“No question the public wants it. And there’s one way it works and you can’t tell me it doesn’t. You fry one of these bastards and at least you know he’s not gonna do it again. The hell, I’d vote for it. Bring back the chair and televise the fucking executions, run commercials, make a few dollars and hire a few more cops. You want to know something?”

“What?”

“We got the death penalty. Not for murderers. For ordinary citizens. Everybody out there runs a better chance of getting killed than a killer does of getting the chair. We get the death penalty five, six, seven times a day.”

He had raised his voice and the bartender was auditing our conversation now. We’d lured him away from his program.

Durkin said, “I like the one about the exploding television set. I don’t know how I missed that one. You think you heard ’em all but there’s always something new, isn’t there?”

“I guess.”

“There are eight million stories in the naked city,” he intoned. “You remember that program? Used to be on television some years back.”

“I remember.”

“They had that line at the end of every show. ‘There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.’ “

“I remember it.”

“Eight million stories,” he said. “You know what you got in this city, this fucked-up toilet of a naked fucking city? You know what you got? You got eight million ways to die.”

I got him out of there. Outside in the cool night air he fell silent. We circled a couple of blocks, wound up down the street from the station house. His car was a Mercury a few years old. It had been beaten up a little around the corners. The license plate had a prefix which would indicate to other cops that this was a vehicle used for police business and not to be ticketed. Some of the more knowledgeable crooks could also recognize it as a cop’s car.

I asked if he was okay to drive. He didn’t much care for the question. He said, “What are you, a cop?” and then the absurdity of the remark struck him and he started to laugh. He clung to the car’s open door for support, helpless with laughter, and swung back and forth on the car door. “What are you, a cop?” he said, giggling. “What are you, a cop?”

That mood passed like a fast cut in a film. In an instant he was serious and apparently sober, eyes narrowed, jaw thrust forward like a bulldog’s. “Listen,” he said, voice low and hard. “Don’t be so goddamn superior, you understand?”

I didn’t know what he was talking about.

“You sanctimonious bastard. You’re no better than I am, you son of a bitch.”