"You can't mean that, Tommy. I've seen you with the kids in my class. You took them to your house and showed them you comic collection. You helped jenny build that model of Jetboy's plane. You like kids."

Tom laughed. "Oh, fuck it, how naive can you get? I was just trying to impress you. I wanted to get into your pants. I don't-" His voice broke. "Damn it," he said. "If I like kids so fucking much, then how come I had a vasectomy? How come, huh? Tell me that?"

When he turned, her face was as red as if he had hit her.

The playground was surrounded by police cruisers, six of them, flashers strobing red and blue in the gathering dusk. Cops were crouched behind the cars with guns drawn. Beyond the high chain-link fence, two dark shapes sprawled under the basketball net, and a third was draped over one of the barrels. Someone was whimpering in pain.

Tom spotted a detective he knew, holding the collar of a skinny young joker whose face was as soft and white as tapioca pudding, shaking him so hard his jowls bounced. The boy wore Demon Prince colors, Tom saw on a close-up shot. He drifted lower. "HEADS UP," he boomed. "WHAT'S THE PROBLEM?"

They told him.

A gang dispute, that was all. Penny-ante shit. Some nat juvies operating around the fringes of Jokertown had trespassed onto Demon Prince turf. The Demon Princes had gotten together fifteen or twenty members and gone into the East Village to teach the interlopers some respect for territorial boundaries. It had gone down in the playground. Knives, chains, a few guns. Nasty.

And then it had gotten weird.

The nats had something, tapioca-face screamed.

They'd come out of it as friends. He was proud of that. It was hardest when their wounds were still raw, and for the first eleven months they avoided each other. But Bayonne was a small town in its own way, and they knew too many people in common, and it was not something that could go on forever. Maybe that was the hardest eleven months Tom Tudbury ever lived through. Maybe.

One night she called him out of the blue. He was glad. He had missed her desperately, but he knew he could never call her after what had happened between them. "I need to talk," she'd said. She sounded as though she'd had a few beers. "You were my friend, Tom. Besides everything else, you were my friend, right? I need a friend tonight, okay? Can you come over?"

He bought a six-pack and went over. Her youngest sister had been killed that afternoon in a motorcycle accident. There was nothing to be done or said, but Tom did and said all the usual useless things, and he was there for her, and he let her talk until the dawn broke, and afterward he put her to bed. He slept on the couch.

He woke in late afternoon, with Barbara standing over him, wearing a terry-cloth robe, red-eyed from crying. "Thank you," she said. She sat down at the foot of the couch and took his hand and held it for a long time in silence. "I want you in my life," she said finally, with difficulty. "I don't want us to lose each other again. Friends?"

"Friends," Tom said. He wanted to pull her down on top of him and smother her with kisses. Instead he squeezed her hand. "No matter what, Barbara. Always. Okay?"

Barbara smiled. He faked a yawn, and buried his face in a pillow, to keep her from seeing the look in his eyes.

"STAY DOWN," the Turtle warned the policemen. They didn't need to be told twice. The kid was hiding inside one of the cement barrels, and they'd seen what happened to the cop who had tried to go into the playground after him. Gone, gone as if he'd never existed, blinked out, engulfed in a sudden blackness and somehow… erased.

"We were cutting the fuckers," the Demon Prince said, "teaching 'em good, teaching them the price if they come bothering Jokertown, fuckin' nat wimps, we had 'em dead, and then this spic come at us with a motherfuckin' bowling ball, and we just laughed at the fucker, what's he gonna do, try to bowl us down, stupid little prick, and then he held out the ball at Waxy and it grew, man, like it was alive. Some kind of black shit came out of it, real fast, black light or a big dark hand or something I don't know, only it moved real fast, and Waxy was just gone." His voice got shrill. "He was gone, man, he just wasn't there no more. And the nat fucker did the same to Razor and the Ghoul. That was when Heehaw shot him and he almost dropped the ball, got 'im in the shoulder I think, but then he did it to Heehaw. You can't fight nothin' like that. Even that motherfuckin' cop couldn't do shit." '

The shell slid above the chain-link fence that surrounded the playground, silent and slow.

"We have something," Barbara said. "We have something special." Her finger traced patterns in the condensation on the outside of her glass. She looked up at him, her blue eyes bold and frank, as if she were challenging him. "He's asked me to marry him, Tom."

"What did you say?" Tom asked her, trying to keep his voice calm and steady.

"I said I'd think about it," Barbara said. "That's why I wanted to get together. I wanted to talk to you first."

Tom signaled for another beer. "It's your decision," he said. "I wish you'd let me meet this guy, but from everything you've told me he sounds pretty good."

"He's divorced," she said.

"So's half the world," Tom said, as his beer arrived. "Everyone but you and me," Barbara, said, smiling. "Yeah." He frowned down at the head of his beer and sighed uncomfortably. "Does the mystery beau have kids?"

"Two. His ex has custody. I've met them, though. They like me."

"Goes without saying," Tom said. "He wants to have more. With me." Tom looked her in the eye. "Do you love him?" Barbara met his gaze calmly. "I guess. Sometimes I'm not so sure these days. Maybe I'm not as romantic as I used to be." She shrugged. "Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if things had worked out differently for you and me. We could be celebrating our tenth anniversary."

"Or maybe the ninth anniversary of our acrimonious divorce," Tom said. He reached across the table and took Barbara's hand. "Things haven't turned out so badly, have they? It would never have worked the other way."

"The roads not chosen," she said wistfully. "I've had too many might-have-beens in my life, Tom, too many regrets for things left undone and choices not made. My biological clock is ticking. If I wait any longer, I'll wait forever."

"I just wish you'd known this guy longer," Tom said. "Oh, I've known him a long time," she said, tearing a corner off her cocktail napkin.

Tom was confused. "I thought you said you met him last month at a party."

"Yes. But we knew each other before. In high school." She looked at his face again. "That's why I didn't tell you his name. You would have been upset, and at first I didn't know it would lead anywhere."

Tom didn't have to be told. He and Barbara had been good friends for more than a decade. He looked into the blue depths of her eyes, and he knew. "Steve Bruder," he said numbly.

He hovered above the playground and floated the fallen warriors over the fence, one by one, to the police waiting outside. The two from the basketball court were dead meat. It would take a lot of scrubbing to wash the bloodstains from the cement. The boy draped over the barrel turned out to be a girl. She wimpered in pain when he lifted her with his teke, and from the way she was clutching herself it looked like her guts had been sliced open. He hoped they could do something for her.

All three were nats. The battleground was free of fallen jokers. Either the Demon Princes had really been kicking ass, or their own dead were somewhere else. Or both.

He touched a control on the arm of his chair, and all his floodlights came on, bathing the playground in a white-hot brilliance. "IT'S OVER," he said, and his loudspeakers roared the words into the twilight. Over the years, he'd learned that sheer volume scared the hell out of punks. "COME ON OUT, KID. THIS IS THE TURTLE."