"Not someone you'd want dating your daughter, but a good cop."

"What is it with guys sticking up for each other? I'd rather see a three-hundred-pound Hell's Angel at my front door."

That made Grace laugh. She'd put her head against Eddie's chest and closed her eyes, but when Eddie set the kilt aside, she sat right up and handed him another piece of clothing, a denim jacket with two more snaps sewn in as buttons.

"Let me see the picture of Misha," Eddie said.

"It's not the guy your brother saw going into the house," Babsie said, handing him a photocopy of a Polaroid. 'This kid's blond, not bad-looking. Kevin said the guy in the jumpsuit was dark-skinned."

"Kevin saw this picture?"

"I stopped by the bar on the way over here," Babsie said. "I wanted to show Kev the finished sketch. We're sending it all over Westchester and the city, most of them going to Brooklyn. And yes, I sent a stack to Boland."

"I'll make sure Boland shares with you," Eddie said.

"Just work product," Babsie said. "Nothing else I want to share with that guy."

Eddie asked to see the sketch Kevin had done. Babsie pulled a flyer from the case folder. She put it flat on the table and turned it around so Eddie could see it. "That's the wrong one," Eddie said. "Don't give me that; I just checked with your brother."

"Can't be," he said. "It's the same one I did." Eddie tried to put Grace on the floor, but she clutched his shirt. He carried her over to the counter and grabbed the sketch he'd worked on earlier that day in the precinct on Snyder Avenue in Brooklyn. He put it on the table next to the Yonkers PD sketch, then turned them both toward Babsie.

"It's not that close," she said.

"The hell it's not. It's the same face I saw in Brooklyn." Eddie pushed the two sketches side by side under the bright light that hung over the table. What he could see, which Babsie couldn't, were the things other than ink. Kevin's sketch was more frontal, more defined. Eddie's mind added an olive skin tone, eyes wider in excitement, a mouth slightly more full, and open, breathing hard.

"I can't remember names," Eddie said. "Five minutes after I'm introduced, I'm struggling to remember the name I just heard. But I know faces. This is him."

Wednesday, April 8

12:45 A.M.

Eddie fell asleep next to Grace, listening to the murmur of sounds coming from the TV in the living room. He jolted awake less than an hour later, his hair drenched in sweat. He'd heard Kate's voice, a hoarse whisper. Her "allergy voice," they called it. She was saying something he couldn't quite understand. Whispering it. He lay there, listening hard, knowing it was a dream but needing to hear her again, trying desperately to understand what she was saying.

He was still awake when something rang. The sound confused him at first. He fumbled around on the floor, under the bed, looking for the source of the strange music. Then he remembered: It was in his jacket pocket. Kevin's cell phone, ringing to the tune of "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling."

The caller had a French accent; the Parrot could do them all. "In front of Nedick's in an hour, and bring five large," the faux Frenchman said. Within ten minutes, Eddie had dressed, asked Babsie to stay with Grace, and dug ten thousand dollars out of a metal box hidden in the tiles of his bedroom ceiling. The voice of Sinatra filled the Olds as he backed down the long driveway. He was going like hell down the Saw Mill River Parkway before Frank finished "Nancy with the Laughing Face."

It always amazed Eddie how quickly you could get around the city of New York in the wee small hours. The West Side Highway was wide-open, but the Third World surface played hell with the Oldsmobile's shocks. Twenty-two minutes: Yonkers to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel to the Belt Parkway. He slowed only for the tolls, where he paid cash. His built-in paranoia would never allow him to have his movements electronically recorded by the E-ZPass system.

The roads were empty; the only danger was getting caught speeding. In his pocket, just in case, he had an NYPD detective shield. It was a copy of his old shield, an imperceptible sixteenth of an inch smaller. The sixteenth of an inch made it a souvenir, not criminal impersonation. Eddie owned two; the other was pinned to an old uniform, stuck in the back of his closet. Most cops used the fake shield in order to avoid the ten-day fine for losing the real one. The real one sat in a safety-deposit box until the day they retired. It was the first lesson of police work: that nothing is what it appears to be.

Nedick's really meant Nathan's. Nedick's, once a ubiquitous New York chain, specialized in the odd combination of hot dogs and orange drink. It served as shorthand for Parrot's old meeting spot. The Parrot always screwed up the two hot dog stands, and it became a joke, then a code. Eddie knew Parrot would wait up in the subway station across from Nathan's, checking to see if they'd been followed. For a guy whose clothes screamed "Look at me," Parrot knew how to hide.

Eddie knew that nobody hides like a Gypsy. They exist without birth certificates, school records, Social Security numbers, telephone numbers, credit cards, and bank accounts. Certain males get a driver's license, but no more than necessary. They have no insurance-hospital or life-no Medicare. Most have no records on paper. They intentionally avoid any assimilation into the culture for fear of "pollution." No one has a clue as to how many Gypsies move through the world.

A heavy mist off the ocean dampened the streets of Coney Island. Eddie cruised the corner, past Nathan's, down to the boardwalk. He made a U-turn and parked next to a cotton-candy stand. Not long ago, hookers and junkies had ruled the streets at this hour, but then Comstat changed the way the NYPD attacked recurring street crimes. In April, it was now quiet enough to hear the surf. Eddie waited until traffic ceased, then walked to the corner to let Parrot see him. He stepped back behind a ten-foot pile of black trash bags and checked his Sig Sauer. A rat startled him as it scurried from under the black bags and disappeared into an alley.

Across the street, under the el, a boarded-up social club had once been a summer hangout for members of the Gambino crime family. Eddie's old partner, Paulie "the Priest" Caruso, had told him that in Coney Island's heyday they called it the "goombahs' beach embassy." Years later, it became a Puerto Rican after-hours spot. The sign above the door read no guns, no knives, no sneakers.

A commercial van went by, tires hissing on the wet pavement. It was a Ford, painted with just a coat of primer, its windows blackened. The name sammy sosa was spray-painted on the side, above the flag of the

Dominican Republic. Eddie didn't think a Gypsy would drive anything with a flag, but it probably rendered the van theft-proof. It turned down the dead-end street and stopped behind Eddie's car. The left bunker flashed, then the right. Eddie stuffed the Sig Sauer in his jacket pocket and walked back toward the van. He opened the door on the passenger's side and got in.

"Eddie Dunne, come back to life," the Parrot said.

"You thought I was dead?"

"Caranina saw it."

A heavy canvas curtain hung behind the front seat, blocking any view behind them. Eddie yanked it aside. The back of the van was carpeted ceiling to floor. Heavily taped cardboard boxes littered the floor. They were marked, and labeled with a variety of shipping labels: UPS, FedEx, USPS.

"You've been down South," Eddie said.

"Land of Dixie." The Parrot wore a white satin waiter's jacket over a yellow Hawaiian shirt, which seemed to glow in the glare of street light. His hair, dyed a bright orange, was dulled by the grease needed to lacquer it back.