He was so thin, made all of wire, coursing with manic energy, sweat pouring off what little flesh he had, heat rising off his cooking brain, only wanting money to fill his veins with magic and fly away.

There was a light tap at the pawnbroker's window. Kathy Mallory had come. He buzzed her through the lock, and she walked in slow, stalking on long legs in dungarees. A black blazer over her T-shirt hid the gun. All the old man's compliments to her were made of hard but precious substance: her eyes were cold green jewels set in ivory and framed in an aureole of gold.

She moved on the boy in the shutter blink of the old man's eyes. It looked to him as though she had disappeared from the shaft of light by the window and then reappeared behind the boy on the other side of the room. Her lips parted, and just the tip of her tongue showed between her teeth. It must be his old eyes or his imagination – she seemed to be tasting the moment. Her hands were rising, curling.

The boy was quickly turning, and he had not faced her yet when she grabbed him by one arm and pulled it up high behind his back. The boy screamed with pain as she slammed him into the wall. And there was fear in that scream, too. He seemed younger now, a wild-eyed child caught in the claws of his nursery-closet monster. This could not be happening, said the boy's eyes.

Where did you get the watch? she was asking him with another slam into the wall. Where? she asked, and never raised her voice, but tufts of the boy's hair came away in her hand when she had to ask him again.

Jack Coffey's mind was breaking with the exhaustion of nights without sleep. The question was endlessly looping back on itself: why had Markowitz gone in there alone? Why?

It made no damn sense at all, not for a smart cop with thirty years on the force. Raw recruits, still damp at the bib with mother's milk, were not so dumb and loved their skins more.