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“I’ll call my mother in the morning and tell her we don’t want to wait anymore.”

“Jesus! Great!”

“I get those thoughts too, honey,” Margaret said. She reached over and caught his hand.

At the hospital, when she kissed him, she kissed him on the mouth and gave him a little tongue, something she didn’t hardly ever do.

Where the fuck am I?

I was thinking about that, and what she said about her having those kind of thoughts, carnal thoughts too, and drove right across Broad Street without thinking where I’m supposed to be going.

“Shit!” he said, and slowed abruptly, and made the next left.

There’s Holland’s body shop. That means I?

?m behind Holland Pontiac-GMC, just a block off North Broad. That’s not so bad. I could have wound up in Paoli or somewhere not thinking like that.

And then something wrong caught his eye. There was a guy sitting in a beat-up old Mustang in an alley.

If I hadn’t been looking to see where the fuck I was, I would never have seen him.

What’s wrong about it? Well, maybe nothing. Or maybe he’s drunk. Or dead. Or maybe not. Now that I think of it, he was smoking a cigarette. People don’t sit in alleys smoking cigarettes at midnight. Not around here.

He made the next right, and the next, and pulled to the curb.

Fuck it, McFadden. It ain’t any of your business, and you ain’t Sherlock Holmes.

Fuck fuck it!

Charley turned off the headlights and got out of the car. He took his wallet ID folder from his pocket and folded it back on itself, so the badge was visible, and then he took the snub nose from its holster, and held it at arm’s length down along his leg so that it would be kind of hard to see.

Then he went in the alley, and sort of keeping in the shadows walked down close to the Mustang.

Piece of shit, that car.

Moving very quickly now, he walked up to the driver’s window. He tapped on the window with his badge.

He scared shit out of the guy inside, who jumped.

The window rolled down.

“Excuse me, sir. I’m a police officer. Is everything all right?”

“I’m a Three-Six-Nine,” the man said. “Everything’s okay. On the job.”

Oh, shit. He’s probably a Central Detective on stakeout. Why didn’t you mind your own fucking business?

Fuck fuck fuck it. Maybe he ain’t.

“Let me see your folder, please,” Charley said, and pulled the door open so the light would come on. It didn’t.

Lieutenant Jack Malone thinking, This big fucker, whoever he is, smells something wrong, and he’s got his gun out, very slowly and nonthreateningly found his badge and photo ID and handed it to Officer Charles McFadden.

“Lieutenant, I’m sorry as hell about this.”

“Don’t be silly. You were just doing your job. I suppose I did look a little suspicious.”

“I didn’t know what the fuck to think, so I thought I’d better check. Sorry to bother you, sir.”