Keith DeCandido: Four Walls

What Mac did was a step down a dangerous path that led to the likes of Dean Truby.

Still, Flack said none of this to Terry Sullivan, because while Sullivan was his friend, so was Mac Taylor. You didn't rat out your friends. Not even to other friends.

That was weak. Flack didn't do weak.

The pain in his ribs grew tighter. He imagined he could still hear the last Percocet rattling around against the plastic.

Finally he said the only thing he could say, words that were still true regardless of any doubts Flack might have had: "Mac's the best. Department'd be a worse place without him."

Sullivan lifted his coffee cup. "Then here's to him."

Flack didn't lift his cup very high, as it hurt.

Seeing him wince in pain, Sullivan said, "Jesus Christ, Donnie, take the damn pill, would you please?"

"Maybe later. How's Katie doing?"

It never failed. The best way to distract Sullivan had always been to ask him about his daughter. His baby face broke into a huge smile. "She's the best. You know she's in kindergarten now?"

"Really?" Flack couldn't believe it. "Wasn't she just born last week?"

"I know. It's crazy. We can't keep up with her; it's like we have to buy a whole new wardrobe every month. And she's reading, too. Teachers wanted to put her in the first grade, but Shannon didn't wanna. I guess I don't blame her-keep her with kids her own age, y'know?"

They kept talking through two more cups of coffee each, before Sullivan looked at his watch. "I gotta get a move on. Uncle Cal'll be on my ass."

"'Uncle Cal'?" Flack asked. He tried not to grind his teeth as he reached around to get his wallet.

"Calvin Ursitti. He's my shift lieutenant."

"You don't call him that to his face, do you?"

"Do I look suicidal?"

Flack chuckled and tossed a five down onto the table. Taking a deep breath, he then got to his feet.

"Will you please take the pill, for the love of Christ?"

"I'm fine," Flack said through clenched teeth. "Give Shannon a hug for me, okay?"

"Shannon hates your guts, Donnie."

Flack sighed. "Still?"

"You went out with her sister and dumped her after two dates, Donnie. You think my wife's gonna forgive that anytime this millennium?"

"Apparently not." Flack looked around, caught Doris's eye, and gave her a friendly wave. Doris just rolled her eyes and went back to reading the Post.

"She's crazy about you," Sullivan deadpanned. "I gotta get the ferry. Be good, Donnie."

They left the diner, Sullivan headed to the ferry terminal, Flack headed to his car. He pulled out his cell phone and turned it back on. He didn't turn it off very often, but he hadn't seen Sullivan in way too long. Just once, he wanted to get through a meal without being interrupted.

Only a cop would consider three cups of coffee a meal.

But then, Flack had been living on coffee lately. He had to do something to swim upstream against the sleepless nights. The pain was worse when he was lying down.

Miraculously, there were no messages on the phone. Somehow, he had made it all the way to seven in the morning without the NYPD requiring his services.

Flack didn't anticipate that state of affairs surviving to his lunch hour.

DINA ROSENGAUS HATED THE morning shift.

It wasn't the getting-up-early part. Dina had always been a morning person, both back home in Russia when she was a little girl and since coming to the United States as a teenager. And it wasn't even every morning shift. Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays were fine.

The other four days of the week, though, the morning shift was a nightmare, thanks to some ridiculous concept known as alternate-side-of-the-street parking.

In order to keep the streets clean, the city of New York designated two-and-a-half-hour blocks during the day when one side of the street had to be clear of parked cars so that the street sweepers could come through.

That was the theory, anyhow. Dina couldn't recall ever actually seeing these mythical street sweepers.

Dina worked at Belluso's, an Italian bakery and cafй in the Riverdale section of the Bronx-in fact, it was located on Riverdale Avenue, right in the neighborhood's primary business district. Riverdale was predominantly Jewish-that was why Dina's family had moved there-and Dina had been surprised to find an Italian bakery there, but the place was popular. They served cookies, cannoli, pastries, coffee, tea, bread, and more. You could come in and grab something to go or sit at one of the round tables for as long as you wanted. Salvatore Belluso, the owner and Dina's boss, always said that he wanted people to feel like they were in a cafй in Florence and encouraged customers to stay as long as they pleased. He even had a clock upstairs with the hands removed to symbolize that it didn't matter what time it was.

But it did matter to Dina what time it was when her shift started. Parking in the area was hard enough under the best of circumstances, but on weekday mornings, several spots were unavailable between 7:30 and 8:00, and several more were off-limits between 9:30 and 11:00. That made parking nigh impossible. Sure, all the spots were legal when she arrived at a little before seven to open the bakery, but they wouldn't be for long, and Mr. Belluso didn't like it when you left the counter to do "personal things." Not getting a ticket apparently qualified as personal. One time, she had to park seven blocks away-she might as well have left the car home.

Today, though, she was lucky. Someone was pulling out of a spot on Fieldston Road, a one-way street that ran alongside Riverdale between West 236th and West 238th. (There was no West 237th, at least over here. This made even less sense to Dina than alternate-side-of-the-street parking, but she'd learned to accept it.)

She had begged Mr. Belluso to keep her mornings limited to the weekends-or to Wednesdays. For some reason, there was no alternate-side parking on Wednesdays. But Dina hadn't been there long enough; Maria and Jeanie had Wednesday mornings, and the competition for weekend spots was fierce. Most of the girls who worked there (Mr. Belluso only hired female high school and college students to work the counter) wanted the weekend also, since they didn't have school. To some extent, Dina was a victim of the schedule, as most of her summer-session classes at Manhattan College were in the afternoon.

As she turned the corner onto Riverdale Avenue, a bus pulled up to the stop right in front of the bakery. The back door whooshed open and four people stepped out, one of whom was Jeanie Rodriguez.

Jeanie was an undergraduate student at Lehman College, planning to be a nurse. They made an odd pairing. Jeanie was small and compact, whereas Dina was tall and broad shouldered. Jeanie's hips were modest and sexy; Dina's were wide and ungainly. Back in Russia, she'd have been considered healthy; here in the States, they seemed to want their women to all look like Paris Hilton. Jeanie was better-looking than Paris Hilton, though, in Dina's opinion. She had a bright face; olive skin that looked much better than Dina's pale complexion; and small, long-fingered hands, whereas Dina's were short and stubby.

The only thing that kept Dina from despising this skinny, pretty, perky young woman was the fact that she was also the sweetest, nicest person Dina had ever met. When Dina had started at Belluso's four months earlier, Jeanie had been very patient with Dina, especially since her English still wasn't as good as Dina wanted it to be.

Jeanie was also the most senior of the six girls who worked at Belluso's and had become the unofficial manager of the store. (Making her the official manager would have required that Mr. Belluso pay her more.) That meant she was the one Mr. Belluso trusted with the keys, so Dina was very glad to see her coming off the bus just as Dina arrived. If she hadn't, Dina would've been stuck outside waiting in the heat. It was already unbearably hot this morning, and she knew it was going to get worse as the day went on. The one advantage to being on the morning shift was that she missed what one of the regular customers called the fly-under-the-magnifying-glass effect. Belluso's had a huge picture window that faced west, and in the late afternoon, the sun blared in, raising the temperature in the place higher than the cheap air-conditioning system could handle.