TUESDAY, JULY 1

12:14 A.M. …

They were headed to First Avenue and Thirtieth Street, the Bellevue complex. Levine drove the big, rattling, unmarked police sedan up East Broadway to Allen Street, north on Allen until Allen became First Avenue, and then on uptown.

At this hour the stores were closed, the folding metal gates drawn over and locked, but people still crowded the sidewalks, purplish-gray under the arc lamps, stepping over and around the litter and, here and there, someone sleeping on the sidewalk. This wasn’t the worst of lower Manhattan: a few blocks to the west was the Bowery with its alcoholic bums. The same distance east, the free-fire zones of slum and housing projects where, amid the burned-out cars and overflowing garbage cans, one could score crack, smack, coke, speed, angel dust, designer drugs, and probably a whole lot of addictive crap Devlin had never heard of. During the three years after his father’s death, struggling with depression, Devlin had seen this as one of its causes. The Lower East Side had not been as bad twenty and thirty years ago. Devlin was old enough to remember the pushcarts and the Sunday bargain shopping on Clinton and Rivington streets, the choice of a dozen Kosher delis where the juicy sandwiches were so thick you couldn’t get your mouth around them, the sound of thousands of voices in scores of languages, dialects, and accents.

It was all but gone now. One clinical definition of depression said that the victim believed he had no effect on his environment. Devlin had been in that state of mind from the age of thirty-eight to forty-one, and now he could remember looking at this desolation and thinking of how bad it was, how much worse it had become, during his lifetime. He had not really taken care of his parents, he had only eased their dying. An evil chewing in his gut had accompanied that notion, and now, as he thought about the Brennans, about both Jack and Joe being dead, the wild great promise of twenty-five years ago plowed under like just another cheap idea, Devlin could feel it again hot in his belly, drawing the warmth from his extremities until he actually felt cold and sick. Maybe it was the reappearance of death, or his awareness of its reappearance, Devlin’s awareness of the losses in his life, all of it fitting together in his gut again, what he had promised himself he would never feel again.