As Rossiter entered the precinct, three-thirty, as usual half an hour before his tour started, Sears was leading a suspect—a bodybuilder with a shaved head, his skull fuzzy—across the room.
“You missed all the fun,” Sears said.
“You think so?” Rossiter said. “Aren’t you jumping the gun? What time did you go on duty?”
“Johnny Carrot,” the suspect introduced himself to Rossiter. “I got myself indicted just to get a little attention.”
Carrot wore an Armani shirt, Diesel jeans, chancletas, white socks.
“How’s your crazy pal?” Sears asked.
Rossiter sank into a desk chair. Sears walked away with her charge.
The precinct was loud with commotion. Rossiter realized he hated the piss-yellow walls.
“You gotta bear with me, Mr. Green,” Officer Monroe Lacey was saying to a middle-aged man with skull-like teeth. “I got acid reflux. You ever get that?”
“Couldn’t you check for fingerprints?” Mr. Green asked. “Or … I don’t know … some forensics?”
“You watch a lot of cops show on TV?” Lacey asked.
Spotting Rossiter, Lacey asked, “Harry hasn’t got you bounced back to the bag yet?”
“I think,” Mr. Green was saying, “there gotta be fingerprints all over the car.”
“Look, fingerprints, forensics,” Lacey said. “You know how much that costs the city?”
Another cop—Kevin Goodyear—led a gangbanger in a bloody shirt back to Booking.
“Hey, big guy,” Goodyear said to Rossiter, “heard your ass is in a sling ’cause you keep romancing Dickinson.”
“Yo, bitch,” the gangbanger called to a hooker, sitting across the room in a bright red rain slicker over her panties and bare breasts.
Goodyear shoved the gangbanger.
“All the acid in my stomach comes up,” Lacey was telling Mr. Green, “burns the shit outta my vocal cords.”
“I want a doctor!” The gangbanger broke free. Handcuffed, he lurched toward Rossiter. “The fuckin’ drunk stabbed me!”
“You mean the civilian you tried to roll?” Goodyear said.
The gangbanger’s blood splattered the sleeve of Mr. Green’s camel’s-hair jacket.
“Jesus Christ!” Lacey said.
He pushed the gangbanger away from him. Two cops grabbed the gangbanger, led him away.
“You might not wanna touch that,” Rossiter told Mr. Green, nodding at the blood spatter.
Opening his desk, he pulled out a tissue, which he offered to Mr. Green, who swiped at the sleeve of his jacket.
“You gotta watch it with the AIDS,” Rossiter said.
Mr. Green dabbed at his sleeve and angrily asked Lacey, “Are you going to help me or not?”
“Six A.M.,” Lacey said, “we fished a meter maid out of a garbage can floating in the river. Twenty-two pieces of her. Very hard to ID that. So we’re a little busy today, but your problem’s very important to us.”
Rossiter felt the beginning prick of one of his migraines like a flash of distant heat lightning. He rubbed his eyes, swallowed bile, and looked at a young man with a tattoo of his own face covering the left side of his face, who was handcuffed to his chair arm.
The young man glanced at a Ziploc bag on the desk facing Rossiter’s.
The bag was filled with dried greenish leaves and twigs.
“Not mine, boss,” the young man said.
“You work in a pizza parlor?” Rossiter asked.
“What?” the young man said. “No.”
“That rules out oregano,” Rossiter said.
A heavyset woman in a white blouse, a tight blue skirt with lateral creases across her belly, and a jacket—Detective Jackie Shoop—sat down at the desk opposite Rossiter, and, without looking at the young man, told him, “Your prints are on their way to Albany.”
Rossiter picked up the phone and dialed.
“Linda,” he said into the phone, “is Harry out of the examination yet? Yeah? Well, call me as soon as he is.”
He hung up and stared at the phone.
“So why don’t you tell us your name?” Shoop said to the young man handcuffed to the chair. “Albany matches your prints, we get your name anyway.”
“Not if I got no record,” the young man said.
“You know a lot about the system for someone who says he’s never been in it,” Shoop said.
“No convictions,” the young man said.
Rossiter sprung out of his chair and put his face so close to the young man’s face he could feel the kid breathing.
“Tell the detective your name, you little shit,” Rossiter said, “or I’ll stick my hand down your throat, grab your lungs, rip them out, and shove them up your ass, got it?”
“Can he do that?” the young man asked Shoop, who shrugged: “I didn’t hear anything.”
Rossiter’s phone rang. He grabbed it.
“Harry skated,” Friday said.
Rossiter grinned.