“Tell me about it. It’s up every year. All crimes are up every year, except we’re starting to get a statistical drop in some of the less serious ones because people aren’t bothering to report them. Like my sister’s burglary. You got mugged coming home and all that happened was he took your money? Well, shit, why make a federal case out of it, right? Be grateful you’re alive. Go home and say a prayer of thanks.”

“With Kim Dakkinen—”

“Screw Kim Dakkinen,” he said. “Some dumb little bitch comes fifteen hundred miles to peddle her ass and give the money to a nigger pimp, who cares if somebody chopped her up? I mean why didn’t she stay in fucking Minnesota?”

“Wisconsin.”

“I meant Wisconsin. Most of ’em come from Minnesota.”

“I know.”

“The murder rate used to be around a thousand a year. Three a day in the five boroughs. That always seemed high.”

“High enough.”

“It’s just about double that now.” He leaned forward. “But that’s nothing, Matt. Most homicides are husband-wife things, or two friends drinking together and one of ’em shoots the other and doesn’t even remember it the next day. That rate never changes. It’s the same as it always was. What’s changed are stranger murders, where the killer and the victim don’t know each other. That’s the rate that shows you how dangerous it is to live somewhere. If you just take the stranger murders, if you throw out the other cases and put the stranger murders on a graph, the line goes up like a rocket.”

“There was a guy in Queens yesterday with a bow and arrow,” I said, “and the guy next door shot him with a .38.”

“I read about that. Something about a dog shitting on the wrong lawn?”

“Something like that.”

“Well, that wouldn’t be on the chart. That’s two guys who knew each other.”

“Right.”

“But it’s all part of the same thing. People keep killing each other. They don’t even stop and think, they just go ahead and do it. You been off the force what, a couple years now? I’ll tell you this much. It’s a lot worse than you remember.”

“I believe you.”

“I mean it. It’s a jungle out there and all the animals are armed. Everybody’s got a gun. You realize the number of people out there walking around with a piece? Your honest citizen, he’s gotta have a gun now for his own protection, so he gets one and somewhere down the line he shoots himself or his wife or the guy next door.”

“The guy with the bow and arrow.”