In Corey’s brain a screen showed Henry McDermott at the age of twenty-two. McDermott was wearing a policeman’s uniform. There was no action on the screen, just the image of the young McDermott, the rookie policeman.

“Here’s how it was,” McDermott said. “I was attached to the Nineteenth Precinct; the city was smaller then. Now it’s the Thirty-Seventh. All right, they had me on the night shift; the beat was Addison to Munroe, Second Street to Seventh. Every time I walked the beat I passed the house where I lived. I was born and raised in that house; so don’t tell me I don’t know this neighborhood. I know this neighborhood like I know the taste inside my mouth.”

“I lived on Fifth. On Third there was this bunch of thugs. They called themselves the Third Street Dragons. Late teens, early twenties. The worst. I mean the very worst. They had every store owner on Addison pissing in his pants. The Third Street Dragons. They wore baseball caps; the emblem was a dragon’s head. You asked them what the angle was, they said it was just an athletic club. You tried to get anything on them, it was nothing doing. They were slick and tightly organized, and there was nothing to go on. And people were getting robbed, getting slugged, getting butchered.”

“Finally I made up my mind. Comes a night I sneak up on one of them, and just on general principles I use the club. He goes to the hospital and damn near dies and nobody knows who did it. So all right, that’s fine. That’s just how I want it, hitting them in the dark so they can’t see who the hitter is. A week later another one goes to the hospital, then a third and a fourth. And that was all. It wasn’t dark enough that night and that fourth Dragon musta seen who’d hit him just before he passed out. A few nights after that they slip a note under my door. It’s black crayon and it reads ‘You ask for it you get it,’ and that’s all it reads.”

“And what they did, they made me wait. It was a week and then another week and I was sweating every minute. One time I passed an alley and a voice says, just loud enough for me to hear, ‘We ain’t in no hurry, McDermott,’ and I rush the alley. But there ain’t nobody there. He musta crawled through some cellar window.”