I rubbed my eyes, looked at the clock. Nearly two thirty. I coughed, said, "Yeah. Who the hell are you?" I groped by the bed for my cigarettes.

"Sorry about the hour. Detective Bert Hagstrom, Midtown South. You awake?"

I got a match to a cigarette, took in smoke, coughed again. My head cleared. "Yeah. Yeah, okay. What's up?"

"I got a kid here. Fourteen, maybe fifteen. Says he knows you."

"Who is he?"

"Won't say. No I.D. Rolled a drunk on 33rd Street just up the block from two uniformed officers in a patrol car."

"Sounds pretty stupid."

"Green, I'd say. Young and big. I told him what happens to kids like him if we send them to Rikers."

"If he's fourteen he's too young for Rikers."

"He doesn't know that. He's been stonewalling since they brought him in. Two hours I been shovelling it on about Rikers, finally he gives up your name. How about coming down here and giving us some help?"

Smoke twisted from the red tip of my cigarette, lost itself in the empty darkness. A November chill had invaded the room while I slept.

"Yeah," I said, throwing off the blanket. "Sure. Just put it in my file, I got out of bed at two in the morning as a favor to the NYPD."

"I've seen your file," Hagstrom said. "It won't help."

Fragments of stories I would never know appeared out of the night, receded again as the cab took me north. Two streetwalkers, one white, one black, both tall and thin, laughing uproariously together; a dented truck, no markings at all, rolling silently downtown; a basement door that opened and closed with no one going in or out. I sipped burnt coffee from a paper cup, watched fallen leaves and discarded scraps jump in the gutters as we drove by. The cab driver was African and his radio kept up a soft, unbroken stream of talk, words I couldn't understand. A few times he chuckled, so whatever was going on must have been funny. He let me out at the chipped stone steps of Midtown South. I overtipped him; I was thinking what it must be like to grow up in a sun-scorched African village and find yourself driving a cab through the night streets of New York.

Inside, the desk sergeant directed me through the glaring fluorescent lights and across the scuffed vinyl tile to the second floor, the detective squad room. Two men sat at steel desks, one on the phone, the other typing. A third man, at the room's far end, punched buttons on an unresponsive microwave.

"Ah, fuck this thing," the button-puncher said without rancor, trying another combination. "It's fucked."

"You break it again?" The typist, a bald-headed black man, spoke without looking up.

"Hagstrom?" I asked from the doorway.

The guy at the microwave turned, said, "Me. You're Smith?"

I nodded. He was a big, sloppy man in a pretty bad suit. He didn't have a lot of hair but what he had needed a trim. "You know how to work these things?" he asked me.

"Try fast forward."

The typist snorted.

"Screw it," Hagstrom said, abandoning the microwave, crossing the room with a long, loose-jointed stride. "Doctor says I should lay off the burritos anyway. Come with me."

I followed him into the corridor, around a corner, into a small, stale-smelling room. It was empty and dim. The only light came from the one-way mirror between this room and the next, where a big kid rested his head on his arms at a scarred and battered table. Two Coke cans, an empty Fritos bag, and a Ring-Ding wrapper littered the tabletop.

Hagstrom flicked a switch, activated the speaker. "Sit up," he said.

The kid's head jerked up and he looked around, blinking. His dark hair was short; he wore jeans, sneakers, a maroon-and-white varsity jacket with lettering I couldn't make out on the back. They were all filthy. He rubbed a grubby hand down his face, squinted at the glass. That glass is carefully made: it will show you your own reflection, tell you what's behind you; it hides everything else.

Hagstrom switched the speaker off again. "Know him?"

"Yeah."

Hagstrom waited. "And?"

"Gary Russell," I said. "He's fifteen. Last I heard he lived in Sarasota, but that was a couple of years ago. What's he doing here?"

"You tell me."

"I don't know."

"What's he to you?"

I watched Gary shift uncomfortably in the folding chair they had him on. The knuckles on his left hand were skinned; his jacket had a rip in the sleeve. The dirt on his face didn't hide the bags under his eyes or the exhausted pallor of his skin. As he moved, his hand brushed the Fritos bag, knocked it to the floor. Conscientously, automatically, he picked it up. I wondered how long it had been since he'd had real food.

"He's my sister's son," I said.