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he corrected.
    â€œI’m forty-two,” she said.
    He nodded.
    She returned the nod.
    The ice had been broken.
    Â 
    THERE WERE REPORTERS waiting outside the station house when he got back there at a quarter to four that afternoon. A pair of blues were standing on the wide front steps, barring the way like soldiers outside the gates of ancient Rome. Carella moved past the teeming crowd on the sidewalk, approaching the steps with an authority that told them at once he was connected.
    â€œExcuse me,” one of them said, “are you…?”
    â€œNo,” he said and went past them, and through the entrance doors with their glass-paneled upper sections adorned with the numerals “87” on each. Behind the muster desk, Sergeant Murchison was busy fielding phone calls. He looked up as Carella went past him, rolled his eyes, said into the phone, “You’ll have to contact Public Relations about that,” and hung up. Carella climbed the iron-runged steps to the second floor, stopped in the men’s room to pee, washed his hands, and then went down the corridor and into the squadroom. Everything seemed more or less normal here. He almost breathed a sigh of relief.
    Meyer Meyer, bald and burly and blue-eyed, was at his desk talking to a woman who looked like a hooker but who was probably a housewife who’d got all dressed up in her shortest skirt to come report something-or-other terrible to the police. The woman appeared extremely agitated although scantily dressed. Meyer merely looked patient. Or perhaps bored.
    At his own desk, Bert Kling, blond and hazel-eyed and sporting a beard that was coming in blond and patchy, but which he felt was essential to an undercover he was working, was on the phone with someone he kept calling Charlie, who was probably on a cell phone because Kling kept saying, “Charlie? Charlie? I’m losing you.”
    Artie Brown, looking huge and menacing and dark and scowling, stood at the bulletin board, pondering the multitude of posters, notes, and announcements hanging there, glancing as well at the latest posted e-mail jokes from other police stations all over the country. Carella thought he detected a smile from him. He turned as Carella went by, waved vaguely in his direction, and then went back to his desk, where the phone began ringing furiously.
    Another day, another dollar, Carella thought, and knocked on the lieutenant’s door.
    Â 
    DETECTIVE-LIEUTENANT PETER BYRNES did not like high-profile cases. Given his druthers, he would have preferred that Lester Henderson had not lived in Smoke Rise, had instead lived across the river in the next state, or anyplace else but the Eight-Seven. He would have preferred that Ollie Weeks had not come calling with his courtesy request, although asking payback for saving someone’s life—twice, don’t forget—possibly qualified as something more substantial than a mere exchange of good manners. It was not unusual for cops in this city to ask favors of other precincts. Usually, but not always, they offered to share credit for any ensuing bust. Ollie had not deemed such an offer necessary. But, hey, he had saved Carella’s life. Twice!
    The first time was when a lion was about to eat him.
    Yes.
    A lion was sitting on Carella’s chest, don’t ask.
    Ollie shot the beast between the eyes, end of lion, end of story. Carella could still smell the animal’s foul breath.
    The second time was a week or so later, when a blonde carrying an AK-47 was not about to eat Carella, more’s the pity, but was instead ready to shoot him in the eye or someplace when who should arrive upon the scene but the large man from the Eight-Eight—wham, bam, thank you, ma’am, though he did not kill her as dead as he had the lion. Carella could still smell her breath, too. A whiff of Tic Tacs, as he recalled, spiked with that selfsame stink of imminent extinction.
    Ollie had a right, Byrnes guessed.