Finch smiled in spite of himself. “I’d heard you were the slipperiest sheriff in this slippery one-horse town. Seems my sources weren’t embellishing.”

Thomas Coughlin cocked his head, his face narrowed in confusion. “I think you have been misinformed, Agent Finch. Sure, we’ve more than one horse in this town. Dozens actually.” He tipped his hat. “Safe travels.”

Finch stood by the car and watched the captain walk back up the street. He decided he was one of those men whose greatest gift lay in the inability of others to ever guess what he was truly thinking. That made him a dangerous man, to be sure, but valuable, too, pricelessly so.

We’ll meet again, Captain. Finch entered the building and climbed the stairs toward his last box in an otherwise empty office. No doubt in my mind, we will definitely meet again.

Danny, Mark Denton, and Kevin McRae were called into the police commissioner’s office in the middle of April. They were led into the office, which was empty, by Stuart Nichols, the commissioner’s secretary, who promptly left them alone.

They sat in stiff chairs in front of Commissioner Curtis’s vast desk and waited. It was nine o’clock at night. A raw night of occasional hail.

After ten minutes, they left their chairs. McRae walked over to a window. Mark stretched with a soft yawn. Danny paced from one end of the office to the other.

By nine-twenty, Danny and Mark stood at the window while Kevin paced. Every now and then the three of them exchanged a look of suppressed exasperation, but no one said anything.

At nine-twenty-five, they took their seats again. As they did, the door to their left opened and Edwin Upton Curtis entered, followed by Herbert Parker, his chief counsel. As the commissioner took up a post behind his desk, Herbert Parker briskly passed in front of the three officers and placed a sheet of paper on each of their laps.

Danny looked down at it.

“Sign it,” Curtis said.

“What is it?” Kevin McRae said.

“That should be evident,” Herbert Parker said and came around the desk behind Curtis and folded his arms across his chest.

“It’s your raise,” Curtis said and took his seat. “As you wished.”

Danny scanned the page. “Two hundred a year?”

Curtis nodded. “As to your other wishes, we’ll take them into consideration, but I wouldn’t hold out hope. Most were for luxuries, not necessities.”

Mark Denton seemed stricken of the power of speech for a moment. He raised the paper up by his ear, then slowly lowered it back to his knee. “It’s not enough anymore.”

“Excuse me, Patrolman?”

“It’s not enough,” Mark said. “You know that. Two hundred a year was a 1913 figure.”

“It’s what you asked for,” Parker said.

Danny shook his head. “It’s what the BSC coppers in the 1916 negotiations asked for. Cost of living has gone up—”

“Oh cost of living, my eye!” Curtis said.

“—seventy-three percent,” Danny said. “In seven months, sir. So two hundred a year? Without health benefits? Without sanitary conditions changing at the station houses?”