You ain’t all that much bigger than me, thought Derek.

“I was thinkin’ of you and Angie,” said Dominic, and as the words left his mouth, Angelo’s eyes dropped.

“I got no quarrel with your brother,” said Derek.

“Knock it off, Dom,” said Angelo.

“I’m talkin’ to Derek,” said Dominic.

Derek knew he could take Angelo. Shoot, the boy’s chin was down on his chest; he was already beat. Derek figured that Angelo feared colored boys the same way many other white boys did. And that fear would be the difference. But there wasn’t anything in kicking Angelo’s ass for Derek. Wasn’t any way he could win.

“You got your mitts?” said Derek.

“Yeah, we got ’em,” said Dominic. “So?”

“Me and Billy,” said Derek, “we’ll take y’all on in a ball game instead. How about that?”

“Fine,” said Dominic. “But first say you won’t fight.”

“Dominic,” said Angelo in a pleading way.

“I got no need to fight,” said Derek.

“That ain’t the same thing. Say what I told you to say or step to my brother and put up your hands.”

“Okay, then,” said Derek. “I won’t fight.” He didn’t mind saying it. He had not backed up a step, folded his arms, or looked away. His body said that he was not afraid. Dominic could see it. He knew.

“All right,” said Dominic. For a moment, Derek saw something human in Martini’s eyes. “Let’s play ball.”

The Martini boys had a bat, a hardball, and two mitts stashed in the ammo bunker built into the base of the fort’s hill. Basically, the game was stickball, but without the wall. Base hits were calculated by landmarks-the flagpole, the fort’s commemorative plaque, et cetera-with the crest of the hill the ultimate goal. A ball hit over “the wall” of the fortification line was a home run.

Derek had the superior swing, and even Billy was a better athlete than the Martinis. Soon it was apparent that the contest was done. When Derek knocked out his third homer, Dominic said he was bored and stopped the game. After putting the playing equipment back in the bunker, Dominic turned to Derek.

“Say, you ever had any, man?”

“Sure have,” said Derek, which was a lie. He had rubbed a little over-the-shirt tit off this older girl in his neighborhood, had a reputation for starting the young boys off, but that was all.

“Sure you have,” said Dominic, laughing a little and lighting a cigarette. “Me, I get it all the time.”

He told Derek about the Fort Club, which he and his friends had recently formed, and how they drank beer and pulled trains on girls inside the bunker on Friday nights. Derek issued a small shrug, enough to stave off another conflict, not enough to let Dominic think that he cared. It wasn’t the reaction Dominic wanted. He pulled something from his pocket and held it in front of Derek.

“You know what this is?”

“That’s a cherry bomb.”

“How about I set it off?”

“Go ahead.”

Martini lit the fuse off his smoke and calmly dropped the bomb into the muzzle of one of the cannons. The cherry bomb exploded, and its report was surprisingly loud. A janitor came out of the church, yelled something at the boys, and walked toward them. Angelo and Billy jogged in the direction of 13th Street. Derek and Dominic followed the other two out of the park, walking at a leisurely pace.

“You and me,” said Dominic, “we ain’t gonna run from nothin’, right?”

Derek had the feeling that this afternoon would come to some kind of bad, the way a boy always knows that the direction of the day has turned. It was as if he were walking, willingly, from the sunny side of the street to the side covered in shadow. He had been raised to understand the clear difference between right and wrong, and he knew that, right about now, he should head back to the diner with Billy. But he was attracted to that shadowed side just the same. So when Dominic suggested they go over to “the Sixth,” just to “fuck around some,” Derek did not object.

THE SIXTH PRECINCT station was on Nicholson, set to the left of Brightwood Elementary. The station structure, all brick fronted with columns, looked like a small schoolhouse itself. A goldfish pond was set beside the concrete drive that horseshoed the rear of the station. The boys approached it from the right side, grouped themselves beside a tall oak, and studied the building through a chain-link fence.

“There’s the cell block right there,” said Dominic, pointing to the right side of the building. “They ain’t got nothin’ but old spring cots for you to sleep on.”

“How do you know?” said Billy, challenging Martini but secretly impressed.

“Our old man told us,” said Angelo. Their father had slept off public drunks in the station a couple of times in the past year.

“Not just that,” said Dominic, annoyed. “I been in there myself.” He had never actually spent the night in the jail, though he had aspirations. Dominic had been written up for a field investigation, which was less dramatic than “a record,” for throwing a rock through a window of the elementary school.

Back behind the main structure was a garage housing several Harleys for the motorcycle cops. One of the precinct’s three squad cars, a high-horse Ford, was parked in the lot, beside a black unmarked, also a Ford. The boys of Brightwood recognized the squad car numbers, 61 to 63, printed on the sides of the vehicles. They knew the names of the desk sergeant and homicide cops and the beat police as well. Among them was an Irish cop whose status had been elevated to legend after he had taken a.45 slug in the gut. The Sixth also had one uniformed colored cop, William Davis, and the hated Officer Pappas, a Greek who was especially tough on kids. He had made it his mission to bust the fathers and sons, some of whom were fellow Greeks, who ran numbers and occasionally fenced out of their businesses up on the Avenue. Pappas had a pencil-thin mustache, which the boys thought of as a French look that bordered on feminine. They had nicknamed him Jacques. When he was on foot patrol, they taunted him from rooftops and alleys, calling out to him with high-pitched voices, “Jaaacques, oh, Jaaacques.”

Officer Davis came from the front of the building and walked to squad car number 62. Davis was tall and lean, his uniform perfectly pressed, his service revolver snapped into its holster. Derek wondered what you had to do to become a police. Must be something to it to make Davis walk the way he was walking. Chin up, close to a swagger. It seemed like the man had pride.

Dominic Martini picked up a rock. Derek grabbed his wrist.

“Don’t,” said Derek.

Derek’s action surprised both of them, so much so that Dominic didn’t resist. He dropped the rock, shook his hand free, and stared at Davis.

“Look at him,” said Martini with contempt. “He really thinks he’s somethin’.”

He is, thought Derek Strange, studying the police officer as he got into the Ford. That’s a man right there.

BUZZ STEWART FED gas into the tank of a ’57 DeSoto Fireflite, a two-tone red-and-white sedan fitted out with whitewalls and skirts. A cigarette dangled from his lips as he worked the pump. He wasn’t supposed to smoke anywhere near the tanks, but there wasn’t anyone at the station, including his boss, big enough to tell him not to. As he replaced the pump handle and took the money from the square behind the wheel, he thumb-flicked ash off his Marlboro and put the smoke back in his thin-lipped mouth.

“Hey, Buzz,” said Dominic Martini, walking by with a bottle of Coca-Cola in his hand.

“Hey,” mumbled Stewart.

Stewart watched Martini, an Italian kid who worked weekend nights, join a group of younger boys at the edge of the Esso station lot. One of the boys was Martini’s no-balls brother. The other was some fattish kid, looked like another spaghetti-bender to him. The third kid was a nigger. Now, why would Martini want to run with a colored boy? He’d have to give Dom some shit about it the next time they talked.