Gary Soneji stepped out of the elevator onto the first floor. He sighed with relief. The two porters went about their business. They weren’t cops. No, they were dumber and dumbest.

Canes, wheelchairs, and metal walkers were everywhere. The hospital artifacts reminded him of his own mortality. The halls on the first floor were painted off-white, the doors and radiators were a shade of pink like “old gum.” Up ahead was a strange coffee shop, dimly lit like a subway passageway. If you ate in that place, he thought to himself, they ought to lock you up in Bellevue!

As he walked from the elevator, Soneji caught his own reflection in a stainless-steel pilar. The master of a thousand faces, he couldn’t help thinking. It was true. His own stepmother wouldn’t recognize him now, and if she did, she would scream her bloody lungs out. She’d know he’d come all the way to hell to get her.

He walked down the corridor, singing very softly in a reggae lilt, “I shot the Shareef, but I did not shoot the dep-u-tee.”

No one paid him any mind. Gary Soneji fit right in at Bellevue.

SONEJI HAD a perfect memory, so he would recall everything about this morning. He would be able to play it back for himself with incredible detail. This was true for all of his murders. He scanned the narrow, high-ceilinged hallways as if he had a surveillance camera mounted where his head was. His powers of concentration gave him a huge advantage. He was almost supernaturally aware of everything going on around him.

A security guard was riffing with young black males outside the coffee shop. They were all mental defectives for sure, the toy cops especially.

No threat there.

Silly baseball caps were bobbing everywhere. New Jork Janquis. San Francisco Jints. San Jose Sharks. None of the ballcap wearers looked as if they could play ball worth spit. Or harm, or stop him.

The Hospital Police Office was up ahead. The lights were out, though. Nobody home right now. So where were the hospital patrol cops? Were they waiting for him someplace? Why didn’t he see any of them? Was that the first sign of trouble?

At the inpatient elevator, a sign read: ID REQUIRED. Soneji had his ready. For today’s masquerade, he was Francis Michael Nicolo, R.N.

A framed poster was on the wall: PATIENTS’ RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES. Signs started out from behind fuzzy Plexiglas everywhere he looked. It was worse than a New York highway: RADIOLOGY, UROLOGY, HEMATOLOGY. I’m sick, too, Soneji wanted to yell out to the powers that be. I’m as sick as anybody in here. I’m dying. Nobody cares. Nobody has ever cared.

He took the central elevator to four. No problems so far, no hassles. No police. He got off at his stop, pumped to see Shareef Thomas again, to see the look of shock and fear on his face.

The hallway on four had a hollowed-out basement feel to it. Nothing seemed to absorb sound. The whole building felt as if it were made entirely of concrete.

Soneji peered down the corridor to where he knew Shareef was being kept. His room was at the far end of the building. Isolated for safety, right? So this was the high-and-mighty NYPD in action. What a joke. Everything was a joke, if you thought about it long and hard enough.

Soneji lowered his head and started to walk toward Shareef Thomas’s hospital room.

CARMINE GROZA and I were inside the private hospital room waiting for Soneji, hoping that he would show. We had been here for hours. How would I know what Soneji looked like now? That was a problem, but we would take them one at a time.

We never heard a noise at the door. Suddenly it was swinging open. Soneji exploded into the room, expecting to find Shareef Thomas. He stared at Groza and me.

His hair was dyed silver-gray and combed straight back. He looked like a man in his fifties or early sixties-but the height was about right. His light blue eyes widened as he looked at me. It was the eyes that I recognized first.

He smiled the same disdainful dismissive smirk I’d seen so many times, sometimes in my nightmares. He thought he was so damn superior to the rest of us. He knew it.

Soneji said only two words: “Even better.”

“ New York Police! Freeze,” Groza barked a warning in an authoritative tone.

Soneji continued to smirk as if this surprise reception pleased him no end, as if he’d planned it himself. His confidence, his arrogance, was incredible to behold.

He’s wearing a bulletproof vest, my mind registered a bulge around his upper body. He’s protected. He’s ready for whatever we do.

There was something clasped tightly in his left hand. I couldn’t tell what. He’d entered the room with the arm half-raised.

He flipped a small green bottle in his hand toward Groza and me. Just the flip of his hand. The bottle clinked as it hit the wooden floor. It bounced a second time. Suddenly I understood…but too late, seconds too late.

“Bomb!” I yelled at Groza. “Hit the floor! Get down!”

Groza and I dove away from the bed and the caroming green bottle. We managed to put up sitting chairs as shields. The flash inside the room was incredibly bright, a splintered shock of white light with an afterglow of the brightest yellow. Then everything around us seemed to catch fire.

For a second or two. I was blinded. Then I felt as if I were burning up. My trousers and shoes were engulfed in flames. I covered my face, mouth, and eyes with my hands. “Jesus, God,” Groza screamed.

I could hear a sizzle, like bacon on a grill. I prayed it wasn’t me that was cooking. Then I was choking and gurgling and so was Groza. Flames burst and danced across my shirt, and through it all I could hear Soneji. He was laughing at us.

“Welcome to hell, Cross,” he said. “Burn, baby, burn.”

GROZA AND I stripped the bed of blankets and sheets and beat out our burning trousers. We were lucky, at least I hoped we were. We smothered the flames. The ones on our legs and shoes.

“He wanted to burn Thomas alive,” I told Groza. “He’s got another firebomb. I saw another green bottle, at least one.”

We hobbled as best we could down the hospital corridor, chasing after Soneji. Two other detectives were already down outside, wounded. Soneji was a phantom.

We followed him down several twisting flights of back stairs. The sound of the footrace echoed loudly on the stairway. My eyes were watering, but I could see okay.

Groza alerted and clued in other detectives on his two-way. “Suspect has a firebomb! Soneji has a bomb. Use extreme care.”

“What the hell does he want?” the detective yelled at me as we kept moving. “What the hell’s he going to do now?”

“I think he wants to die,” I gasped. “And he wants to be famous. Go out with a bang. That’s his way. Maybe right here at Bellevue.”

Attention was what Gary Soneji had always craved. From his boyhood years, he’d been obsessed with stories of “crimes of the century.” I was sure that Soneji wanted to die now, but he had to do it with a huge noise. He wanted to control his own death.

I was wheezing and out of breath when we finally got to the lobby floor. Smoke had seared my throat, but otherwise I was doing okay. My brain was fuzzy and unclear about what to do next.

I saw a blur of hectic movement ahead, maybe thirty yards across the front lobby.

I pushed through the nervous crowd trying to exit the building. Word had spread about the fire upstairs. The flow of people in and out of Bellevue was always as steady as at a subway turnstile, and that was before a bomb went off inside.

I made it onto the stoop in front of the hospital. It was raining hard, gray and awful outside. I looked everywhere for Soneji.

A cluster of hospital staff and visitors were under the front awning, smoking cigarettes. They seemed unaware of the emergency situation, or maybe these workers were just used to them. The brick path leading away from the building was crowded with more pedestrians coming and going in the downpour. The umbrellas were blocking my vision.