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Kolchuk’s house before they were spotted by some family friend. They had laughed with the audacity of it, he and Petey, thinking they were almost home free, unobserved.
    But they had been watched, as Jack had learned just thirty-two hours ago. Somewhere along the way a car had slowly cruised behind them with an Italian-American man at the wheel and two Negro teenagers sitting low in the back. His brother’s killer and the friend he had brought along for backup—both members of Fort Greene’s Black Chaplains street gang, a world away from their home turf. On Richards Street, the man had stopped the car and the back door swung open.
    “That’s them, boys. You know what to do.”
    Forty years later, Jack forced himself to continue on. Scraps of paper and empty potato-chip bags littered the sidewalk, challenged by big weeds pushing up through the cracks. A Puerto Rican woman and two little pigtailed girls emerged from the bodega across the corner, the kids laughing and skipping. He walked along a block of spavined little houses, their facades weather-beaten; old ornamental cornices ran along the rooflines. Take away the cars and the telephone wires, and the scene might have looked the same a hundred years before.
    Jack trudged along, seeing how the upper windows of the houses filled with the bright gold of the late afternoon sun; white airplane contrails cut the blue sky above. And then, at the corner, he stopped and looked down. For the first time since his youth, he was standing over the spot where his younger brother had been slain. He stared at the sidewalk, half-expecting to see bloodstains on the cracked concrete. But the concrete itself had probably been replaced a number of times since that fateful day—a reminder that this was one very cold case indeed.
    A flock of sparrows chittered loudly up in the branches of a scrappy little tree. Jack looked around. Across the way, a couple of the old houses had been sandblasted and renovated, maybe by some of the artsy types who had been moving in and trying to rejuvenate the neighborhood; they called themselves “urban pioneers.” A block down was the corner where the diner had once stood, where the patrol cops had stopped in before they could witness two local boys getting jumped.
    Jack stared down again. There should have been a memorial on this spot, a permanent one, a bronze plaque dedicated to a teenage kid who had been so cheerful, such a natural athlete, so full of life. The detective made a solemn vow: I swear that I will find out who was responsible for what happened to you, Petey. And I will bring him to justice.
    Somewhere, maybe just a mile away—if he was still in this world—lived the man who had set this killing in motion. And there was no statute of limitations on murder.
    Jack stood there a few minutes, musing. It was a strange thing: an Italian man and two Negro boys, together in Red Hook, back in the sixties. Like oil and water. Mulignans , the Italians called their neighbors to the east, meaning “eggplants,” referring to their dark skin. There was no love lost.
    The boy with the knife, Jack’s visitor yesterday, one Darnel Teague Jr., had never known the name of the man who had hired him. Dead tired, soaked with sweat, as he was getting off a shift as a dishwasher in a Fort Greene restaurant, Darnel had been approached by an Italian-American man, black-haired, medium height and build, maybe thirty years old. It had been very late, and the street was dark, and the man was sitting out front in a sharp-looking car, an Eldorado, maybe, or an LTD. He called out as Darnel walked out onto the sidewalk, but the teenager ignored him. The man called again, using Darnel’s name this time. The boy approached the car cautiously, leery of talking to some strange white man at that hour of the night (or at any hour, for that matter), but the visitor quickly piqued his interest.
    “Word on the street is that you’re a smart kid. I bet you don’t want to be a