“Not even hardly.”

Hardy took a belt of his stout, set the glass down, and swore. “I must’ve sent down a hundred guys. You too,” he said.

Ingraham nodded. “All told, I put away two hundred and fourteen assholes.”

Hardy whistled. “You were red hot, weren’t you?”

“Yeah, but there was only one Louis Baker.”

Baker had been a cancer in Hunter’s Point for the first twenty years of his life. He had a huge head, a well-trimmed Afro, and the body of a defensive safety. In spite of having a sheet ranging from the petty-vandalism and car theft, burglary and muggings-when he was in his teens to the heinous as he matured, he was convinced he would never do hard time, and not without reason.

The D.A. had been forced to drop charges on him twice for murder and four times for rape. He was good at not leaving evidence, or at making witnesses reluctant to testify.

The one time Baker went to trial for attempted murder and mayhem on a man who had talked too long to his girlfriend in a 7-Eleven, the man had finally refused to identify him when the crunch came. He got all the way to the stand, then looked at Baker at the defendant’s table and evidently decided that if he pointed the finger at him, he would not live to see his grandchildren. So he suddenly couldn’t say for sure that Baker had been the man who’d cut off his ears before stabbing him in the stomach in the middle of the afternoon.

Hardy had been the prosecutor in that case.

The D.A.’s office-Rusty Ingraham this time-had finally gotten him for armed robbery of four victims, one of whom he’d wounded, but as it was only Baker’s first conviction, meaning that in the court’s eyes he wasn’t yet a hardened criminal and hence a candidate for rehabilitation, the judge had been inclined to be lenient and had given him eight years.

When the verdict came down, Baker had quietly hung his head for a short time, then looked over at the prosecution table. Hardy had wanted to come down for the verdict, see this guy finally get put away, and he was sitting next to Ingraham. Baker looked in their direction, directly at Ingraham, seemingly memorizing him.