I CUT MY MINI'S ENGINE in my garage and was getting out, when I heard something weird in the far-right corner. I guess I was a little jumpy, because immediately my Glock was drawn, sights center-massed on the seated figure there.

Until I realized it was Paul.

I clicked on the lights before I finally holstered my weapon.

Paul was snoring in a lawn chair beside his toolbench. On the concrete floor beside him was a bottle of Johnnie Walker scotch. With maybe one shot left in it.

Oh yeah, and Paul wasn't wearing any clothes. He was bareass naked.

He was also wasted. Blotto. Three sheets to the wind, as they say. Maybe four.

How bad I was feeling tonight wasn't a fraction of what was going on with Paul, I realized, staring at his troubled, unconscious face.

I knocked off the last shot in his bottle before I tried to shake him awake. No response.

One of his eyes flipped open when I tugged his earlobe. I pulled at his right hand until he stood.

He mumbled something, but I couldn't make it out as I brought him into the house. I'd never seen him so drunk.

I almost threw my back out, trying to steer him into our bedroom. I finally laid him on top of the bed, and I brought over the wastebasket in case he was sick.

I was just able to make it into the bathroom myself before all the pent-up stress exploded out of me in violent sobs.

Where the hell was all this going? What did I think I was doing, playing dumb in the investigation? This wasn't a game. Scott Thayer was dead. Few things on this earth bring down more scrutiny than an NYPD cop getting murdered. Did I think I could bluff my way through this? Was I crazy?

I thought about Brooke Thayer again. Her autistic daughter. The two other kids. I felt poisoned. Evil. I wanted to turn myself in. At this point, I would do just about anything to take this black burden off myself.

But I wasn't the one who would get punished for it.

It was Paul.

So, what was I supposed to do now?

I STILL HADN'T FIGURED THAT OUT when I totally collapsed three minutes later in the shower.

One moment I was standing there, shampooing my hair, and the next I was sitting down hard on the cold porcelain, water pinging off my torso and legs.

I pressed my forehead to the wet tile as the sum of the night's events dripped through me. What made me the sickest was hard to decide. My flat-out betrayal of Paul? Or staring into Scott's dead face? Or maybe staring into his wife's face?

Closing my eyes, I longed crazily for the water to melt me, to let me stream down the floor of the tub and disappear with a gurgle into the drain.

After a minute of that not happening, I lifted my head off the tile and opened my eyes.

This wasn't just going to go away, was it? I needed to do something. But what?

I considered my choices.

First, what would happen if I turned Paul in?

I was an expert on the Bronx criminal justice system. Like any retailer faced with massive volume most of the time, the Bronx DA's office was willing to make a deal with offenders, offer justice at a reduced rate. But the high-profile nature of Scott's case, I realized, would be considered a career maker for the prosecution. It would be Paul against the system, and the system would make sure that this was one case they would win, and win with a vengeance.

I thought of the mountains of legal bills. The cost of bail for Paul. If he could get bail.

Even with the obvious plea of self-defense, the best-case scenario we were looking at was manslaughter, five years of state prison. I shook my head. Five years. Whenever I dropped off a prisoner at Rikers, after five minutes I longed to do a hundred laps in a pool of antibacterial soap. I winced as I remembered the cattle line in the search room. The sound of crying babies and the beneath-the-table sex in Visitors.

I imagined Paul looking at me over a scuzzy table, disgust in his blackened eyes.

"What's the matter, Lauren?" he would say. "I thought you liked quickies."

And if that wasn't horror enough to consider, there was the New York press. What could be more salivating to the tabloids than a love triangle gone wrong, where two cops were involved, one of them now dead! We were looking at long-lasting infamy here.

Loser Hall of Fame material.

Mass-media humiliation.

And let's not forget what would happen to Scott's family. Right now, Brooke was being regarded as a hero's wife. But once the truth got out, that Scott was killed by the husband of the woman he was cheating with, it would be bye-bye crying on the commissioner's shoulder, bye-bye Brooke, bye-bye kids.

My eyes almost bugged out of my head as I considered these particular details.

It would also be so long line-of-duty death benefits for the Thayer family!

I pictured Brooke rocking with her poor daughter. Instead of getting Scott's pension, she would be left with jack squat.

I stood up in the shower. Tried to catch my breath.

My little decision-making meeting was adjourned.

If this were just about me, I would turn myself in. I would go into my room right now, get dressed, and march into my boss's office. I would confess.

But it wasn't just about me. It was about Paul. It was about Brooke.

And most of all her three fatherless kids.

Who was I kidding? There wasn't any choice, at least not right now.

I had to make everything right again.

The water roared in my ears like thunder as I thrust my face under the spray.

But how could I make everything right?

PAUL WAS STILL SNORING when I left for work. I would have liked to speak with him. To say we had a lot to deal with was quite the understatement. But since I didn't think they offered marriage counseling in prison, I decided that instead of waking him up, priority numero uno was getting back to work to see if I had a shot at keeping my husband out of jail.

Mike was writing Scott's name on the bullpen Homicide chart when I stepped into the squad room.

I was more or less happily surprised when I realized nobody was looking at me suspiciously. I guess adrenaline-flooded and terror-struck have a passing resemblance to bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Through the smeared glass wall of the rear office, I could see my boss, Lieutenant Keane, talking on his desk phone while dialing his cell.

"What do we got?" I said, handing Mike a bodega coffee from the brown bag I was carrying. Starbucks had yet to make inroads into Soundview.

"Shit," Mike said, flicking the plastic coffee lid sliver across his desk as he sat. "No sign of either Ordonez. Turns out the pilot's off work until next Wednesday, and he wasn't at his apartment. Of the younger and even scummier brother, Victor, we have no sign at all."

Mike handed me a file folder.

"Check out the family album."

The Ordonez brothers were the only children of Dominican immigrants. On the slightly older brother, Mark, the Air Force pilot, there was surprisingly little. A single assault bust when he was twenty-one. But the younger one, Victor, had a crime-ography that was a long and interesting read.

From the age of sixteen, Victor had been in and out of jail, putting up MVP crime stats. Burglary, narcotics sales, attempted rape, assaults of prisoners while incarcerated, possession of a deadly weapon.

But for me, one charge stood out as if it had been marked with a neon highlighter.

Attempted murder of a police officer.

The abstract described how at the age of seventeen, Victor, while resisting arrest for yet another possession charge, drew a concealed.380 semiautomatic, pointed it at the officer's face, and pulled the trigger several times. After he was wrestled to the ground, it was discovered that the gun hadn't discharged due solely to the fortuitous fact that young Victor, new to the wonderful world of semiautomatics, had forgotten to rack the slide and jack the first round into the chamber. To show you what kind of straits the New York criminal justice system was in during the crack epidemic of the early nineties, Victor did just one year.