Everyone but Matt, who confounded them all by taking, just after his Uncle Dutch had been killed, the civil service exam for entry into the police department.

Matt’s passing the exam shocked no one-he was as far as anyone knew the first, very possibly the only, summa cum laude university graduate to apply to the department-but many were surprised at his passing muster during his thirty-week stint in the demanding Police Academy.

And that had really worried more than a few, because there was talk that the only reasons he’d joined the cops was to prove his manhood-failing to make it into the Marines had damaged more than a little pride-and to avenge the deaths of his natural father and uncle. And, further, behind the worry was the genuine fear that not only would walking a police beat leave Matt, the product of such a privileged background, less than satisfied, it damn well could leave him hurt, or dead.

One such person who’d shared this fear was then-Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin. The last thing Coughlin wanted to have to do was tell Matt’s mother that there’d been another shooting-Denny had been the one who knocked on her door and delivered the news that John Francis Xavier Moffitt, her husband and his best friend, had been killed in the line of duty.

Coughlin had toyed with the idea of hiding Matt in the School Crossing Guard Unit and getting him bored to tears helping snot-nosed second graders make it to the next curb-making Matt bored and pissed off enough to quit the department-then decided it was safer to have him assigned to a desk as administrative assistant to Inspector Peter Wohl. Wohl, it was hoped, would keep an eye on him and make sure he suffered in the line of duty nothing worse than a paper cut.

And that had worked. But only for a short time. A very short time.

Neither Matt’s godfather (Coughlin) nor his rabbi (Wohl) on the police force, despite all their efforts to the contrary, anticipated that Officer Matt Payne would find himself in shoot-outs with bad guys-and they sure as hell had no idea that he’d ultimately come to be known as the Wyatt Earp of the Main Line.

First, with not even six months on the job, he’d been off-duty when he spotted the van used by the doer whom the newspapers had dubbed the Northwest Serial Rapist. Matt had attempted to question the van’s driver, at which point the driver had tried to run him down. Matt responded by shooting the sonofabitch in the head. Then, in the back of the van, he’d found the rapist’s next victim-a neatly trussed-up, and naked, young woman.

The reaction of Matt’s godfather and rabbi-and damned near everyone else on the force-was to quietly declare Matt impossibly lucky that (a) he’d stumbled across the rapist and (b) that he hadn’t died from the blunt-force trauma of the van’s bumper.

And so they redoubled their efforts to keep Matty safe until he came to his senses, recognized that he damned well could have been killed, and rejoined civilian life.

But not a year later, in the middle of a massive operation designed to arrest a gang of armed robbers on warrants charging them with murder during a Goldblatt’s Department Store heist, Matt again made headlines. He’d been assigned to sit on a Philadelphia Bulletin reporter in an alley that was deemed to be a safe distance from where the arrests were going down-for the reporter’s safety but, conveniently, for the safety of the reporter’s “escort,” too.

The foolproof plans unraveled when one of the critters, who hadn’t been made privy to the foolproof plans, stumbled into the “safe” alley and started shooting it up. One of the ricocheting bullets grazed Payne’s forehead, and he returned fire.

In the next edition of The Philadelphia Bulletin, the front-page photograph (“Exclusive Photo By Michael J. O’Hara”) showed a bloody-faced Officer Matthew M. Payne, pistol in hand, standing over the fatally wounded felon. Above the photograph-written by Mickey O’Hara, who well knew Payne’s background, as he’d written the Bulletin piece on Dutch Moffitt’s death-was the screaming headline “Officer M. M. Payne, 23, The Wyatt Earp of the Main Line.”

And again came the quiet accusations, particularly considering that the vast majority of cops over the course of a twenty-year career on the beat never found cause to pull out-let alone fire-their service weapon at a murderer or rapist or robber.

Yet here was a cop-a goddamned Richie Rich rookie at that!-with two righteous shootings proverbially notched on his pistol grip.

It didn’t help that not long afterward, Matt Payne had taken-and passed, the summa cum laude college boy’s score having placed him first-the exam for the rank of detective.

The quiet accusations gave way to those on the force who made it loud and clear that they regarded Matt Payne as a rich kid who was playing at being a cop, and whose promotions and assignments were thanks to his political connections, not based on his abilities.

And then there were those who weren’t quite so accommodating and mindful of their manners-and more than happy to share their opinions directly to Matt’s face.

There hadn’t been a helluva lot that Payne could do about them, of course, except just stick it out and do his job to the best of his ability. And Matt had found that he not only liked being a cop but thought that he was good at it, further proof of that having come twice in the last six months.

The earlier episode had involved one Susan Reynolds, a beautiful blue-eyed blonde with whom Payne saw himself winding up living happily-ever-after in a vine-covered cottage by the side of the road. However, Susan, blindly loyal and trying to protect an old girlfriend, stupidly got caught up in a group that included Bryan Chenowith, a terrorist hunted nationwide by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Payne set it up for Philly’s FBI special agent in charge to take down Chenowith behind the Crossroads Diner in Doylestown. They bagged the bad guy-but not before Payne saw his dreams with Susan literally die when the lunatic Chenowith cut her down with a stolen fully automatic.30-caliber carbine.

The second episode had happened in the last thirty-odd days, and the Wyatt Earp of the Main Line again had made headlines.

Payne and his date had been in his Porsche 911 Carrera. They were headed for his apartment, about to leave the parking lot of La Famiglia Ristorante, when they came across a middle-class black couple who only moments earlier had left the restaurant and been robbed by two armed men. The doers had pistol-whipped the husband, knocking out teeth, and had gotten only as far as the end of the lot.

Sergeant Payne, Matthew M., Badge Number 471, Philadelphia Police Department, automatically gave chase-and almost immediately his car took the brunt of two blasts from a sawed-off shotgun. Payne then pulled his Colt.45 Officer’s Model pistol and put down the shotgunner with a round to the head and severely wounded the accomplice, who had fired at Payne with a.380-caliber Browning semiautomatic pistol.

Payne’s date-the extremely bright and attractive Terry Davis, a heavy hitter in the entertainment industry in Los Angeles-had not been badly hurt, but their budding relationship died in that parking lot.

While Matt Payne’s shootings were all righteous ones-ones in which he not only was found to be justified by the system but also ones in which he’d been hailed a hero by the public-they haunted him.

And this last shooting had put him over the edge.

It set up a series of events that found him hospitalized and briefly under psychiatric care. After careful examination-and a more or less completely clean bill of health-he was ordered to take a thirty-day leave of compensatory time. The purpose of this leave was (a) to fulfill the prescription for recovery that the psychiatrist said was necessary for such an overworked and overstressed police sergeant, and (b) to be a period of reflection, in which said police sergeant could consider if he might be better suited to another career path at the somewhat tender age of twenty-seven, such as that of a lawyer.