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What? Say that again?

“Jacobi thinks the whole station is going down the tubes This is between us three, OK?”

“OK,” Conklin said. “What’s happened?”

Brady said, “In the past year, a half dozen drug dealers have been shot in crack houses and stash pads all across the city. The cash and the drugs disappear, never to be seen again. Word on the street is that the robbers are cops.”

No wonder Brady was pissed. There was a bad cop epidemic. And we were just about the last to know.

I said, “Are you thinking these cops who’re ripping off drug dealers could be the same rogue cops we’re looking at for the check-cashing stores?”

“Could be, or maybe not. We’ve got no surveillance of the shooters, of course, and no one’s naming names. I’m just saying, keep this in mind.”

When I got back to my desk, there was a note on my chair, handwritten on my own FROM THE DESK OF LINDSAY BOXER notepad.

The note was in block letters.

It read, WATCH YOUR BACK, BITCH. REMEMBER WHO YOUR FRIENDS ARE. THEY WEAR BLUE.

I looked around the squad room.

The night-shift guys were getting ready to check out while the day shift was just settling in. I saw about a dozen and a half cops I’d worked with for years. I loved some of them, liked many of them. But one of these guys was warning me not to cross the thin blue line.

Not even if catching bad cops meant catching murderers.

But then, blind loyalty was a bone-deep part of being a cop. I did wonder, though, if this note was from one of the Windbreaker cops. Could one or more of them work in this very squad? Or was the note from any one of the cops in this room who had simply seen the open investigation file I had left in plain sight on the computer?

I showed the note to Conklin, who gave me a questioning look. I shrugged and put the note in my handbag.

I would watch my back. But I was shaken. Next chance I got, I was going to have to report this to Brady.

CHAPTER 31

AT EIGHT THIRTY that morning Richard Blau had his keys in his hand and was about to open the folding metal gates in front of his check-cashing store on the corner of Market Street and Sixteenth. Blau was a careful man. He and Donna had successfully run their business for over thirty years and were closing in on retirement.

He had heard that a couple of stores like theirs had been robbed in the last week, making him glad he had an alarm tied into a central station and also had a shotgun behind the counter.

His wife had gone to park the car in the underground lot around the corner. Blau always opened the store. First he unlocked the padlock; he had started sliding the metal gates back from the plate glass window when he saw three men get out of a gray sedan two cars up from the entrance to the store.

The three men wore police Windbreakers and billed caps, which gave him pause, but then he caught a look at the identical latex masks they were all wearing.

They were latex pig masks. There was no unseeing that.

He had a panicky thought that if he could somehow get into the store and close the door behind him, this nightmare could be derailed. He could call the police—but he canceled the idea almost as soon as he had it. Last thing he wanted was for Donna to approach the store and get shot.

The men in the pig masks were coming toward him quickly. Their timing was good. There were no pedestrians, and the few drivers were focused on getting through the next traffic light. Blau saw that each of the men had a gun. He had to outthink them. He had to use his brain.

Blau raised his hands.

When the men were six or seven feet away, Blau said, “I’m not armed. I’ll give you whatever you want. Just don’t hurt me.”

“OK, man. We don’t want to hurt anyone,” said one of the robbers. He seemed to be in charge. And he seemed to be a youngish man. His voice was young.

Blau tried to take in everything about him so he could give a good report of the robbery after it was over. He thought the guy who had talked to him was about five ten. And Blau saw from his hands that he was white. He couldn’t describe the man’s build because of the boxy shape of the Windbreaker, but he thought he might be able to recognize the guy’s voice if he ever heard it again.

Blau said, “What do you want? My wallet is in my back pocket. Take it. I’ve got a few hundred in cash in there. And my watch is pretty new. Take that, too.”

Blau was still holding the keys in his hand. There was nothing he could do about that.

A different one of the three men said, “Let’s go into your store, OK, Mr. Blau?”

They knew him. They knew who he was . Blau felt faint. He’d never had a gun pointed at him before. He almost said, “Do I know you?” but shut the thought down.

If the guy thought Blau knew him … He thought of Donna. He prayed she wouldn’t show up now. She wouldn’t be able to handle this.

Blau said, “OK. I’m going to open the door now, and let’s do this fast before customers come in.”

“Lead the way, Mr. Blau,” said one of the masked men. “Let’s go.”

CHAPTER 32

BLAU FIDDLED WITH the gates and the keys and the double locks. His hands were shaking and he could smell his own sweat. He thought there was every chance he could be living his last minutes on this earth. He got the front door locks open, and then the door creaked and swung wide, and then he hit the lights so that when his wife showed up, she could see through the plate glass window. See that this was a holdup.

Please, Donna, don’t come into the store.

One of the fucking armed robbers complained, “Hey. We don’t need no steenking light, man.”

“I have to see so I can open the safe ,” Blau said. “Believe me, I want you out fast. I’m happy to give you the money, all right? Just trust me, OK? I’m working with you.”

Blau didn’t wait for a reply. He walked deliberately and quickly past the block of folding chairs, all the way to the back of the store where the lines were painted on the floor, delineating aisles leading to the teller windows. Next to the windows, on the far right side of the wall, was the security door that divided the store into the public space and the office area behind it.

The safe was in the office. Blau turned his back to the robbers to open the door, telling those shits, “After I give you the money, you can go out the back door. Be safer for you.”

The men, maybe they were boys, the way they were all jumpy, were crowding into the office area with him. One of them, the smallest pig, was getting anxious, looking around, saying “Let’s go let’s go let’s go.”

Blau turned his eyes away from the credenza where he kept the shotgun and pointed out the wooden cabinet below the counter.

“The safe’s in here,” he said.

The one who had been saying “Let’s go” was now saying “Come on come on come on.”

Blau’s hands were out of control. He could barely hold a key, and both the key and the cabinet lock were small. He poked at the lock until he finally got the key into it, turned it, and opened the lower cabinet where he kept the old cast-iron safe. Taking no chances, he angled his body so they could see the safe and said to one of the boys, “You’re in my light.”

He tried not to look at the kid, give him any sense whatsoever that he knew who he was, but his mind was running through the faces of all the kids, white, black, Latino, who came into this place to cash checks. His tellers talked to them. The transactions were brief. The only time he ever talked to a customer was when there was a problem.

“Step on it, Daddy,” said a guy with a gun.

Blau said, “I am stepping on it.”