schedules, and that in theory, I should be able to get from Commissioner Czernick all the details of whatever I would like to know. But since there seems to be some breakdown in communications, I thought it best to ask you to spare me a few minutes of your valuable time."

"Good morning, Mr. Mayor," Lowenstein said. "I'm sure I speak for all of us when I say I'm sorry you fell out of the wrong side of the bed this morning."

Carlucci glared at him for a moment.

"Oh, for Christ's sake, sit down, all of you," he said. "I know you' re doing your best." He looked at Czernick. "Can we get some coffee in here, Tad?"

"Yes, sir. There's a fresh pot."

"I was reading the overnights," the Mayor said. "Did you notice that some wiseass painted'Free The Goldblatt's Six' on a wall at the University?"

"Those villains we have," Coughlin said.

"No kidding?"

"The railroad cops caught three of them doing it again on the Pennsy Main Line right of way. You know those great big granite blocks where the tracks go behind the stadium? They had lowered themselves on ropes. Two they caught hanging there. They squealed on the third one."

"Who were they?"

"College kids. Wiseasses."

"The judge ought to make them clean it off with a toothbrush," Carlucci said. "But that's wishful thinking."

"Mike Sabara told me when I called him just before I came here that there's 'ILA' painted all over North Philadelphia," Wohl said. "I don' t think that's college kids, and I would like to know who did that."

"What do you mean?"

"How much of it is spontaneous, and how much was painted by the people who issued those press releases."

"Let's talk about the ILA," Carlucci said. "Now that it just happened to come up. What do we know today about them that we didn't know yesterday?"

"Not a goddamn thing," Coughlin said. "I was over at Intelligence yesterday. They don't have a damned thing, and it's not for want of trying."

"They're harassing Monahan. And for that matter, Payne, too. Telephone calls to Goldblatt's from the time they open the doors until they close."

"What about at his house?" Carlucci asked.

"Telephone calls. The same kind they're making to Matt Payne's apartment."

"Driving by Monahan's house? Anything like that?"

"Nothing that we've been able to get a handle on. Nobody hanging around, driving by more than once."

"What have you got on Monahan, at his house?"

"Three uniformed officers in an unmarked car. One of the three is always walking around."

"Supervised by who?"

"A lieutenant named Jack Malone. He came to Special Operations from Major Crimes."

"Where he got the nutty idea that Bob Holland is a car thief," the mayor said. "I know all about Malone. Is he the man for the job, Peter? This whole thing would go down the toilet if we lose Monahan as a witness, or lose him, period. Christ, what that bastard Nelson and hisLedger would do to me if that happened."

"Malone strikes me, Mr. Mayor, as a pretty good cop who unfortunately has had some personal problems."

The mayor looked at Wohl for a moment and then said. "Okay. If you say so. You say they're harassing Payne? How? What's going on with him?"

"He has an apartment on the top floor of the Delaware Val ley Cancer Society Building on Rittenhouse Square. There's an underground garage with a Holmes rent-a-cop at the entrance, and, during the day, there's a Holmes rent-a-cop in the lobby. There's a pretty good burglar alarm system. We have an officer wearing a Holmes uniform, replacing the Holmes guy, in the garage at night."

"That's all?"

"And we have somebody with Payne all the time."

"Two of them are those kids from Narcotics who ran down the punk who shot Dutch Moffitt," Chief Inspector Coughlin said. "McFadden and Martinez. They're friends, and in regular clothes. We don't want to give the impression that we're-"

"Baby-sitting a cop, huh?" the mayor interrupted. "I get the point."

"They call him, these sleaze-bags," Wohl said, "every fifteen minutes or so. Say something dirty, and hang up. No time to trace the call."

He took a tape cassette from his pocket and held it up.

"What's that?"

"A recording of the calls," Wohl said. "I'm going to take it to the lab."

"That sounds as if we're chasing our tails," the mayor said. "What do they hope to find?"

"We're trying everything we can think of, Mr. Mayor," Wohl said.

"Sometime yesterday afternoon, they got to his car," Coughlin said. " Slashed the tires, and did a job with a knife or a key, or something on the paint job."