Bernardino was aware that a lot of important people had shown up to give him a nice send-off, but he was feeling drunk and more than a little sorry for himself. He couldn't help feeling that it was all over for him-not just the job to which he'd devoted his whole life, but his life itself.

What does a man think about when he has a premonition that he's on his very last page? Bernardino was a tough guy, a bruiser of a man. Not more than a hair or so over five-nine, he was barrel-chested. Always an enthusiastic feeder, he had quite a corporation going around his midsection. He still had a brush of gray hair on top, but his mug was a mess. His large nose had been broken a bunch of times by the time he was thirty, and his face, deeply pitted from teenage acne, was creased and pouchy with age. He was sixty-two, not really old in the scheme of things. His father had lived past ninety, after all. The lieutenant wasn't as old as he felt.

"Thank you guys for everything. That's about all I can say," he muttered to the detectives nearest him. Charm was not exactly Bernardino's middle name. He was done. He was goin' home. His working life was over. No pretty good-byes for him. He took a quick survey. The dark Greenwich Village hole-in-the-wall where he'd spent many happy hours was so full of old friends that he actually had to blink back his emotions.

Thirty-eight years on the job could make a man a lot of buddies who wouldn't want to call it a day, or a lot of enemies who'd barely stop in for a free feed. Bernie had been surprised to see that he'd collected the former. At eleven forty-five on a Wednesday night the speeches were long over. His awards were sitting on the bar, and the buffet of heavy Italian favorites- the lasagne and ziti, the baked clams and calamari fritti, the eggplant parmigiana-had been picked clean and cleared away.