With the victims carrying credit cards, picking pockets had become enormous international business. Brokers had cash ready for cards that could be Air Expressed anywhere in the world in a day and a half. The credit-card companies wrote off the losses against their colossal profits, but taxes paid for the added police work, whatever it’s worth. This was one of the reasons why Devlin had told Eileen a long time ago he could take his job or leave it. Collaring a pickpocket still meant nothing. The best pickpockets these days were Colombians, often teenagers. With their connections to the money of the drug trade, they simply made bail and skipped the jurisdiction. Or maybe not… How could you find them in today’s ghettoes? So what did police work mean? Throwing career thieves off the top of the Empire State Building wouldn’t accomplish anything, either. Crime was as much a factor of the human equation as blue eyes. As in every other endeavor, a new generation was coming up fast, more skilled, sophisticated, and merciless. Modern communication had turned crime into sport, with records made to be broken. Sometimes the job was fun all over again for Devlin when a suspect’s bladder-spilling collapse reminded him what a deep, down-and-dirty thrill arresting someone could be; but more often it was like this evening, uncomfortable, slow, routine, with the deadliest enemy, boredom, settling on the brain as suffocatingly heavy as volcanic ash. Devlin could see it glazing the eyes of the young plainclothesmen moving slowly against the crowds under the movie marquees surrounding the intersection of Seventh Avenue and Broadway. Devlin wasn’t feeling the boredom. The bright summer evening was uncomfortable, slow and routine for Devlin, but something else was crawling up his spine: he was remembering what that grammar school kicking-of-the-ankle had been called. With the Seville down on one rim, why hadn’t he thought of it earlier? Did someone have a macabre sense of humor? On the staircase of Junior High School 125, when one kid kicked another’s ankle so that falling down was inevitable, it was called a Flat Tire.

Devlin was wearing a borrowed pair of trousers. The split seam in the shoulder of the jacket wasn’t as bad as he’d thought. A four-inch gauze pad covered his knee. All the scrapes had been washed with antiseptic. They hurt, and he could sense that he had pulled a couple of different muscles, but he wasn’t stiffening up, not yet. All his exercising might make a difference in how he felt tomorrow. No question in the minds of his fellow officers about the authenticity of his accident. Maybe fifty guys had seen him this afternoon, and more than half of them had gritted their teeth, sucked air, or winced. He’d probably see fifty more before the night was out.…