The worst of all were the officers and civilians, the bodies all over the place in the World Trade Center attack. Smashed fire trucks and police cars. And the fire that had gone on and on. You couldn't get the smell of smoke and burned flesh out of your nose in Chinatown for months. Refrigerators in apartments down there had to be replaced. Thousands of them. The smell wouldn't fade. And that was the least of it.

When the unthinkable happened, Bernardino had been CO of the detective unit in Fifth Precinct on Elizabeth Street in Chinatown for over a decade. Too close to Ground Zero for comfort. Everyone in the precinct worked around the clock because nobody had wanted to go home or be anywhere else. They'd stayed on the job twenty-four/seven for weeks longer than absolutely necessary. People who'd retired years ago came back on the job to help. And they came from other agencies, too. Retired FBI and CIA agents manned the phones, directed traffic. Whatever had to be done. He shook his head thinking about it.

All through those long, long days, the cops who worked the front lines waited with the rest of the world for the second shoe to drop. They'd responded to hundreds of bomb threats a day, telling themselves they were fine. Doin' okay. But the truth was none of them were okay. The worst for Bernie was that he'd let Lorna down. He'd been out fighting a war on New York and hadn't been home for her in her last year of life.

Amazing how one thing could tip a person over. He hadn't been there for Lorna long before she'd gotten the cancer. That was what ate away at him. He hadn't been there when she was well. Then as soon as things were back to "normal," people were out the door. Retiring left and right. And now he was out the door.

Bernardino was a retired cop on the street on a humid spring night, and he was immediately enveloped by a deep warm fog.