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O’Hara gestured grandly, After you.

Harris shrugged, then nodded and said, “All off the record, right?”

O’Hara sighed. “You know you’ll see what I put together before I post it online.”

From the look on Tony Harris’s face, it was evident that he was genuinely embarrassed for the slip of tongue. “Sorry, Mickey. Old habits and all.”

[FOUR]

As a rule, cops didn’t much like reporters, and, accordingly, didn’t share with them more than they absolutely had to—and a good deal of the time not even that.

Those who made up the Thin Blue Line were a guarded group. Outsiders simply didn’t understand what it was that they did, what their brotherhood meant, and apparently no amount of education changed that.

You either were a cop—and understood—or you weren’t.

Mickey O’Hara wasn’t a cop. “I couldn’t get on with the police department,” he joked with his cop friends, “because I knew both of my parents and knew that they were married.”

But—as, invariably, rules had exceptions—O’Hara did indeed understand.

He had long ago earned the respect—and in cases like Matt Payne, the friendship—of many on the police department, including more than a few of the white shirts, some of whom even wore stars on their uniforms.

It was said of Mickey O’Hara that he knew more people on the police force than most of the cops did themselves, and certainly more cops recognized him than could identify in a crowd the top cop himself, Police Commissioner Ralph J. Mariana.

O’Hara’s history with the police was almost, but not quite, as long as his history with the Bulletin. He’d begun with a paper route at age twelve, throwing the afternoon edition from his bike at the stoops of West Philadelphia row houses every day after school for four years.

By the time he turned sixteen, a series of events had served to dramatically change his career in newspapers.

The series was triggered by his being expelled from West Catholic High School.

Monsignor Dooley had made it clear that gambling would not be tolerated. When he found out that the O’Hara boy had illegal numbers slips that could be traced back to Francesco “Frankie the Gut” Guttermo, and that Mickey would not rat out his co-conspirator—no matter how immoral the Monsignor declared it all to be—the Monsignor said that left him with no choice but to throw Mickey out of school.

Before being caught by the Monsignor and being shown the door, Mickey had heard that the Bulletin had a copyboy position open. He’d never had the time to pursue it—until now. And now he really wanted it, because it offered far more money than throwing papers from a bike, and it was indoor work, so no more riding in the rain or racing away from the snapping maws of those goddamn rabid street dogs.

Mickey actually got the position, but with a ninety-day probation period.

He took his new job seriously, probation or not. And that did not go unnoticed.

After his probation period expired, he came to be mentored by the ink-stained assistant city desk editor, who dumped on Mickey more and more of the research assignments—drudge work that no one else wanted to do. Before Mickey knew it, the research he was turning in was becoming actual articles, albeit short ones, printed under the credit “Staff Roundup.”

Then, late one Friday afternoon—he clearly remembered it as if it had happened yesterday, not nearly two decades earlier—he’d been summoned to the managing editor’s office. The office had a huge glass window overlooking the entire newsroom, and as Mickey approached he saw that the managing editor was looking at a copy of that afternoon’s front page. The assistant city desk editor was in there, too, looking his usual deeply introspective self.

Mickey O’Hara, days shy of turning eighteen, was convinced that this was the end of his newspaper days. Clearly, his mentor had been caught abusing his official duties by helping develop the questionable skills of a lowly copyboy.

And now said copyboy was about to lose his job and be sent back to the streets.

O’Hara figured that if he was lucky they might let him pedal around town slinging papers at stoops again.

But, of course, that had not happened.

After an initial awkward exchange of pleasantries, the managing editor had tossed the afternoon paper that he was holding to Mickey. Mickey had glanced at it, recognized the headline he’d written, then under that seen his name—his byline there on the front page.

As Mickey O’Hara, speechless, looked between the two men, the managing editor said, “Congratulations, Mickey. Nice work. This is usually the part of the interview process when I ask, ‘When can you start?’ but it would appear that you already have.”

O’Hara rose rapidly in the hierarchy of the Bulletin city room, eventually writing “Follow the Money,” the hard-hitting series of articles on graft and gross incompetence in the city’s Child Protective Services. It was the series that won him a Pulitzer Prize for public service.

O’Hara had thought that he was on top of the world, particularly considering how far he’d come from the day Monsignor Dooley had shown him the door. He was being paid, he’d thought, damned decently for something he enjoyed doing. And, he believed, the stories that helped better the lot of kids trapped in the hell that was CPS was alone worth it all.

But then his childhood buddy, Casimir Bolinski, showed up in town and told him he was a fool. His exact words: “Face it, Mickey, those bastards are screwing you.”