“Whatever you say, bro. Later.”

The man in the gray fatigues—a janitor just off-shift was Callahan’s guess—started walking. He favored Callahan with one final glance—still amazed but already beginning to doubt what he’d seen—and then skirted the little crowd listening to the street preacher. A moment later he was gone.

Callahan got to his feet and stood on one of the steps leading up to Hammarskjöld Plaza, looking for Jake. He didn’t see him. He looked the other way, for the Unfound Door, but that was gone, too.

“Now listen, my friends! Listen, I say God, I say God’s love, I say gimme hallelujah!”

“Hallelujah,” said a member of the street preacher’s crowd, not really sounding all that into it.

“I say amen, thank you, brotha! Now listen because this is America’s time of TESTING and America is FAILING her TEST! This country needs a BOMB, not a new-kew-lar one but a GAWD-BOMB, can you say hallelujah?”

“Jake!” Callahan shouted. “Jake, where are you? Jake!”

“Oy!” That was Jake, his voice raised in a scream. “Oy, LOOK OUT!”

There was a yapping, excited bark Callahan would have recognized anywhere. Then the scream of locked tires.

The blare of a horn.

And the thud.

THREE

Callahan forgot about his bashed ankle and sizzling palms. He ran around the preacher’s little crowd (it had turned as one to the street and the preacher had quit his rant in mid-flow) and saw Jake standing in Second Avenue, in front of a Yellow Cab that had slewed to a crooked stop no more than an inch from his legs. Blue smoke was still drifting up from its rear tires. The driver’s face was a pallid, craning O of shock. Oy was crouched between Jake’s feet. To Callahan the bumbler looked freaked out but otherwise all right.

The thud came again and yet again. It was Jake, bringing his balled-up fist down on the hood of the taxi. “Asshole!” Jake yelled at the pallid O on the other side of the windshield. Thud! “Why don’t you—” Thud! “—watch where—” THUD! “—the fuck you’re GOING!” THUD-THUD!

“You give it to im, Cholly!” yelled someone from across the street, where perhaps three dozen people had stopped to watch the fun.

The taxi’s door opened. The long tall helicopter who stepped out was wearing what Callahan thought was called a dashiki over jeans and huge mutant sneakers with boomerangs on the sides. There was a fez on his head, which probably accounted somewhat for the impression of extreme height, but not entirely. Callahan guessed the guy was at least six and a half feet tall, fiercely bearded, and scowling at Jake. Callahan started toward this developing scene with a sinking heart, barely aware that one of his feet was bare, slapping the pavement with every other step. The street preacher was also moving toward the developing confrontation. Behind the taxi stopped in the intersection, another driver, interested in nothing but his own scheduled evening plans, laid on his horn with both hands—WHEEEOOOONNNNNNK!!!—and leaned out his window, hollering “Move it, Abdul, you’re blockin the box!”