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He stopped when Washington held up his hand again.

“Be advised, sir, that my entire command, save, of course, the absent Detective Payne, is at this very moment rushing to the sound of the guns.”

“Thank you, again,” Wohl said.

“And Jerry O’Dowd got here before I did,” Pekach said. “What’s going on?”

“Just as soon as you get Mike out of bed, I’ll tell you,” Wohl said.

A very large, very black woman, attired in a flowered housecoat, opened her front door and examined her caller with mingled annoyance and curiosity.

“This better be something important, Dennis,” the Hon. Harriet M. “Hanging Harriet” McCandless, judge of the Superior Court, announced. “I’m an old woman and need my sleep.”

“Thank you for seeing me, Your Honor,” Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin said. “I think you’ll agree with me that this is important.”

“It had better be,” Judge McCandless announced. “Come in. I made a pot of coffee.”

“Tony Callis is in my car, Your Honor,” Coughlin said.

“Are you hinting that you would like to have him come in?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

Judge McCandless considered that for a full thirty seconds.

“Well, we can’t have our distinguished district attorney sitting outside in the dark, can we?” she said finally. “You may fetch him, Dennis.”

“Thank you, Your Honor.”

“Now, just to make sure I have everything straight in my mind,” Judge McCandless said, leaning back in her armchair as if she expected the back to move as her judge’s chair did. “You, Tony, are going to come to me to appeal the decision of the magistrate to permit these people bail.”

“Yes, Your Honor,” District Attorney Callis said.

“Then, their bail having been revoked, you are going to return them to custody. Once in custody, in exchange for their testimony against the police officers in question, you are going to drop the charges on which they were arrested.”

“If it gets to that, Your Honor. Only as a last resort will we agree to drop the charges.”

“Come on, Tony,” Judge McCandless said. “These people aren’t stupid. They’re going to want a deal, and yo

u’re going to give it to them. Your priority is to get the Five Squad.”

“Jason Washington, Your Honor,” Coughlin said, coming to Callis’s assistance, “can often work miracles.”

“I am second to no one in my appreciation of the Black Buddha’s skill as an interrogator,” Judge McCandless said. “But I repeat, these people aren’t stupid. They are going to want to do a deal, and Tony is going to have to make one.”

“We’ll try, Your Honor,” Tony Callis replied, “if it comes to that, to make the best deal possible.”

“Several things occur to me,” she replied flatly. “The second being that you’ll make whatever deal you have to.”

“And the first?” Tony Callis asked, as ingratiatingly as he could manage.

“If you get away with this,” she said, “I will have to disqualify myself.”

There was no reply.

“And while neither one of you is a nuclear scientist, I feel sure you considered that before you decided to wake me up at four o’clock in the morning.”

And again there was no reply.