Until investigators from the General Accounting Office had put a stop to it, providing the Highway Patrol, in its new, innovative, and experimental role as a subordinate unit of the new, innovative, and experimental Special Operations Division, with new cars had been, in Mayor Carlucci’s opinion, a justifiable expenditure of federal grant funds.

More senior police officers, lieutenants and above, usually, the “white shirts,” who understood that money was money, and that if extra money from outside bought Special Operations and Highway cars, then the money which would ordinarily have to eventually be spent for that purpose could be spent elsewhere in the Department, were not as resentful. But this rationale was not very satisfying to a cop in a district whose battered radio patrol car wouldn’t start at three o’clock in the morning.

Detective Payne went to a row of eight new, unmarked Ford sedans, which so far as the federal government was concerned were involved in new, innovative, and experimental activities under the ACT concept, and got in one of them. It was one of four such cars assigned to the Investigation Section. Sergeant Jason Washington had one, and Detective Tony Harris the second, on an around the-clock basis. The two other cars were shared by the others of the Investigation Section.

He drove out of the parking lot and headed up Castor Avenue toward Hunting Park Avenue. He turned off Hunting Park Avenue onto Ninth Street and off Ninth Street onto the ramp for the Roosevelt extension of the Schuylkill Express way, and then turned south toward the Schuylkill River.

At the first traffic light, he took one of the two microphones mounted just about out of sight under the dash.

“Mary One, William Fourteen.”

“You have something for me, Fourteen?” Lieutenant Jack Fellows’s voice came back immediately.

“Right.”

“Where are you now?”

“Just left Special Operations.”

There was a moment’s hesitation as Lieutenant Fellows searched his memory for time-and distance.

“Meet us at the Zoo parking lot,” he said.

“On the way,” Matt said, and dropped the microphone onto the seat.

Then he reached down and threw a switch which caused both the brake lights and the blue and white lights concealed behind the grille of the Ford to flash, and stepped hard on the accelerator.

The Mayor is a busy man. He doesn’t have the time to waste sitting at the Zoo parking lot waiting for a lowly detective. This situation clearly complies with the provisions of paragraph whatever the hell it is of Police Administrative Regulations restricting the use of warning lights and sirens to those clearly necessary situations.

There were a number of small pleasures involved with being a policeman, and one of them, Matt Payne had learned, was being able to turn on warning lights and the siren when you had to get somewhere in a hurry.

He had thought of this during dinner the previous evening, during a somewhat acrimonious discussion of his-their-future with Miss Penelope Detweiler.

It was her position (and that of Mr. and Mrs. Chadwick Thomas Nesbitt IV, who allied themselves with Miss Detweiler in the Noble Cause of Talking Common Sense to Matt) that it was childish and selfish of him, with his education, potential, and background, to remain a policeman, working for peanuts, when he should be thinking of their future.

He had known that it would not have been wise to have offered the argument “Yeah, but if I’m not a cop, I won’t be able to race down Roosevelt Boulevard with the lights on.” She would have correctly decided that he was simply being childish again.

There were other satisfactions in being a policeman, but for some reason, he seemed to become instantly inarticulate whenever he tried to explain them to her. In his own mind, he knew that he had been a policeman long enough so that it was in his blood, and he would never be happy at a routine job.

He reached the Schuylkill River, crossed it, and turned east toward Center City. Then he reached down and turned off the flashing lights. The traffic wasn’t that heavy, and if Mary One, the mayoral limousine, beat him to the Zoo parking lot, he wasn’t entirely sure if the Mayor would agree with his decision that turning on the lights was justified.

From what he’d heard of the Mayor’s career as a police man, he’d been a really by-the-book cop.

When he got to the Zoo parking lot, he stopped and picked up his microphone.

“Mary One, William Fourteen, at the Zoo.”

“A couple of minutes,” Lieutenant Fellows’s voice came back.

Matt picked the envelope off the floor, and got out of the car and waited for the Mayor.

Two minutes later the limousine pulled up beside him. Matt walked to the front-seat passenger door as the window whooshed down and Lieutenant Fellows came into view.

“Good morning, sir,” Matt said, and handed him the envelope.

“Thank you, Payne,” Fellows said, and the window started back up. Then the rear window rolled down and he heard the Mayor of the City of Philadelphia order:

“Hold it a minute, Charley,” and then the rear door opened and the Mayor got out.

“Long time no see,” the Mayor said, offering his hand. “How are you, Matt?”

“Just fine, Mr. Mayor. Thank you.”

“Good to see you, Matt,” the Mayor said. “And say hello to your mother and dad for me.”

“Yes, sir. I will. Thank you.”

The Mayor patted his shoulder and got back in the limousine, and in a moment it rolled out of the parking lot.

EIGHT

Matt got back in the unmarked Ford and drove out of the Zoo parking lot, wondering where the hell he was going to find a drugstore and buy the razor he had been ordered to buy.

It had been nice of the Mayor, he thought, to get out of his car to say hello. It was easy to accuse the Mayor of being perfectly willing to wrap his arm around an orangutan and inquire as to the well-being of his parents if that would get him one more vote, but the truth, Matt realized, was that after he had wrapped his arm around your shoulder, it made you feel good, and you were not at all inclined to question his motives.

While it was said, and mostly believed, that the Mayor knew the name of every cop in the Department, this was not true. There were eight thousand policemen in the Department, and the Mayor did not know the name or even the face of each of them. But he did know the faces and sometimes the names of every cop who was someone, or who had ever done something, out of the ordinary.

Matt qualified on several counts. One of them was that the Mayor knew his parents, but the most significant way Matt Payne had come to the Mayor’s attention was as a cop.

Shortly after the formation of Special Operations, as Detective Washington was getting close enough to the Northwest Serial Rapist to have a cast of his tire tracks and a good description of his van, Mr. Warren K. Fletcher, thirty-one, of Germantown, had attempted to run down Matt with his van when he approached it.

That gave Matt (although he was so terrified at the time that this legal consideration had not entered his mind) the justification to use equal-deadly-force in the apprehension of a suspect. He had drawn his service revolver and fired five times at the van. One of the bullets found and exploded Mr. Fletcher’s brain all over the windshield of his van.

It didn’t matter that finding what looked like it could possibly be the van could be described only as blind luck, or that when Matt had fired his revolver he had been so terrified that hitting Mr. Fletcher had been pure coincidence. What mattered was that Mr. Fletcher, at the time of his death, had Mrs. Naomi Schneider, thirty-four, of Germantown, in the back of his van, stripped naked, trussed neatly with telephone wire, and covered with a tarpaulin, and shortly before their trip was interrupted had been regaling her with a description of what he had planned for them as soon as they got somewhere private.