It was dark when the telephone rang in the kitchen. Hardy, gun in hand, woke up from another of his fitful dozes, flicked on the kitchen light and got to it before the second ring.

“Rusty?”

“Who’s Rusty?”

A woman’s voice, far away, crackled on the wire after a short delay.

Hardy’s head was clearing. “God, it’s good to hear your voice.”

“Were you asleep?”

The clock on the stove read 3:10. “It’s three o’clock in the morning here,” he said. “I was just jogging around the neighborhood and happened to hear the phone.”

“In the morning? I can’t get this straight at all.”

“It’s okay.”

“I don’t even know what day it is. There, I mean.”

“That’s all right. I’m right here and I don’t know what day it is.”

“And who’s Rusty?”

Jane was halfway around the world and there was no need to worry her. “My old office mate. I was just having a dream, I guess.”

He held the telephone’s mouthpiece in one hand and became aware of the gun in the other. He almost thought of telling her then. Look, sweetie, I’m standing in my kitchen holding a loaded.38 Special and I am considering the possibility that someone, who’s probably good at it, is trying to kill me. But don’t worry. Have a good time in Hong Kong. Don’t think about lions. What he did was ask her how her trip was going. “Good, except it looks like I’ve got to stay another week, maybe ten days.”

“Peachy.”

Silence.

“Dismas?”

“I’m here. I was just doing a few cartwheels.”

“This happens, you know.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I’d just like to see you.”

“Me, too.” She went on to explain about the vagaries of supply in the East. Ships carrying thousands of bolts of material from the labor-cheap factories in the Philippines, Thailand and Korea coming in to Hong Kong to be made into designer clothes by the-relatively-labor-cheap tailors there.

“But we can’t commit, really, I mean buy, unless we see the colors, feel the quality of the material.”

“I know,” Hardy said. “Feel the quality…”

“And two of the ships are running late. They could come in earlier but even so, it’ll take a few days to go through the bolts.”

“I got it, really.” Hardy put the gun on the counter. “It doesn’t thrill me, but I’ll live.” Poor Dismas. “Otherwise, how’s the trip going?”

“Well, people are starting to get nervous about ninety-seven. You can feel it already. Nobody wants to talk long-range, like by next year some plans may evolve and the Brits will be gone. It’s weird.”

“It’s better,” Hardy said. “People ought to remember they might be gone by next year.”

Jane paused. “My cheerful ex-husband.”

“Hey, not so ex.”

“Not so cheerful either. Gone by next year! You can’t live thinking like that.”

Hardy wanted to tell her you’d better, that even a year was pretty optimistic. He was tempted to remind her that their son hadn’t even made it that year, but he let it pass. She didn’t need to be reminded of that. “You’re right,” he said. “You can’t live like that.”

“Dismas, are you all right?” she asked. “Are you doing anything for fun?”

“I am tearing up the town. I’d just rather be doing it with you.” He realized he was being a pain in the ass. “Look, I’m sorry. It’s three A.M. and you tell me you’ll be gone another week. I’m a little disoriented, is all. A little case of vu zjahday.”

“Vu zjahday?”

“Yeah. It’s the opposite of déjà vu. The sense that you’ve never been somewhere before.”

Jane laughed. “Okay, you’re all right.”

“I’m all right.”

“I love you,” she said.

“Maybe when you get home we talk some long-range, huh?”

A beat, or it might have been the delay on the line. “It could happen,” she said.

Frank Batiste wasn’t sure anymore that he was happy to have made lieutenant. It was more money and that was all right, but sitting here in the office all day, the conduit for gripes going up and edicts coming down, was wearing him down.

In ancient times they killed the bearer of bad news, and he was starting to understand why. Maybe, somehow, the news would go away, or wouldn’t have to be thought about.

He couldn’t just hide in here all day. He forced himself up from his chair, feeling the beginning of back pain, and opened the door.

The homicide department was commencing to take on the feel of a country-club locker room. Several golf bags leaned against desks.

He walked back through the room, nodding at the guys and getting ice for his troubles. Hell, it wasn’t his doing. He even sided with the men. Maybe he should step down as looie, let someone else deal with this crap. But what would that do? Just put someone else in, someone who wouldn’t be as sympathetic to the team.

If only the City That Once Knew How had a goddamn clue, he thought. Now it didn’t know how to wipe its own ass. And nowhere was it more clear than here in Homicide. These fourteen guys-it sounded funny, but was true anyway-were the shock troops against the worst elements in the city. No one got to Homicide without nearly a decade of solid police work, without a lot of pride, and without some special mix of killer instinct, stubbornness and brains. These guys were the elite, and if you cut their morale you had a problem.

But last week, for the first time in seven years, the department had brought charges against two men on the squad. A month before, the two officers-Clarence Raines and Mario Valenti-had gone to arrest a telephone-company executive named Fred Treadwell for murdering his lover and his lover’s new boyfriend. Treadwell had resisted arrest-kicking out a window of his second-story apartment, cutting his head upon his exit, falling to the alley below, breaking an ankle, smashing his head again as he pitched into some garbage cans and escaping on foot to his attorney’s office.

Treadwell and both the other principals in this triangle being gay, his attorney immediately called a press conference and trotted poor Fred out with his cuts, breaks and bruises, charging police brutality.

Valenti and Raines, two of the elite with perfect records, had, it seemed, suddenly not been able to contain their prejudice against gays (probably as a result of their own latent homosexuality), and had beaten Fred to within an inch of his life, leaving him for dead in the alley behind his apartment.

Somebody took Fred’s lame story-or the righteous outrage of the gay community-seriously enough to bust Raines and Valenti and begin a formal investigation.

As if that weren’t enough, at about the same time as the charges came down, the latest budget cuts were announced. Effective immediately, no overtime was to be approved for ‘routine procedural work,’ which meant writing reports and serving subpoenas.

A significant number of murder cases now were what they called NHI cases. It stood for ‘No Humans Involved,’ and a kind interpretation meant that the victim, the suspect and all the witnesses were at best petty criminals.

These people were not fond of policemen and tended to be hard to find during normal business hours. So the service of subpoenas would most often take place in the early morning or late at night, and the cops going out after their witnesses would put in the overtime knowing this was their best chance of doing their job. Now the city had decided it wasn’t going to pay for that.

Which led to the golf clubs. The guys went out at eight or nine o’clock, knocked at doors, found no one home, played a round of golf, went back to the same doors and tried again, still found no one home, came back to the office, and wrote reports on their day in the field.

It sucked and everybody knew it.

Jess Mendez nodded at the lieutenant and called over his shoulder. “Hey, Lanier! What time you tee off?”

Batiste didn’t turn around. He heard Lanier behind him. “I got three subpoenas first. Say nine-thirty.”