The Hispanic was in motion already, reaching inside his jacket in a motion that could mean only one thing: Dooley tracked him with his muzzle.

"Hold it right-"

The big vent-ribbed Colt Python roared as it came on-line, chopping Dooley off in the middle of his sentence. The bulky armor encasing his body would definitely have stopped even the high-speed. 357 slug, the face plate might have turned it. But the jacketed hollowpoint nipped neatly between the lip of his helmet and the top of his mask, punched through his right eye and right out the back of his skull.

"Dooley!" Lynn screamed, and held back the trigger. Like everybody else in CLET, he'd had the three-round burst regulator on his assault rifle disabled the moment he'd been issued the thing. He let the whole magazine go on full rock'n'roll, felt the ripple of high-velocity slugs in passing as Matteoli did the same from the doorway.

The Hispanic dropped the Python and did a little jitterbug dance as the white front of his shirt came all over red. The black guy dove out of sight.

Lynn spun and dropped with his back to a lab table that would never stop a bullet but would at least hide him from sight. He dropped the spent magazine, fumbled another from a belt pouch, and rammed it home.

"Matty, pop a stun grenade on the puke!" he yelled. "Backup!" Matteoli screamed back. "We gotta call for backup!"

Fuck that, Lynn thought. His eyes stung with tears. Payback's a mother. He jacked the charging handle and rose. To see a black arm waving from the midst of all that mechanism, brandishing a black leather holder with an alltoo-distinctive gold shield inset.

"Narcotics Enforcement. We're NYPD, you dumb sons of bitches!"

TWO DIE IN SHOOT-OUT AT ACE DRUG LAB, the headline said, or screamed. The subhead read, Drug Czar Calls Illicit Lab "Most Sophisticated Ever"; Nationwide Manhunt Declared.

Dr. Pretorius sighed and looked over the half-moons of his old-fashioned reading glasses. "So a couple of your cowboys came off the handle and shot it out with New York's finest. What does this have to do with my client?"

The youngest of the three came out of his leathercovered chair with an incoherent scream of rage. Pretorius raised an eyebrow.

"Lynn," the eldest said, not loud but with a certain attack-dog-trainer snap. "Maybe you'd better wait outside." The young man with the shock of black hair falling into wild eyes turned and pounded the heel of one fist against a wall, making display cases with exotic insects inside dance. The he ran out of the attorney's office.

"Whatever was that about?" Pretorius asked.

"Agent Saxon was involved in the incident you so insensitively spoke of," said the third man. He was in his early fifties and in all ways average except for the expensive cut of his lawyerly three-piece and the bland smoothness of his face. A man for George Bush's America. "His partner was killed." He settled back, apparently looking for expressions of regret or sympathy.

"My question still stands," Pretorius said.

The third man's face hardened momentarily. "Under New York law, Dr. Meadows can be held responsible for violent deaths associated with his crimes."

"We're talking capital here," the attack-dog trainer added.

Pretorius began to laugh. The two of them stared at him as if he'd sprouted great big white wings like Peregrine's. "That is the farthest-fetched interpretation of the law I've heard in a long time," he said, taking off his glasses and wiping his eyes. "Is there no limit to the arrogant disregard you people have for concepts like `rights' and `due process' -not to mention common sense?"

Kinder-and-Gentler smiled. "Given that seventy percent of the American public believes any measures at all are justified in combating the drug menace," he said, "no."

The trainer pulled a sheaf of papers from an inside pocket of his sport coat. "We have something for you, too, Pretorius." He slammed a packet of official-looking papers on the desk and smiled up at Pretorius with satisfaction glinting in his steely gray eyes. Pretorius gave it a 6.5.

"As you're no doubt aware," Kinder-and-Gentler said, as smooth as his face, "under the Racketeering-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations and Continuing Crime Acts, all property belonging to drug dealers is liable to confiscation. As you're also aware, I'm sure, recent interpretations of the law permit us to seize the property of attorneys who represent such scum. We can't permit the enormous sums commanded by drug dealers to deflect justice, now, can we, Doctor?" And he smiled too.

My, we're a happy group today, Pretorius thought. He reached for the telephone, pressed a button. When a voice answered, he said simply, "Go."

His guests stiffened. The Attack Dog Trainer was leaning so far forward, he was in danger of toppling over and splitting Pretorius's desk with the blade of his face. "What are you trying to pull?" he barked.

It was Pretorius's turn to try his hand at smiling, and he gave it his all. "Your latest little perversion of due process does not precisely take me by surprise, gentlemen. I was just speaking to an associate of mine waiting at the federal courthouse. If you'll be patient a few moments, a court order voiding your seizure should shortly arrive by messenger."

They stared at him with eyes like boiled eggs. He reached into a drawer of his desk. The Trainer stiffened, and his hard right hand started inside his suit coat.

Kinder-and-Gentler put a hand on his arm. "He's not going for a gun, Pat. Act your age."

"At the very outset of the Meadows custody case,"

Pretorius said, "I foresaw you gentlemen and your modern Star Chamber tactics might become involved. And I personally have no need for money."

"You can't weasel out of this by waiving your fee, bunky," the Trainer said.

"Nor did L" He trumped the trainer's sheaf with his own embossed legal envelope. "I charged Dr. Meadows my full hourly rate-payable, under the terms of this contract, directly to the March of Dimes for research into mental retardation. And if you wish to try to confiscate their assets, gentlemen, I wish you luck."

"We're the future, pal!"

An open-hand slap cracked across the yellow stripe dyed down the center of his close-cropped skull. Trash-clogged foreshore and sagging graffiti-crusted buildings swam in stench thick as heat haze, or maybe from the blow. The tall man hunched his shoulders and raised his arms defensively across his face.

He'd ridden to the Rox in a giant jellyfish in search of shelter. It didn't surprise him much to find there was no shelter there, either. It did made him kind of sad.

He wasn't sure how many joker boys were on him. He'd never had much head for detail on a macro scale. It didn't really matter. Make Love Not War were the words he'd always lived by.

In his proper person, anyway. Which was all he had to help him now.

An attacker slammed the scarred pale Hormel ham he carried instead of a hand into the midriff of the tall man's faint paint-dappled Pendleton shirt. He whoofed and doubled and staggered back, and the empirical part of him noted that there had to be at least two assailants since another was, sure enough, down on all fours behind him to take him behind the calves and send him sprawling. That trick had been a constant companion in childhood and early adolescence. Made him nostalgic, almost.

Coughing and sobbing for breath, he tried to remember what the survivors of the Czechago Convention had told him: Curl up, get small, try not to give them a crack at your joints or skull.

Mayor Daley's disorder preservers had had nightsticks. These boys had body parts a la wild card. Like the calcareous hoof somebody was slamming rhythmically into the small of his back, aiming to pulp his kidneys.

"Hey, nat! You ain't gettin' any younger. And maybe (kick) you ain't getting (kick) any older either!"