"Except for the naked lady," Tom Coogan said.

"What naked lady?" Pekach asked.

"Some dame was running around without any clothes in the park by the Wissahickon Bridge," Tom Coogan said. "Every car north of Market Street went in on it."

"Tell me about this," Pekach said, impatiently, gesturing vaguely around him.

"So there was a buy, and they run," Coogan said. "And we chased them. And they run off the road here."

"High-speed pursuit, no doubt?" Pekach asked, dryly.

"Not by us, Captain," Coogan said, firmly and righteously. "We got on the radio and gave a description of the car, and a Thirty-fifth district car spotted it, and they chased them. We only come over here after they wrecked the car."

"So what have you got?" Pekach asked, a tired, disgusted tone in his voice.

Without waiting for a reply, he walked over to one of the Thirtyfifth District patrol cars, and looked through the partially opened rear seat window. There were four white kids crowded in the back, two boys and two girls, all four of them looking scared.

"Anybody hurt?" Pekach asked.

Four heads shook no, but nobody said anything.

"Whose car?" Pekach asked.

There was no reply immediately, but finally one of the boys, mustering what bravado he could, said, "Mine."

"Yours? Or your father's?" Pekach asked. "My father's," the boy said.

"He's going to love you for this," Pekach said, and walked back to the Narcotics Division officers.

"Well, what have you got on them?" he asked Officer Coogan.

"About an ounce and a half," Coogan replied, uncomfortably.

"Anounceandahalf." Pekach said in sarcastic wonderment.

"Failure to heed a flashing light, speeding, reckless driving," Coogan went on, visibly a little uncomfortable.

"You like traffic work, do you, Coogan? Keeping the streets free of reckless drivers? Maybe rolling on a naked lady?"

Officer Coogan did not reply.

There was the growl of a siren, and Pekach looked over his shoulder and saw a Thirty-fifth District wagon pulling up. The two policemen in it got out, spoke to one of the patrol car cops, and then one of them went to the van and opened the rear door while the other went to the patrol car with the patrol car cop. The patrol car cop opened the door and motioned the kids out.

"Wait a minute," Pekach called. He walked over to them. One of the girls, an attractive little thing with long brown hair parted in the middle and large dark eyes, looked as if she was about to cry.

"You got any money?" Pekach asked.

"Who are you?" the van cop asked.

"I'm Captain Pekach," he said. "Narcotics."

The girl shook her head.

Pekach pointed at one of the boys, the one who had told him it was his father's car. "You got any money, Casanova?"

There was a just perceptible pause before the boy replied, "I got some money."

"You got twenty bucks?" Pekach asked.

The boy dug his wallet out of his hip pocket.

"Give it to her," Pekach ordered. Then he turned to the patrol car cop. "You have the names and addresses?"

"Yes, sir."

"Put the girls in a cab," Pekach said.

He turned to the girl with the large dark eyes.

"Your boyfriends are going to jail," he said. "First, they're going to the District, and then they'll be taken downtown to Central lockup. When they get out, ask them what it was like."

Pekach found Officers Alexandro Gres-Narino and Thomas L. Coogan.

"If you can fit me into your busy schedule, I would like a moment of your time at half-past three tomorrow in my office," he said.

"Yes, sir," they said, almost in unison.

Pekach took one more look at the girl with the large dark eyes. There were tears running down her cheeks.

"Thank you," she said, barely audibly.

Captain Dave Pekach then walked to the worn-out Buick, coaxed the engine to life, and drove home.

At five minutes after nine the next morning, Mickey O'Hara again pulled his battered Chevrolet Impala to the curb in front of the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel by the no parking at any time tow away zone sign. He was not worried about a ticket. There was about as much chance a police officer would cite him for illegal parking, much less summon a police tow truck to haul Mickey O'Hara's car away, as there was for a white hat to slap a ticket on his Honor, Mayor Jerry Carlucci's mayoral Cadillac limousine.

There were perhaps a couple of dozen police officers among the eight thousand or so cops on the force who would not recognize the battered, antennae-festooned Chevrolet as belonging to Mr. Mickey O'Hara, of the editorial staff of thePhiladelphia Bulletin. The others, from Commissioner Taddeus Czernick to the most recent graduates of the Police Academy, if they saw Mickey O'Hara climb out of his illegally parked vehicle, would wave cheerfully at him, or, if they were close enough, offer their hands, and more than likely say, "Hey, Mickey, how's it going? What's going on?"

It was generally conceded that Mickey O'Hara knew more of what was going on at any given moment, in the area of interesting crime, than the entire staff of the Police Radio Room on the second floor of the Roundhouse. Equally important, Mickey O'Hara was nearly universally regarded as a good guy, a friend of the cops, someone who understood their problems, someone who would put it in the paper the way it had really gone down. Mickey O'Hara, in other words, was accustomed to ignoring NO PARKING signs.

But today, when he got out of his car, Mickey looked at the sign, and read it, and for a moment actually considered getting back in, and taking the car someplace to park it legally. The cold truth was that right now he was not a police reporter. The Bull could call it" withholding professional services" all day and all night, but the truth of the matter was that Mickey O'Hara was out of work. If you didn't have a job, and nobody was going to hand you a paycheck, you were, ergo sum, out of work.

Mickey decided against moving the car someplace legal. That would have been tantamount to an admission of defeat. He didn't know that theBulletin was going to tell him, more accurately tell his agent, to "go fuck yourselves, we don't need him." That struck Mickey as the most likely probability in the circumstances, but he didn'tknow that forsure.

He had hoped to have the issue resolved, one way or the other, last night. But the Bull's plane had been late, so that hadn't happened. It had been pretty goddamned depressing, and he had woken up, with a minor hangover, rather proud of himself for not, after he'd drained the last bottle of Ortleib's, having gone out and really tied one on.

Mickey straightened his shoulders and marched resolutely toward the revolving door giving access to the lobby of the Bellevue-Stratford. There was nothing to really worry about, he told himself. For one thing, he was the undisputed king of his trade in Philadelphia. There were four daily newspapers in the City of Brotherly Love, and at least a dozen people, including, lately, a couple of females, who covered crime. The best crime coverage was in theBulletin, and the best reporter on theBulletin was Michael J. O'Hara, even if most of the other reporters, including both women, had master's degrees in journalism from places like Columbia and Missouri.

Mickey himself had no college degree. For that matter, he didn't even have a high school diploma. He had begun his career, as a copy boy, in the days when reporters typed their stories on battered typewriters, and then held it over their head, bellowing "copy" until a copy boy came to carry it to the city desk.

Mickey had been expelled from West Catholic High School in midterm of his junior year. The offenses alleged involved intoxicants, tobacco, and so far as Monsignor John F. Dooley, the principal, was concerned, incontrovertible proof that Michael J. O'Hara had been running numbers to the janitorial staff and student body on behalf of one Francisco Guttermo, who, it was correctly alleged, operated one of the most successful numbers routes in Southwest Philly.