Two great things about my loft. One, it’s elevated enough to catch the breezes between the rivers and off the Battery. The temperature sign on the Bowery Bank reads 112° tonight as I hike past, but with my big windows open and four industrial fans cranking, my place will be down to ninety-five by midnight. I can sleep in that. Two, I can work better from home than I do from the office. I’ve set up a standard consumer-grade VPN with basic encryption so my digital identity looks normal from the outside. Beyond that I’m pretty much invisible. I’ve masked my actual IP address, and with a sequence of homemade firewall hacks I can tap into all the databases at headquarters. Yeah, I would get into big trouble at work for accessing from off-site, except the only peeps at DivSix geeky enough to glom onto this subterfuge are the ones who would not only not turn me in but would actively abet me in continuing my depredations. In ninety minutes I’ve got enough background on the Righteous Man legend, not to mention apocalyptic coding, Hebrew language gematria, and End of Days eschatology, to print a dozen pages for Manning.

Just before midnight two more texts come in from Gleason’s assistant. Both are team alerts for the upcoming SWAT raid on Russian Mafia headquarters in Brighton Beach. The date of the action is Saturday, April 22, seventy-two hours from now, but I am instructed to be present without fail, with Manning, tomorrow p.m. for weapons and body armor issue (the teams will carry assault rifles and possibly shotguns), test firing, and comm channel setup, at which each team member will receive his or her headset and frequencies will be tested and locked.

A SWAT raid.

What the fuck am I doing with my life? Every time my job forces me to confront the violent reality of this city, not to mention the male-dominated grab-your-bitch-ass culture within the department (including elite units like DivSix), I find myself asking these questions. What the fuck was I thinking when I signed up for this shit? What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I be normal?

I take my pizza crust and the last of my Diet Coke and perch by the northeast corner window. The industrial fans are wailing; temp will be down to the high nineties soon.

Should I be married?

Why don’t I have children?

I’m twenty-fucking-eight, for God’s sake.