Abe didn’t like it.

The Giants beat the Phillies, 4 to 3.

After the last out Hardy stayed in his seat, drinking beer and waiting for what crowd there was to thin out. They stopped selling beer after the eighth inning and he’d gone back and bought three to hold him over to the end of the game. He still had one, open but untouched, in the deep pocket of his coat.

They left the field lights on. Hardy squinted below to the place the man had fallen. They’d stopped the game back in the seventh right in the middle of what turned out to be the Giants’ game-winning rally, when they had two men on, nobody out and Will Clark coming up.

Most of the spectators had gone. He figured by now it was just the cops, so he got up and meandered through the seats, sipping beer.

The area was cordoned off with yellow tape. Deecks was sitting slumped, his legs hanging over the seat in the row in front of him.

The Cougar-Rafe Cougat, Deeck’s partner-was talking to one of the techs. They were getting ready to move the body.

Hardy felt a hand on his shoulder and turned around. “Abraham, my man,” he said. Then, the thought occurring to him, “This a murder?”

Abe Glitsky grinned, and the scar running through his lips lightened. Fifteen years before, he and Hardy had walked a beat together. They still wrote Christmas cards.

“You see it happen?” Abe asked.

“No. I was watching the game.”

“Still fascinated by crime, huh?”

Against Hardy’s will, the sarcasm rankled slightly. “I read the sports page, sometimes the food section. I get my current events across the bar.”

Glitsky jerked his head. “These low railings,” he said. “I mean, you see kids leaning over ’em all the time going for fouls. They ought to put up nets or something.”

Three men lifted the body bag and were carrying it over the seats. Another group waited on the cement stairs. The gurney waited at the top of the ramp. “I’m kind of surprised you bothered to come over and check this out.”