‘I’m not mad,’ Hodges says. In fact, he doesn’t know what he is. He feels like he’s entered a dreamworld where all the clocks run backward.

‘What do we do now?’ Jerome asks. ‘Call the cops?’

But Hodges is still not ready to let go. The young man in the picture may have a cauldron of crazy boiling away behind his bland face, but Hodges has met his share of psychopaths and knows that when they’re taken by surprise, most collapse like puffballs. They’re only dangerous to the unarmed and unsuspecting, like the broke folks waiting to apply for jobs on that April morning in 2009.

‘Let’s you and I take a ride to Mr Hartsfield’s place of residence,’ Hodges says. ‘And let’s go in that.’ He points to the gray Mercedes.

‘But … if he sees us pull up, won’t he recognize it?’

Hodges smiles a sharklike smile Jerome Robinson has never seen before. ‘I certainly hope so.’ He holds out his hand. ‘May I have the key, Holly?’

Her abused lips tighten. ‘Yes, but I’m going.’

‘No way,’ Hodges says. ‘Too dangerous.’

‘If it’s too dangerous for me, it’s too dangerous for you.’ She won’t look directly at him and her eyes keep skipping past his face, but her voice is firm. ‘You can make me stay, but if you do, I’ll call the police and give them Brady Hartsfield’s address just as soon as you’re gone.’

‘You don’t have it,’ Hodges says. This sounds feeble even to him.

Holly doesn’t reply, which is a form of courtesy. She won’t even need to go inside Discount Electronix and ask the dirty blond; now that they have the name, she can probably suss out the Hartsfield address from her devilish iPad.

Fuck.

‘All right, you can come. But I drive, and when we get there, you and Jerome are going to stay in the car. Do you have a problem with that?’

‘No, Mr Hodges.’

This time her eyes go to his face and stay there for three whole seconds. It might be a step forward. With Holly, he thinks, who knows.

10

Because of drastic budget cuts that kicked in the previous year, most city patrol cars are solo rides. This isn’t the case in Lowtown. In Lowtown every shop holds a deuce, the ideal deuce containing at least one person of color, because in Lowtown the minorities are the majority. At just past noon on June third, Officers Laverty and Rosario are cruising Lowbriar Avenue about half a mile beyond the overpass where Bill Hodges once stopped a couple of trolls from robbing a shorty. Laverty is white. Rosario is Latina. Because their shop is CPC 54, they are known in the department as Toody and Muldoon, after the cops in an ancient sitcom called Car 54, Where Are You? Amarilis Rosario sometimes amuses her fellow blue knights at roll call by saying, ‘Ooh, ooh, Toody, I got an idea!’ It sounds extremely cute in her Dominican accent, and always gets a laugh.

On patrol, however, she’s Ms Taking Care of Business. They both are. In Lowtown you have to be.

‘The cornerboys remind me of the Blue Angels in this air show I saw once,’ she says now.

‘Yeah?’

‘They see us coming, they peel off like they’re in formation. Look, there goes another one.’

As they approach the intersection of Lowbriar and Strike, a kid in a Cleveland Cavaliers warm-up jacket (oversized and totally superfluous on this day) suddenly decamps from the corner where he’s been jiving around and heads down Strike at a trot. He looks about thirteen.

‘Maybe he just remembered it’s a schoolday,’ Laverty says.

Rosario laughs. ‘As if, esse.’

Now they are approaching the corner of Lowbriar and Martin Luther King Avenue. MLK is the ghetto’s other large thoroughfare, and this time half a dozen cornerboys decide they have business elsewhere.

‘That’s formation flying, all right,’ Laverty says. He laughs, although it’s not really funny. ‘Listen, where do you want to eat?’

‘Let’s see if that wagon’s on Randolph,’ she says. ‘I’m in a taco state of mind.’

‘Señor Taco it is,’ he says, ‘but lay off the beans, okay? We’ve got another four hours in this … huh. Check it, Rosie. That’s weird.’

Up ahead, a man is coming out of a storefront with a long flower box. It’s weird because the storefront isn’t a florist’s; it’s King Virtue Pawn & Loan. It’s also weird because the man looks Caucasian and they are now in the blackest part of Lowtown. He’s approaching a dirty white Econoline van that’s standing on a yellow curb: a twenty-dollar fine. Laverty and Rosario are hungry, though, they’ve got their faces fixed for tacos with that nice hot picante sauce Señor Taco keeps on the counter, and they might have let it go. Probably would have.

But.

With David Berkowitz, it was a parking ticket. With Ted Bundy, it was a busted taillight. Today a florist’s box with badly folded flaps is all it takes to change the world. As the guy fumbles for the keys to his old van (not even Emperor Ming of Mongo would leave his vehicle unlocked in Lowtown), the box tilts downward. The end comes open and something slides partway out.

The guy catchs it and shoves it back in before it can fall into the street, but Jason Laverty spent two tours in Iraq and he knows an RPG launcher when he sees it. He flips on the blues and hooks in behind the guy, who looks around with a startled expression.

‘Sidearm!’ he snaps at his partner. ‘Get it out!’

They fly out the doors, double-fisted Glocks pointing at the sky.

‘Drop the box, sir!’ Laverty shouts. ‘Drop the box and put your hands on the van! Lean forward. Do it now!’

For a moment the guy – he’s about forty, olive-skinned, round-shouldered – hugs the florist’s box tighter against his chest, like a baby. But when Rosie Rosario lowers her gun and points it at his chest, he drops the box. It splits wide open and reveals what Laverty tentatively identifies as a Russian-made Hashim antitank grenade launcher.

‘Holy shit!’ Rosario says, and then: ‘Toody, Toody, I got an id—’

‘Officers, lower your weapons.’

Laverty keeps his focus on Grenade Launcher Guy, but Rosario turns and sees a gray-haired Cauc in a blue jacket. He’s wearing an earpiece and has his own Glock. Before she can ask him anything, the street is full of men in blue jackets, all running for King Virtue Pawn & Loan. One is carrying a Stinger battering ram, the kind cops call a baby doorbuster. She sees ATF on the backs of the jackets, and all at once she has that unmistakable I-stepped-in-shit feeling.

‘Officers, lower your weapons. Agent James Kosinsky, ATF.’

Laverty says, ‘Maybe you’d like one of us to cuff him first? Just asking.’

ATF agents are piling into the pawnshop like Christmas shoppers into Walmart on Black Friday. A crowd is gathering across the street, as yet too stunned by the size of the strike force to start casting aspersions. Or stones, for that matter.

Kosinsky sighs. ‘You may as well,’ he says. ‘The horse has left the barn.’

‘We didn’t know you had anything going,’ Laverty says. Meanwhile, Grenade Launcher Guy already has his hands off the van and behind him with the wrists pressed together. It’s pretty clear this isn’t his first rodeo. ‘He was unlocking his van and I saw that poking out of the end of the box. What was I supposed to do?’

‘What you did, of course.’ From inside the pawnshop there comes the sound of breaking glass, shouts, and then the boom of the doorbuster being put to work. ‘Tell you what, now that you’re here, why don’t you throw Mr Cavelli there in the back of your car and come on inside. See what we’ve got.’

While Laverty and Rosario are escorting their prisoner to the cruiser, Kosinsky notes the number.

‘So,’ he says. ‘Which one of you is Toody and which one is Muldoon?’

11

As the ATF strike force, led by Agent Kosinsky, begins its inventory of the cavernous storage area behind King Virtue Pawn & Loan’s humble façade, a gray Mercedes sedan is pulling to the curb in front of 49 Elm Street. Hodges is behind the wheel. Today Holly is riding shotgun – because, she claims (with at least some logic), the car is more hers than theirs.