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Did I do something stupid, following him into the Roundhouse? Did he see me looking through the window?

Well, to hell with it. It’s done.

Matt turned the headlights on as he left the parking lot, and headed for Rittenhouse Square.

“Who was that in the unmarked car?” Officer Tom Coogan inquired of Officer Timothy Calhoun as soon as they were inside the well-worn Buick Special.

“I just made him,” Calhoun said. “Remember the guy that popped the sicko, the serial rapist? Blew his brains out?”

“John Wayne, something like that?”

“Payne. His name is Payne.”

“That was him?”

“That was him, I’m sure. That fucking new unmarked car makes me sure. He’s one of them hotshots in Special Operations. Every one of them fuckers gets a new car, did you know that?”

“I heard it,” Coogan

said. “I ran into Charley McFadden—remember him?—at the FOP.”

“I remember him, sure. He made detective, didn’t he?”

“Him and the spic. Martinez. Mutt and Jeff both made detective, and both of them are in Special Operations, and both run around in brand-new unmarked cars.”

“There’s a moral in there, Coogan. Shoot a bad guy, and get yourself promoted.”

“Mutt and Jeff didn’t shoot a bad guy, they tossed him under an elevated train,” Coogan replied.

Calhoun laughed.

“What the fuck do they do out there in Special Operations?” he asked.

“Who the fuck knows? They’re Carlucci’s fair-haired boys. They caught that loony tune who wanted to blow up the vice president. Shit like that.”

“How do you get in Special Operations?”

“Shoot a bad guy, I told you. Get your picture on TV.”

“If we shoot one of our bad guys, we’d wind up on charges for violating the fucker’s civil rights,” Calhoun said.

“Speaking of our bad guys, what did we get?”

“Nothing. Zip,” Calhoun said.

“Nothing?”

“The two johns had eighty-five bucks between them,” Calhoun explained. “The dinges had a half-dozen bags and three hundred bucks and change. I figured it wasn’t worth the risk to take any of it.”

“Three hundred bucks is three hundred bucks. A little bit here, a little bit there . . .” Coogan made a little joke.

It went over Calhoun’s head.

“Somebody might have thought it strange that the dinges had only a hundred or so,” he replied seriously. “And we don’t take it all, remember? Don’t be so fucking greedy, Coogan.”

“Up yours, Calhoun!”

They drove to the Narcotics Unit’s office at 22nd Street and Hunting Park Avenue, decided finishing the paperwork could wait until they had a beer, and walked across the street to the Allgood Bar.