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“I’m sure.”

“And do you see any case coming up before the grand jury?…I’ll answer that for you—you don’t! For the past ten years, the New York Police Department has been fighting a suicidal gang war. Nearly a hundred officers have been killed in the line of duty. Only we haven’t been allowed to fight back until now. Our job was to begin to fight back.”

Charles Mackey placed a hand on Isiah Parker’s shoulder. The older man seemed weary and drained suddenly. “You have my word that this is going to stop soon. That means you have the commissioner’s word. This is the last time. Alexandre St.-Germain. Traficante. Oliver Barnwell. One more, then we’re out of it. We dissolve your team.”

Parker shook his head. Finally, he smiled. He had no choice but to trust Mackey. “You’ll let me know the details? Who it is? When we go again?”

Charles Mackey seemed to be retreating into prayer. After a moment, he reached out and shook Parker’s hand. “What other choice did we have?” he whispered.

Deputy Commissioner Mackey left the subterranean bathroom. He hurried back upstairs, where he caught another commuter train downtown.

Parker didn’t follow him out of the train station bathroom right away. He waited another few minutes down in the basement. One more time, he thought as he stood in the desolate public bathroom. Then we’re out of it.

37

John Stefanovitch; Ridgewood, New Jersey

BEAR KUPCHEK DIED in the emergency room at Lenox Hill Hospital, one of the city’s best facilities. Stefanovitch had gone there with his unconscious friend, traveling in the back of a speeding EMS ambulance. He’d watched as the Bear was finally pronounced dead.

When a policeman or fireman arrives in critical condition at a New York hospital, the best doctors and nurses usually assist, trying everything to save the injured officer. There was nothing any of them could do this time. The shock and sadness of the emergency room staff was obvious, both touching and maddening to Stefanovitch.

On June 28, he drove north out of New York on the crumbling West Side Highway, then across the split-level expanse of the George Washington Bridge. The world was feeling fuzzy at the edges, unfamiliar and unreal to him.

Why Kupchek? What had the Bear found out? What was the missing clue? The words were being shouted inside his head. Everything but cymbals were crashing, creating a powerful effect, like the end of Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much… except that Stefanovitch didn’t know too much.

He was headed toward Ridgewood, New Jersey, where he would attend Kupchek’s funeral. He couldn’t imagine anything worse that he’d have to do for the rest of his life.

As he reached Route 17, he remembered happier times, when the Bear and his wife, JoAnne, had used their combined incomes to buy a home in Jersey. It was during Kupchek’s third or fourth year with the force. Recently, he’d told Stef that the value of their house had gone from under sixty thousand to almost four hundred thousand. The manager of the Yankees lived in the same neighborhood. Stefanovitch had been out there to visit in May. There’d been humongous steaks grilled on the Weber, a closely contested NBA play-off game, too many Coronas for him to drive home that night. He loved Bear’s family. They loved Stef back. This was so god-damn hard, so bad.

As he drove past the shopping malls of northern Jersey, Stefanovitch began to think about another kind of small-town life, back in Pennsylvania, where he had grown up. All kinds of bittersweet memories were sweeping through his mind on the morning of Bear’s funeral. His parents’ farm. A soup kitchen they ran for poor people. A flood of images.

His grandfather had been a route driver for a regional bread company out near Minersville. For many years, George Stefanovitch had driven a beaten-up truck over the Catawissa Mountains to his territory, a nest of tiny villages.

He had given his grandson some free advice on careers one morning when Stef was helping out with the