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Over the intercom there came some physical sounds from what I knew was the security office in the basement of the building. Maybe a hundred seconds later I heard a door thrown open and slammed shut, and then he was pushing open the front doors to the high-rise.

Brawl Pickering. Red-faced, pink-skinned, blue-eyed, and built like both a football player and a basketball player too. Tall and broad and muscular like a weight lifter, though he had told me more than once that the heaviest thing he ever lifted was the last man he had to throw across a room.

He and his sister, Fracas, together worked the streets of New York in a six-month-long looting frenzy. He was the muscle, and she the brain.

I had met Brawl when I was still a cop, and he was what they called the Smash and Grab Man. He worked midtown Manhattan and hit high-end businesses, broke front windows and late-night glass doors. He ran like a demon and the NYPD had learned by hard-won experience that no three men could hold him down.

I was just a uniform back then, when he was pillaging Midtown. When my precinct was discussing him at a morning briefing, I said, aloud, that I could bring that man in singlehanded and without my sidearm.

That very day they put me on Smash and Grab, not because they believed I could stop him but rather to humiliate me and, possibly, get my ass kicked by the juggernaut-thief.

I had a partner, Lyle Gorth was his name, but he spent the late afternoons and evenings doing paperwork for the duty sergeant while I was the only foot patrol cop in all Manhattan.

I had studied Smash and Grab and thought I knew the kinds of stores he stole from and, most importantly, where and when he was liable to strike. Despite his brutal and unsophisticated approach, Smash and Grab’s targets were always situated in places where there were at least two street constructions going on in the nearby vicinity. That way police access was hindered. This notion was supported by the fact that he always had at least two escape routes that were connected and because, as big as he was, he would seemingly disappear after turning one corner or the one after that.

I’d spent three weeks patrolling the streets and discouraging crime, when late one Wednesday, a likely day for the Smash and Grab Man to be active, I heard a crash of glass. Taking what looked like an eighteen-inch spool from the back of my holster belt, I ran to the spot I was sure he’d hit one day: Mendias Jewelry.

I was overexcited, however, and ran into the man I came to know as Brawl when I turned the corner.

“Halt!” I shouted while pulling the spool up to a horizontal position.

But I’d forgotten how fast old Smash and Grab had been reported to be. He was on me in a second and hit me so hard in the chest that I imagined his fist going through my backbone. Down on one knee, I depressed the trigger of the stun gun. Luck was with me because, even though I was seeing double, I hit my quarry dead center with a twenty-gauge beanbag round. He was down on the sidewalk, unable to move. I fell onto both knees for at least a minute before I could muster the strength to cuff him.

Brawl, his chosen name, was very civil about his defeat. He didn’t try to escape or curse my mother. He was unarmed and, in some way, had earned my respect and the respect of most of the NYPD uniforms tasked with maintaining the law.

I spoke to the new dispatch sergeant, Gladstone Palmer, about the bust. He told me two things that had a big impact on my life. The first was that he had asked my senior officer to suggest me for detective training. The second was that he’d allow me to testify on Brawl Pickering’s behalf.

Years later, Fracas told me that she was just around the corner when I’d brought her brother down. She was waiting, as she always did, in their getaway car.

“I knew I couldn’t lift his fat ass, so I had to leave him,” she said.

Brawl served three years, after which I helped him get a security job at Co-op City. He and his sister were grateful for the help.

They were first-generation Americans of Irish ancestry. Their given names all but forgotten, they’d christened themselves after their almost symbiotic natures and had always worked together.

About the three of us—if the situation is right, sometimes natural enemies can become the best of friends.

15.

FRACAS LOVED IRISH whiskey, while her brother preferred Scotch. I had coffee because there was someone out there who was killing people, and I might well have been one of many possible targets.

We were seated around the big ash-wood table in their office.

Brawl was tapping at an ancient desktop computer keyboard while his sister concentrated on a large handwritten log, trying to help with my request.

“No,” the mastermind was telling me. “We don’t have no Twyla livin’ here. Not in this buildin’ anyway.”

“Not in any’a the other buildin’s neither,” Brawl added, squinting at the monitor glaring before him. “At least not owners or their families. Somebody might be a guest, I guess. Why you think she up in here anyway?”

“Her mother told me that she sent a postcard from here.”

I took the small framed picture of Twyla Macintosh or maybe Mann out of my pocket and showed it to Fracas.

“Oh,” she said after only a glance. “Tina Marie. She’s the one was in buildin’ thirty-two, stayin’ with that sour boy, Blass.”

“That motherfucker,” Brawl said.

“Randolph David Blass?” I asked.