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ducked again and froze.
    By the time he’d recovered, raised his own weapon, and tried to level it with both shaking hands, the third man had disappeared with the other two, and there was no real opportunity to shoot. Creed broke into a full run and reached the corner in time to get a last glimpse of what seemed to be a lone fleeing shadow turning right at the next corner. Vaguely aware of pedestrians hugging the buildings on both sides of the street, he sprinted the length of the block along the cable car tracks, past the trees that incongruously sprang from the pavement near the end of the Powell Street line.
    By the time he got down to the cable car turnaround at Market, it was over. There was no sign of any of them. They’d probably split up and gone in separate directions. But even if they had stayed together, which Creed would have no way of knowing, they could go in any one of six or seven directions from this intersection—streets and alleys within a half block in every direction, each a potential avenue of escape. The turnaround also marked the entrance to the subterranean BART station.
    And since Creed hadn’t gotten close enough to get a good look at any of them, as soon as his three men stopped running, they would look like anyone else. He had a sense that the man who’d fired at him was bigger than the other two, but that was about it.
    A fresh gust of wind brought on its front edge a wall of water as the drizzle became a downpour. Creed heard the insistent keening, still, of Silverman’s alarm. He took a last look down Market, but saw nothing worth pursuing. He looked down at his gun, still clenched tight in his right hand. Unexpectedly, all at once, his legs went rubbery under him.
    He got to the nearest building and leaned against it. He got his gun back into its holster, buttoned the slicker over his jacket against the rain, began to jog back to Silverman’s. It didn’t take him a minute.
    Still, the alarm pealed; the door yawned open. The shop’s interior lights illuminated the street out front. Creed drew his gun again and stood to the side of the door. Raising his voice over the alarm, he called into the shop. “Is anybody in there?” He waited. Then, even louder, “Mr. Silverman?”
    Remembering at last, he pulled his radio off his belt and told the dispatcher to get the regular police out here. With his gun drawn, he stepped into the light and noise of the shop. But he saw or heard nothing after catching sight of the body.
    The victim might have been napping on the floor, except that the arms were splayed unnaturally out on either side of him. And a stream of brownish-red liquid flowed from under his back and pooled in a depression in the hardwood floor.
    The skin on Sergeant Inspector Dan Cuneo’s face had an unusual puffiness—almost as though he’d once been very fat—and it gave his features a kind of bloated, empty quality, not exactly enhanced by an undefined, wispy brown mustache that hovered under a blunt thumbprint of a nose. But his jaw was strong, his chin deeply cleft, and he had a marquee smile with perfect teeth. Tonight he wore a black ribbed turtleneck and black dress slacks. He was a professional and experienced investigator with an unfortunate arsenal of nervous habits that were not harmful either to his own or to anyone else’s health. They weren’t criminal or even, in most cases, socially inappropriate. Yet his partner, Lincoln Russell—a tall, lean African-American professional himself—was finding it increasingly difficult to tolerate them.
    Russell worried about it. It reminded him of how he’d gotten to feel about his first wife Monica before he decided he was going to have to divorce her if he wasn’t going to be forced to kill her first. She wasn’t a bad person or an unsatisfactory mate, but she had this highly pitched laugh that, finally, he simply couldn’t endure any longer. She’d end every sentence, every phrase almost, with a little “hee-hee,”