Michael Goodman is up early Wednesday morning, a slight headache the price for his three glasses of wine. He showers, shaves, and sneaks out of the apartment while Carmen and Pop-Tart sleep. He returns with the paper and a box of sugared doughnuts.

Carmen is awake, and they breakfast on doughnuts and tea. Goodman tells her he’s going to spend the day with his daughter. This time, she asks him if she can borrow some of his clothes, and he readily agrees. He takes it as a good sign that she wants to get dressed, perhaps even go out.

While she showers, he reads the Times. There’s a small article about a woman from Connecticut who claims to have been raped in Central Park while she slept, a report of a bicycle rider injured by a hit-and-run motorist in the East Village, and a piece describing the alleged beating of a carriage horse by its owner on Fifty-Ninth Street as horrified pedestrians looked on.

There is no article about Russell Bradford, no mention of his being gunned down and left for dead on West 129th Street, in the shadow of the West Side Highway, shortly before his seventeenth birthday. Perhaps the omission has something to do with the fact that, unlike the woman and the pedestrian and even the horse, Russell Bradford was not white.

Or perhaps not.

Carmen emerges from the shower wearing the clothes Goodman’s put out for her: the new jeans he bought in Florida and a white button-down shirt. Her feet swim in a pair of his sneakers. Although she’s the same height as he is, her body is that of a teenager, and his clothes make her look like a child who’s raided some grown-up’s closet. The bruises on her face have faded almost to the point of being invisible, and her hair has taken on a luster that a day and a half ago would have seemed unimaginable. She is nothing less than stunning.

Goodman says nothing, but he knows full well that the look in his eyes has betrayed his silence. He turns to the phone and calls his mother-in-law, who answers on the first ring.

“Hello,” he says. “It’s me, Michael.”

“Yes, hello, Michael.”

“How’s Kelly?”

“She seems okay. She’s asking for you. This is too much for me, Michael,” she tells him. “I’m too old to start being a mother all over again.”

The three of them - Goodman, his daughter, and his mother-in-law - had gone together to a counseling agency shortly after Shirley’s death. It had been the counselor’s suggestion that Kelly move in with her grandmother for a while, just until Goodman could find a new job and get back on his feet financially. At the time, Goodman had suspected that the real motivation behind the suggestion had been the counselor’s concern for Goodman’s mother-in-law, her perception that she needed Kelly even more than Goodman did at that particular moment. Like her daughter, Shirley had been an only child, and her death had been truly devastating to her mother, who herself had been widowed several years earlier. Allowing Kelly to stay with her grandmother after her mother’s death had therefore seemed like a kindness to both child and grandmother, so Goodman had gone along with the suggestion. Now, however, it seems as though it’s time for him to reclaim his daughter.

“Let me speak with her,” he says.

After a minute, he hears his daughter’s soft “Hi, Daddy.”

“Hi, angel. You up for some fun?”

“What kind of fun?”

“Oh, I don’t know. We’ll think of something. I’ll pick you up in a little while, okay?”

“Okay. Daddy?”

“Yes?” he says, fearful he’s about to hear about her headaches.

“Can Larus come?”

“Absolutely.”

Carmen announces she’s going out as well, that she’s going to visit a girlfriend, see if she can get some “real” clothes.

“You’re rejecting my wardrobe?” he asks in mock pain.

“I reject nothing about you,” she says, and kisses him on the tip of his nose.

He gives her the second set of keys that came with the new lock to his door. They find Tony the Super, who comes up with a spare key to the downstairs door, but only after giving Carmen a thorough up-and-down and Goodman a knowing wink.

At Lexington Avenue, Goodman and Carmen go their separate ways, he to the west, she downtown. As soon as she’s out of sight, he takes his index finger and touches the tip of his nose. It seems to tingle.

The sun feels good, and Goodman coaxes Kelly into going to Central Park, Larus in tow. But after awhile, though she complains of no headaches, he notices her squinting as though the light is too much for her. He blames himself for not thinking of a cap or a pair of sunglasses.

“How would you like to go to the museum?” he asks her.

“Can we have lunch there?”

“You bet.”

The museum is their museum, the American Museum of Natural History, the one they always go to. They know it almost by heart, from the dinosaurs to the great whale to North America Mammals exhibit. They have their favorites: the pearl-diver exhibit, Peter Stuyvesant coming ashore to meet the Indians, the geological crystals, and anything where you can push a button and make things happen.

Today, they head for Ocean Life and Biology of Fishes, where it’s dark and cool. They make their rounds, following the same route they always do. They check on the killer whales, the sharks, the pearl divers in their underwater caves, and watch a tiny movie showing the angler fish cast for its prey for the hundredth time.

Lunch means the cafeteria, where they dine on grilled cheese sandwiches and iced tea at a long wooden table. Kelly cuts her sandwich into tiny squares, which from time to time Goodman has to remind her to eat.

“I’m ready,” she tells him between bites.

“Ready for what?”

“Another chapter of the story.”

“Ah,” he says, though in truth, he’d at that very moment been working on the next segment and knew precisely what she was ready for the moment she spoke. “The Ballerina Princess. Where was she when last we left her?”

“She was being good even though they kept giving her these tests. Is she finished with the tests?”

The Ballerina Princess (Continued)

The Ballerina Princess had indeed been very good about the tests. She’d kicked obediently when they’d hit her knee with the rubber hammer, she’d laughed when they’d tickled the bottom of her foot, and she’d said “Ouch!” when they’d stuck her toes with the safety pins, just as she was supposed to do. And the whole time, she never complained once. So it certainly seemed only fair that there should be no more tests.

But, alas! Even in the magical kingdom of Yew Nork, things weren’t always fair. And it was decided that the Ballerina Princess needed another test after all.

“Was it the kind of test that hurt her?” Kelly asks him.

“I’m afraid so,” he has to tell her. “At least it was the kind that hurts a little bit.”

But the Ballerina Princess was very brave, remember. And on the day of the test, she wasn’t alone. On one side of her, she had her father, the Keeper of the Numbers. And on the other side, she had the brave and loyal Prince Larus.

“Did she cry?”

She cried a little bit, which was all right, because sometimes crying a bit could actually make the Ballerina Princess feel better. But the test was an important one, because it would help the doctors figure out what the matter was and how to make her all better.

“Can I go back home with you, Daddy?” she suddenly asks him.

“Would you like that?”

“If Grandma won’t mind.”

“We can call Grandma,” he says. “I’m sure she won’t mind.”

“Can I sleep at your house?”

“Of course you can.”

On this Wednesday, Annise Bradford uses her lunch hour to travel 115 blocks each way by subway to spend twenty minutes in her mother’s room at Jacoby Hospital.

“Hello, Nana,” she says, using the name everyone’s called her mother since before she can remember.

“Hello, Ni.” She sounds it like knee. She still speaks out of the corner of her mouth. One side of her body continues to be virtually paralyzed. The doctors have admitted that they’d hoped for noticeable improvement by this time.

“How you feeling, Nana?”

Her mother totally ignores the question, asks instead, “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” Annise Bradford says, before the tears burst from her.

Nana gives her a minute. “It’s Russell,” she says then, “isn’t it?”

“It’s Russell,” Annise Bradford sobs. And she falls to her knees beside the bed and lowers her head onto the mattress, her shoulders heaving uncontrollably. Her mother reaches out with the only arm she can move and cradles her child’s head in the crook of her elbow, rocking it gently to the rhythm of some ancient, wordless song.

Nana will die in her sleep less than forty-eight hours from this moment. The doctors will attribute her death to complications arising from the stroke. Her death certificate will identify heart failure as the official cause of death.

But in a sense, at least, it can rightly be said that the twenty kilos will have claimed their third victim.

Late Wednesday afternoon, Ray Abbruzzo and Daniel Riley are about to enter an abandoned brownstone on 144th Street in the South Bronx. They intend to use an empty apartment on the top floor as an OP, an observation post. An observation-post operation is a variation on the theme of the buy-and-bust operation. Instead of depending upon an undercover officer to buy drugs before calling in the backup team to make arrests, officers man the observation post, scanning the street below - sometimes with binoculars, sometimes with the naked eye - for drug sales. As they spot a transaction, they radio a description of the buyer to the backup team. As soon as the departing buyer rounds the corner, he’s scooped up. After two or three such transactions, the sellers themselves are arrested, and their stash - if the observing officers have been able to pinpoint its location - is seized. The buyers are charged with misdemeanor possession counts and are often permitted to “plead down” in court to disorderly conduct. The sellers are charged with felonies - “observation sales” rather than “direct sales” - but every bit as serious as had they been caught selling to an undercover officer.

Abbruzzo spots a lanky black kid who looks familiar, which is not altogether unusual.

“Hey,” he says to Riley, “isn’t that Larry Lookout?”

Riley looks. “Yeah,” he says, “Syracuse.” Even though today the kid’s wearing a different jacket.

“Yo!” Abbruzzo calls out, just loud enough for the kid to look over. As soon as he has the kid’s attention, he motions him to follow them into the building.

“Hey, kid,” Abbruzzo says as soon as they’re off the street. “Howya doing?”

“Okay.”

“What’s your name again? Bobby?”

“Robbie.”

“Right, Robbie McCray.”

“I didn’t do nothin’,” Robbie tells them. “I’m clean.”

Abbruzzo laughs. “Sure you are,” he says. “We got no beef with you, Robbie. It’s your friend Russell we’re looking for.”

“Yeah, we think maybe he jerked us off about that white guy,” says Riley. To illustrate the phrase “jerked off,” he makes an up-and-down movement with his fist in the area above his crotch.

“That place was clean as a whistle,” Abbruzzo says. “Guy turns out to be a fucking accountant.”

Robbie eyes both detectives in turn, as though they’re jerking him off, before saying, “Dint you hear?”

“Hear?” Riley echoes.

“Russell got popped,” Robbie says. “Caught hisself a coupla caps downtown.” Manhattan is downtown to anyone who lives in the Bronx, even though there are parts of Manhattan that are farther north than parts of the Bronx.

“When?”

“Monday night.” This means any time from dark to nine o’clock Tuesday morning.

“Where?”

“Wayova on the Wesside, by the riva. Roun twenny-fif.” Which, of course, is 125th Street.

“No shit,” says Abbruzzo.

Later, upstairs in the OP, Abbruzzo has a thought. Wiping the coffee from his chin, he shares his thought with Riley. “The way I figure it, maybe it was there after all,” he says.

“It?”

“The Mole’s stash,” Abbruzzo says. “Or maybe not. Maybe he keeps it somewhere else. Either way, someone seems to have got pretty pissed off at Russell for putting us onto him.”

“Or,” Riley says, “somebody wasted Russell for something completely different. Like maybe he dissed the wrong guy. Or owed some fucker twenty cents and was late payin’ it back.”

“Maybe,” Abbruzzo says. “Remind me to check with somebody in the Twenty-sixth. Find out who caught the homicide, see what the word is on the street.” He sips his coffee, dribbles some more down his chin, ignores it. “In the meantime, maybe we oughta take a second look at our friend the Mole.” The coffee drips from the tip of his chin onto the front of his shirt.

Halfway home, Goodman realizes that he hasn’t told his daughter about either Carmen or Pop-Tart. He figures she’s had enough surprises lately.

“Hey, angel,” he calls out, since she’s perched atop his shoulders, holding onto his head for balance. “I’ve got a couple of guests staying with me. They’re both looking forward to meeting you.”

“What kind of guests?”

He immediately opts for cowardice. “Well, one’s very short, and he’s got whiskers-”

“Whiskers?” She laughs.

“Whiskers.”

“How many legs does he have?”

“Let me see,” Goodman says, pretending to search his memory. “One . . . two . . . three . . . four!”

“Does he by any chance go ‘meow’?”

“I think he may when he’s a little older. Right now, he’s only up to ‘mew.’“

“You have a kitten, Daddy?”

“How come you’re so smart, angel?”

“‘Cause you gave me giant hints.”

He shifts Larus from one hand to the other.

“Who’s the other guest?” she asks excitedly. “Does he go ‘bowwow’?”

“No, and he’s a she.”

That stops her, but only for a moment. “What does she say?”

“Oh, she says things like ‘Hello’ and ‘How are you?’ and ‘Nice to meet you.’“

“She must be a parrot,” Kelly announces.

When they reach his building, Goodman unlocks the downstairs door and, to announce their arrival, buzzes upstairs on the intercom. By the time they make it to the fifth floor - Kelly having dismounted and leading the way, Goodman and Larus struggling to keep up - Carmen is waiting at the door.

“This is Carmen,” Goodman begins the introductions, “and this-”

“And this must be the Ballerina Princess,” beams Carmen, who’s somehow managed to lower herself to her knees and become Kelly’s height.

“And this is Larus,” Kelly announces, rescuing her mascot before her father can drop him to the floor.

“Pleased to meet you, Larus.”

A loud mewing sound, followed by the sudden appearance of black fur on the top of the sofa back, informs them that they’ve slighted someone.

“And this is Pop-Tart,” Goodman says, completing the protocol. He watches as Kelly goes immediately to the kitten, questioning his name no more than she’s questioned Carmen’s. Pop-Tart responds by allowing his head to be scratched and back to be stroked, but he keeps a wary eye on Larus, with whose species he’s apparently unfamiliar.

Goodman looks around as he catches his breath. He’s already noticed Carmen’s outfit. Tight-fitting black jeans and a matching T-shirt have replaced his own baggy loaner clothes of the morning, and she’s had her hair cut or done or something, making her look younger and even prettier than before. Now he takes in the rest of his apartment. His sofa’s been turned at a slight angle; his broken coffee table has retreated to the corner, leaving more room to get around. Last night’s empty Chianti bottle has found its way atop the radiator and sprouted a bunch of daisies, and somehow, the place looks cleaner and brighter than it did before.

Out of the corner of his eye, he notices Carmen looking at him. “Very nice,” he smiles. Her return smile suggests a touch of pride, and perhaps even a trace of relief at his approval. He catches himself wondering if her “couple of days” might not have a renewal clause buried in the fine print, and the thought fills him with an undeniable sense of excitement.

Goodman’s down to his last $20, but tomorrow’s a payday, so he splurges and orders a pizza. By adding the rest of the lettuce, Carmen manages to reproduce last evening’s salad. They gather around the card table and play family. The usually appetiteless Kelly eats two slices of pizza and shares a third with Pop-Tart, and Goodman dares to believe for a moment that being reunited with him is what she’s needed all along. His eyes suddenly fill, and he quickly brings his paper napkin to them, drying them and blowing his nose in one motion to hide his reaction. But as he lowers his napkin back to his lap, thinking he’s pulled the maneuver off quite nicely, he catches Carmen looking at him. She misses nothing, he sees.

They watch an old episode of Taxi on TV. When it’s bedtime, Carmen begs for a turn on the floor, but Kelly points out that there are more girls than boys, so the girls get the bed.

“Looks like you and me on the floor for sure,” Goodman tells Pop-Tart, but he’s wrong again. An hour later, he’s still trying to cushion his hipbone, while the kitten sleeps peacefully on the sofa bed with Carmen, Kelly, and Larus.

“Looks like they’re out for the count,” Daniel Riley says to Ray Abbruzzo. The two of them have been shivering in a doorway on East Ninety-Second Street, peering up at a fifth-floor window for the last two and a half hours. They had to get special authorization from a lieutenant to skip the evening’s buy-and-bust operation and do this surveillance instead, and now all they have to show for it are a lot of frozen toes and a couple of stiff necks. They step out of the doorway and begin walking east.

“I can’t figure this fucker out,” Abbruzzo says. “He’s definitely the guy that the Bradford kid met with. We know Bradford was walking around with a pocketful of pure shit. He even told us that the guy he was meeting was his connection. Yet the guy never looks behind him when he walks, and when we turn the place upside down, it’s clean as a whistle.”

“And now he’s playing Mr. Family Togetherness.” Riley rubs the back of his neck as he walks.

“We could stand out here playin’ with our dicks for two weeks and not see a fuckin’ thing,” Abbruzzo says. “Maybe it’s time to bring in OCCB, see if they’ll spring for a wiretap.”

Shortly after midnight, Big Red walks into the Uptown Lounge on 125th Street. He’s recognized by the regulars, with whom he exchanges greetings and high fives.

“Hey Red. Howsitgoing?”

“Whassup, man?”

“Heard you spent a night at the Centre Street Hilton.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Red smiles. “How about that?” He spots the man he’s looking for sitting at a table in the corner, and he heads that way. The man starts to stand, but Big Red motions him to stay put, lowering himself into the empty chair.

“Lookin’ good, Red. They treat you awright?”

“Red carpet for the Red Man.”

“Solid. Good to see you.”

“So,” Big Red says, leaning forward over the table, “how’d it go?”

“Like eatin’ pussy,” the other man smiles.

Big Red leans back and laughs. “You always did have a way with words, Hammer.”

“So when do you wanna whack that shit up, Red?”

“I got the girls lined up for ten o’clock tomorrow night. I think we’ll use that apartment up on Gun Hill Road.”

“That’s cool,” Hammer says. “Want me there?”

“Yeah, you be there,” Big Red says. “You an’ ol’ Buster Brown.”

Hammer smiles. “Buster Brown” is street talk for a sawed-off shotgun.