“Oh, so now I don’t date, either,” he snapped.

She laughed. “When? While you’re brushing your teeth? You’re out every night working and then show up in the newsroom by nine, after you’ve run your ass off around the track and hit a million tennis balls. You tell me when you date, Andy? Huh?”

Fortunately, Radar the dispatcher hailed them exactly at this moment. Apparently there was an assault on Monroe Road.

“Unit 700 responding,” Brazil irritably said into the mike.

“They call you Night Voice,” West told him.

“Who’s they?” he wanted to know.

“Cops. They know when you get on the radio that you’re not me.”

“Because my voice is deeper? Or maybe because I use proper grammar?” he said.

West was making her way through more menacing-looking government-subsidized housing. She was constantly checking her mirrors. “Where the hell are my backups?” she said.

Brazil had his eye on something else, and excitedly pointed. “White van, EWR-117,” he said. “From the APB earlier.”

The van was moving slowly around a corner, and West sped up. She flipped on lights and siren, and twenty minutes later, cops hauled someone else to jail as West and Brazil drove on.

Radar wasn’t finished with them yet. A call came in for a car broken into at Trade and Tryon, and he assigned this to unit 700 as well, while other cops rode around with nothing much to do.

“Subject a black male, no shirt, green shorts. May be armed,” Radar’s voice came over the scanner.

At the scene, West and Brazil discovered a Chevrolet Caprice with a smashed windshield. The upset owner, Ben Martin, was a law-abiding citizen. He’d had his fill of crime and violence and did not deserve to have his brand-new Caprice mauled like this. For what? His wife’s coupon book that looked like a wallet in the backseat? Some shithead hooligan destroyed Martin’s hard-earned ride to get fifty cents off Starkist albacore tuna, or Uncle Ben’s, or Maxwell House?

“Last night, same thing happened to my neighbor over there,” Martin was explaining to the cops. “And the Baileys over there got hit the night before that.”

What had gone wrong in the world? Martin remembered being a boy in Rock Hill, South Carolina, where they did not lock their doors and a burglar alarm was when you walked in on the sucker cleaning you out and he was surprised. So you beat the fool out of him, and that was the end of it. Now there was nothing but randomness, and strangers brutalizing a new Caprice for manufacturers’ coupons camouflaged by a red fabric wallet fastened with Velcro.

Brazil happened to notice a black male in green shorts running a block away, headed toward the dark, ancient Settlers Cemetery. “That’s him!” Brazil shouted.

“Get on the radio!” West ordered.

She took off. It was instinct and had nothing to do with reality, which revealed her as a middle-aged, out of shape, Bojangles-addicted smoker. She was at least a hundred feet behind the subject and already heaving. She was sweating and clumsy, her body and heavy Sam Browne belt simply not designed for this. The bastard had no shirt on, his muscles rippling beneath gleaming ebony skin. He was a damn lynx. How the hell was she supposed to catch something like this? No way. Subjects didn’t used to be this fit. They didn’t used to drink Met-Rx and have fitness clubs in every jail.