A slow smile of appreciation was tugging at Patrolman Guiterrez's lips when he felt his feet leave the hard concrete, and he forgot all about the girl and her undulating pelvis. The thunderous boom seemed to be chasing him.

His mind froze in midthought. Explosion!

Many people's lives flash before them when they feel the cold touch of death. Patrolman Guiterrez was made of different stuff. He recognized the sound of a detonation. Even in that split second when his eardrums were being punished by the leading edges of the traveling shock wave, his mind correlated a half-dozen random facts.

The explosion was directly at his back. Couldn't be more than twenty yards away. Sounded right at the corner, too.

What had exploded? he wondered with an eerie clarity of thought.

The faces of the pedestrians Guiterrez had passed flashed by his mind's eye. Ordinary people. None had caught his observant eye.

There had been a Dodge Ram pickup truck at the corner light. Traffic on Eighth Avenue was flowing smoothly.

A car bomb! he thought. Yeah. That's gotta be it. A car bomb.

Then he was slammed into the free-standing wire trash container.

It probably saved his life, though Guiterrez didn't realize it for a while. He struck the trash barrel with such force that for three days afterward the wire pattern was visible in white against his red cheek. They bumped together in midair, then rolled. Guiterrez landed atop the rolling container, mashing it almost flat with his 215 pound body. The barrel was full of newspapers and other paper refuse. They helped save him, too.

When Guiterrez came to, he was looking at a dragon of smoke rolling across the otherwise blue September sky.

Guiterrez sat up. He hurt in so many places he didn't know where to start. He looked at his feet. Still attached-though he'd lost one regulation shoe. He noticed he couldn't feel the ground with his supporting hands, so he looked right, then left, half-expecting to see raw stumps.