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entertained because there are things that happen in the life of a cop that nobody who writes books and movies about cops could ever dream up.
    For instance, there was the perfectly usual morning a few years ago when I stopped in at my usual neighborhood spoon and ordered my usual eggs over easy with sausages and rye toast and black coffee. And when I had finished the mess, I left the usual dollar tip. Thus fortified with usualness, I hit the street. And then the street hit me, in a manner of speaking.
    “Outta my way, bub!”
    This was shrieked at me by an agitated heavy-hipped curly-haired crone in a straw bonnet and pink dress with cabbage roses all over it. She looked like the wallpaper in the parlor of the Hell’s Kitchen apartment where I grew up, which is not so far from my Hell’s Kitchen apartment today.
    Anyway, the crone backed up her words with a right straight-arm to my Adam’s apple, which just about decked me. So I stepped out of harm’s way to see what her rush was all about.
    What she was trying to do, it appeared, was catch up with a skinny punk sauntering down the street with the handbag he had recently snatched off her shoulder. The crone was making plenty of good squawk, but nobody on the street besides me seemed to care about it, which did not make it much of a sporting proposition. The poor old thing with the mean right had too many years on her and too much ballast. Well down the street now, the punk turned around and laughed at us both.
    I went over and asked her what was up. She had stopped, and was catching her breath. “Honest t’God,” she said, “would you look at that little snot down there? He swiped my purse and my rent money inside of it and my keys and my last bottle of Kaopectate. And it ain’t nothing but a joke to him. He’s thinking he’ll get clean away with it. He’s prob’ly one of them crack junkies. Where’s a goddamn cop when you need one?”
    I did not have the chance right then to introduce myself professionally because just then the punk started coming back toward us. I suppose he was a crackhead; dopers do very crazy things, like right away returning to the scene of a crime.
    “Now’s my chance!” the old lady said.
    She waited until he was about a half-block away, then she did something as amazing and exciting and dead-on gorgeous as anything I have seen speeding off Phil Niekro’s knuckles back when he was on the mound up at Yankee Stadium in the bottom of the ninth with two away and Niekro has got only one pitch on a full count to shut out a Red Sox designated hitter in order to hang onto the Yanks’ one run lead.
    Only the crone did not use a baseball.
    Instead, she plucked a glass eye from the left side of her head, went into something approximating a windup, and burned one-quarter pound of blue iris crystal straight on down the street, scoring a bull’s-eye dead square on the laughing punk’s nose. Which then burst into red like it was an exploding paint can. The punk was not laughing when he went down.
    “C’mon, bub! Give a helpless old lady a hand, why don’t you?”
    Adrenalin got the helpless old lady to the punk about the same time I got there myself to make a nice, sweet collar on aggravated robbery. I was reaching into my back pocket for the bracelets when the crone took a joyful hop into the air and pounced on the punk’s chest, just like I have seen wrestlers do on television. “I’ll sit here on the crumb-bum while you go call up the cops, okay?”
    She had recovered her purse and was bashing it into the squashed punk’s face. The glass eye rolled off the curb into a grating and disappeared into a sticky dark bog of tired-out chewing gum, cigarette butts, spittle and latex mementos of curbside revels. “Hell!” she crowed. “The insurance’s paid up and I been wanting a new one anyways.”
    Ruby had been laughing steadily since '‘C’mon, bub, give a helpless old lady a hand ..."
    She said, “If that’s not an Irishman’s