In this city, you have to pay attention. In this city, things are happening all the time, all over the place, and you don’t have to be a detective to smell evil in the wind.

Take this week’s tabloids: the face of a dead girl is splashed across the front page. She was found sprawled near a park bench not seven blocks from the police station. Detectives Carella and Brown soon discover the girl has a most unusual past. Meanwhile, the late-night news tracks the exploits of The Cookie Boy, a professional thief who leaves his calling card — a box of chocolate chip cookies — at the scene of each score. And while the detectives of the 87th Precinct are investigating these cases, one of them is being stalked by the man who killed his father.

Welcome to the Big Bad City.

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Chapter 1

The detectives hadn’t even known the two men were acquainted. One of the two men was in the holding cell because he’d inconsiderately shot a little Korean grocer who’d resisted his attempts to empty the store’s cash register. The other one was just being led into the cell. He’d been caught running from the scene of a liquor store holdup on Culver and Twelfth.

Aside from their occupations, the two men had nothing in common. One was white, the other was black. One was tall, the other was short. One had blue eyes, the other had brown eyes. One had the body of a weight lifter, possibly because he’d spent two years upstate on a prior felony. The one being led into the cell was somewhat plump. Sometimes, the plump ones were the ones to watch.

“Inside, let’s move it,” Andy Parker said and nudged him into the cell. Parker would later tell anyone who’d listen that he’d automatically figured the arresting blues had frisked the perp at the scene. “How was I to know he had a knife tucked into his crack?” he would ask the air.

In this instance, “crack” was not a controlled substance. Detective Parker was referring to the wedge between the man’s ample buttocks, from which hiding place he had drawn a sling-blade knife the instant he spotted the body builder slouching and sulking in the far corner of the cage. What Parker did the minute he saw the plump little magician pull a knife out of his ass was slam the cell door shut and turn the key. At that very moment, Steve Carella and Artie Brown were together leading nine handcuffed basketball players into the squadroom. Both detectives smelled trouble at once.

The trouble was not that any policeman was in danger from the chubby little knife-wielding man in the cage. But the body builder was in police custody, and presumably under police protection as well, and every cop in that room conjured up visions of monumental lawsuits against the city for allowing a black man–black, no less–to be carved up while in a locked cell–locked, no less–with a fat white assassin who kept slashing the air with the knife and repeating over and over again, “Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah?”

Carella fired a shot at the ceiling.

“A minute before I was about to,” Parker would later claim.

“You!” Carella yelled, sprinting toward the cage.

“Don’t get any ideas,” Brown warned the nine basketball players, who, although they were not lawyers, were already spouting learned Supreme Court decisions on false arrest and civil rights and such. Just in case one of them decided to drag the rest of his handcuffed buddies after him into the corridor, Brown drew his own gun and stood massively and menacingly between the players and the slatted wooden railing that separated the squadroom from the hallway outside.

“Oh, yeah?” the knifer in the cage said again, and slashed the air. The body builder kept backing away, hands circling the air in front of him. He had seen a few knife-wielders in his time, this dude, and he was waiting for the next gunshot from outside the cage, hoping the cops would help distract this crazy fat bastard who kept coming at him with the knife and yelling “Oh, yeah?” as if he was supposed to know what it meant. “Oh, yeah?” the corpulent little shit said again and again came at him.

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