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about, right? How to be good?"
    "You've got a whole lot of better to explore before you get to good," I said.
    Paul gave me a look, narrowing his eyes while trying to suppress a smile.
"I mean, no, I'm not in danger of pulling some variation of that prolonged cry
for help you launched, but I know why I do it. I do it for the money, and
because I failed to come up with anything more interesting to do. That's not
really something I'm super proud of."
    "Well," I said, "I guess you could say that I'm not super proud of
how I've ended up where I am, either."
    "You didn't get there the easy way," Paul agreed as the waiter brought us our steak.
"But I do believe that in some way you got where you were supposed to go. And
that's good enough for a fucking celebration."
    WE ATE our steak and drank our wine, and after the meal we each had an Oban, straight up. I hadn't realized how tense I was until the alcohol relaxed me. I liked the camaraderie of eating steak and drinking scotch. Paul's company relaxed me too; I enjoyed his aggression, his thoughtless will, his attempt to bully the world.
    Afterward, we stepped outside into the crisp spring air. The breeze was just enough to make me aware of the fact of weather. I heard Paul inhale a breath, taking in the night. When I glanced over at Paul he was smiling.
"Let's go see if we can find some trouble," he said.

5
    M YRA'S CAR was already parked across the street when I went out to wait for her the next morning; she honked as soon as I stepped out of my building on Bergen Street. I'd overslept a little; Paul and I had ended up spilling whiskey at the Gate until a little after one a.m. I wasn't at my best; my stomach was clenched and sour, and I could still taste the scotch in the back of my throat.
    "Morning," I muttered as I opened the door of her aging Volvo.
    "Just throw that shit in the back," Myra said, pointing at the jumble of papers in the passenger seat. I scooped them up and tossed them onto the backseat. Myra was smoking a cigarette, had an old Sleater-Kinney song blasting on the car stereo, both of which were a little much for me first thing on a hungover morning.
    "You've been out to Rikers before, right?" she asked as she pulled onto Flatbush.
    "Actually, no," I said.
    "Rikers isn't so bad," Myra said. "Compared to the real prisons
upstate—Green Haven, Sing Sing—it's a weekend in the Hamptons. There're bad guys
there who couldn't make bail on a hard-core felony, but they're heading to trial
and they've got an incentive to behave. Everybody else who's there has been
sentenced to under a year, meaning they're unlikely to be violent."
    "I'm sure you get used to hanging out in jail," I said. "I just
haven't had the opportunity to do so."
    "It's bullshit that Lorenzo's being held on a case this thin," Myra said as she pulled onto I-278, which would take us out of Brooklyn, through Queens, and into the Bronx.
"The judge wouldn't grant bail because of all the reporters in the courtroom, didn't want to see himself on the front page for letting loose the college-student killer. His only hook was that the police didn't find Lorenzo for a few days after they'd issued an arrest warrant, which he took to mean flight risk. How's that make him a fucking flight risk? He had four days to get out of town and they arrest him going into his apartment. If anything, he's proven he
won't
leave, even when given motive and opportunity."
    "Did you argue that?"
    "I thought about it," Myra said. "So, no offense, but I really
don't get why Isaac decided to put you on a murder case. I'd been working as a
PD for over three years before I had my first murder. I spent my first eighteen
months doing nothing but juvie-court delinquent proceedings. Where'd you go to
law school?"
    "Why?"
    "I bet you went to an Ivy League, didn't you?"
    "What does it matter?"
    "Harvard?"
    "Columbia, actually. Why?"
    "I knew it!" Myra exclaimed. "That explains why Isaac is putting
you on this case. Even