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Payne and his date had been in his Porsche 911 Carrera. They were headed for his apartment, about to leave the parking lot of La Famiglia Ristorante, when they came across a middle-class black couple who only moments earlier had left the restaurant and been robbed by two armed men. The doers had pistol-whipped the husband, knocking out teeth, and had gotten only as far as the end of the lot.

Sergeant Payne, Matthew M., Badge Number 471, Philadelphia Police Department, automatically gave chase-and almost immediately his car took the brunt of two blasts from a sawed-off shotgun. Payne then pulled his Colt.45 Officer’s Model pistol and put down the shotgunner with a round to the head and severely wounded the accomplice, who had fired at Payne with a.380-caliber Browning semiautomatic pistol.

Payne’s date-the extremely bright and attractive Terry Davis, a heavy hitter in the entertainment industry in Los Angeles-had not been badly hurt, but their budding relationship died in that parking lot.

While Matt Payne’s shootings were all righteous ones-ones in which he not only was found to be justified by the system but also ones in which he’d been hailed a hero by the public-they haunted him.

And this last shooting had put him over the edge.

It set up a series of events that found him hospitalized and briefly under psychiatric care. After careful examination-and a more or less completely clean bill of health-he was ordered to take a thirty-day leave of compensatory time. The purpose of this leave was (a) to fulfill the prescription for recovery that the psychiatrist said was necessary for such an overworked and overstressed police sergeant, and (b) to be a period of reflection, in which said police sergeant could consider if he might be better suited to another career path at the somewhat tender age of twenty-seven, such as that of a lawyer.

Sitting at his computer in his Rittenhouse Square apartment, Matt Payne had begun his morning-after making coffee and filling the thermos-reading e-mails and the online edition of The Philadelphia Bulletin. Then he’d moved on to reviewing the files saved from websites he’d studied the previous night. These had extolled the virtues of various law schools he’d looked at across the country, from Harvard Law-a short scull ride from the Atlantic Ocean via the Charles River and Boston Harbor-to Pepperdine Law, overlooking the surfers in the Pacific Ocean at Malibu. He also had a yellow legal pad on which he’d listed the pros and cons for each of the schools he was considering-or not considering, as there were more schools marked through than not.

And, just as last night, they had begun to bore the shit out of him.

About the time he had poured coffee cup number three, Payne started clicking on another website that he found far more exciting: 911s.com. It had, among other things, a search engine that required the user’s home zip code. Payne had first punched in and searched his home zip code, 19103, and almost instantaneously was offered a listing of twenty one-year-old and two-year-old Porsche 911s offered for sale by dealers and brokers and individuals within twenty-five miles of his apartment.

He scrolled through the list, clicked on a few Carrera models, idly wondering as he read the pages how much of their histories were truly factual-“Only 10,250 pampered miles! Always garaged! Never driven in rain!”-and how many of the cars actually, say, had been raced from Media down I-95 to Miami Beach, or run in last month’s Poconos Mountain Off-Road Rally then hosed off for resale before the tires-as the stand-up comedian Ron White was famous for saying-fell the fuck off!

Matt had grinned at the thought of the comedian’s shtick-not a day went by, especially when on the job, that he couldn’t apply at least one of White’s hilarious observations to a particular situation, most often “You can’t fix stupid”-and then he had thought: Or an even worse abuse-the cars used as daily commuters, rain or shine.

Porsche actually built their cars to fly down the highway at the hammers of hell.

Stop-and-go traffic is the equivalent of a slow death.

Especially in salt-laced snow sludge.

Figuring he would search major cities that had no snow, and thus no road salt to rust out body panels, he’d punched in 90210, 85001, and 75065, and read the results from those. They belonged, respectively, to Beverly Hills, Phoenix, and Dallas. And each offered three times as many 911s as did 19103.

Ones with no road salt.

Maybe I could get one shipped back here.

Or maybe go get one, and drive it back here at the hammers of hell. Now that would be fun…

He then punched in 33301, which was one of Fort Lauderdale’s zip codes. In the search field that asked for a radius in miles from that geographic point, he’d typed in “50.”

Fifty miles easily covers Miami to the south and Palm Beach to the north.

Then he’d chuckled as he clicked the SEARCH button.

And plenty of Everglades swamp to the west and Atlantic Ocean to the east.

If there’s a Porsche in either, it’s going to be worse off than my shot-up Carrera.

Maybe I should donate mine as an artificial reef. It’d sink like a rock with all those shotgun pellet holes…

It took a long moment for the page to completely load on his computer screen.

Jesus! Look at all those Porsches for sale!

Ninety Carreras alone!

Who the hell is buying them?

He took a sip of his coffee.

Stupid question. Who the hell else?