“Are you okay?”

The answers were quickly drowned out by the piercing sound of sirens. I barely had time to grab my tape recorder as the New York police descended on the restaurant, blocking off all the exits and corralling us like sheep in the bar area.

Soon, everyone was asking a different question.

“Haven’t we been through enough already?”

A few ambitious cops fanned out among us, quickly trying to get as much information as they could before turning the investigation over to the detectives. What they didn’t want to get in return was lip and blowback from a high-class clientele that just wanted to get the hell out of there.

“Tough shit,” I actually overheard one officer say to some red-faced stuffed shirt complaining that he had to be at an important board meeting all the way downtown.

The officer’s anger made all the more sense as word got around fast that the two men who confronted the killer had indeed been off-duty cops. Their precinct, the nineteenth, was nearby and they had been grabbing a quick beer and hamburger at the bar after working the graveyard shift together.

Now they were dead.

How could that be? I had been there – and it almost hadn’t seemed possible. They had had the guy covered like white on rice!

Clearly the killer knew what he was doing, and that was the King Kong of understatements. As fast as lightning he’d taken down two of New York City ’s finest, and not with lucky shots, either. I’m talking about dead center to their foreheads, twice over. The cops never knew what hit them.

Then – poof! – the killer was gone. He had apparently escaped unscathed through the kitchen and out a back door.

All told, he left behind three dead, four wounded, and dozens who were really, really shaken up about what they had just – unfortunately – witnessed.

Few more so than Dwayne Robinson, who now stood by my side. I almost felt like his bodyguard at this point. Or his sports agent. Someone there to take care of him.