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and a tank top. The cops were back to grabbing teenagers off the street—as soon as crime had started to tick up, there were more backs to the walls. The NYPD wanted to prove that they weren’t stopping kids for no reason, not like they used to. So now they gave them summonses to prove they really thought they were up to something.
    Leonard thought to intervene, but telling a cop you work for DIMAC is no way to get him to listen. Every cop on the force has a faded story about a brother or a friend who had been railroaded by DIMAC, had been forced off the street for doing his job and ended up sitting at a desk going mad while the hoodlums and the crazies took over the city. And even though the story took place twenty years ago, and even though whoever did this wrong had long since retired, and even though it probably wasn’t even true to begin with, the cop will hear where you work and shrug you off. Ignoring you will be his little opportunity for justice, revenge, whichever.
    No one was jumping to the kid’s side either. People kept their noses out of it because they had all grown accustomed to a new city with low crime and fresh fruit on the corners, bright new apartment buildings and digital signs in the subways telling you when the next train was coming. They had become used to the warmth and the order, but had averted their eyes to how that order was maintained. When the order started to crack, and the old habits came back, people looked away. That was part of the deal.
    Curmudgeons had complained, sure, that the grunge and the dirt had made New York special. They whined that there had been character in dirty bookstores on Ninth Avenue or junkies spread out across your stoop in the morning. But most people were glad for the swap, they were happy to give up the local color, or the mystique, or however you wanted to describe it, so long as they also were able to give up the fear.
    Or, to be precise, to give up the Little Fear. People had become used to being free from any worry that someone would pull out a switchblade on the sidewalk and ask you for your wallet. That someone would climb through your window and take your television. Advertisements for fixing torn earlobes were long gone from the subway. The Little Fear had vanished.
    But the Big Fear was always with you. The fear that the buildings would come crashing down, that the elevators would be filled with poison gas, that the subway stalling for a moment on the bridge means the bridge itself is about to collapse into the water—that was part of you. Maybe not like it had been just after, maybe tempered a little, and smoothed out by your New York attitude, but it was always there beneath, throbbing a little, reminding you, like an old scar that you can feel when you lounge back into an otherwise comfortable chair. You couldn’t look away from the Big Fear.
    As Leonard left the cop, who was dusting off the boy he had manhandled, he realized that even if he left the city, even if he moved out of the Ebbets Field Apartments into a bright condo in Hoboken, the Big Fear would stay with him too. He turned past the petty arrest and toward his office. He passed the fire-red sign for the John Street Bar and Grill pointing downstairs to cheap beer and sawdust hamburgers, the basement shoe stores hedging their boasts (“We are Probably the Lowest Priced in the City”), and the riot of egg sandwiches, weak coffee, and clutter. He was in a position of power now, but it came with risks. He could confront Detective Ralph Mulino, but the police department had its own way of bringing the Big Fear. If the shooting was dirty, there were ways that cops would go about taking it out on the messenger.
    Leonard would have to be ready for them.

CHAPTER FIVE

    COMPLIANCE
    They were stacked four deep and three high and took up almost the entire desk. Two-inch-thick black binders, spreading a glum, dull welcome to Christine Davenport at the new job. Each one contained nearly three