Bad sign.

Even though Ron Pulaski tried hard to be like Lincoln Rhyme and not believe in signs or superstitions, he kind of did.

He started forward. Stopped.

Pulaski had been spending a lot of nerves on the idea that he was going undercover. He was a street cop, a beat cop – he and his twin brother, also blue, used to say. He was thinking of bad hip-hop riff the bros threw together.

A beat cop, a street cop, write you up a ticket and send you on your way.

Or let your know your rights and put your ass away …

In Rikers, the island, in the bay.

He knew next to nothing about the art of sets and covert work – so brilliantly played by people like Fred Dellray, the tall, lean African American FBI agent who could be anyone from a Caribbean drug dealer to a Charles Taylor–style warlord to a Fortune 500 CEO.

Man was a born actor. Voices, postures, expressions … everything. And apparently this Gielgud guy too (maybe Dellray worked with him). And Serpico. Even if he got shot.

Beat cop, street cop, walking through the sleet cop …

The rap riff skipped through his head, somehow stilling the uneasiness.

Why’re you so damn nervous?

Not like he was having to pass with druggies or gangbangers. Richard Logan’s family or friends, whoever these visitors were, seemed like your average law-abiding Manhattanites. The Watchmaker had moved in a different circle, a higher level than most criminals. Oh, he’d been guilty of murder. But it was impossible to picture Logan, the Watchmaker, the sophisticate, in a crack house or in the double-wide of a meth cooker. Fine restaurants, chess matches, museums had been more his thing. Still, he was aware that the Watchmaker had tried to kill Rhyme the last time they’d met. Maybe he’d left instructions in his will for a hit man associate of his to do just what Pulaski was doing at the moment: hang out in the funeral home, identify any nervous undercover cops, drag ’em into the alley afterward.

All right. Jesus. Get real.

There is a risk, he reflected, but not a bullet in the back of the head. It’s that you’ll fuck up and disappoint Lincoln and Amelia.

That damn uncertainty, the questioning. They never go away. Not completely.

At least he thought he looked the part. Black suit, white shirt, narrow tie. (He’d almost worn his dress NYPD tie but decided: Are you out of your fucking mind? It didn’t have little badges on it but one of these people might’ve known cops in the past. Be smart.) He had scruffed up, per Lincoln Rhyme’s request. A one-day growth of beard (a bit pathetic since you had to get close to see the blond stubble), shirt stained, shoes scuffed. And he’d been practicing his cold stare.

Inscrutable, dangerous.