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what was left of the late-afternoon sun.
    Rev. Jim leaned back against the bench’s wooden slats, stretched his arms out, and checked the time on his watch. He was wearing a jean jacket over a dark blue long-sleeved T-shirt and an old pair of Macy’s slacks. His body was still workout lean, kept that way by a vegetarian diet and three-times-a-week yoga classes that he attended with a fervor bordering on the religious. He was closing in on his fortieth birthday and, for the first time in memory, had finally landed in a good place both mentally and physically. Of course, the burn scars remained etched across his chest and neck, constant reminders of his years working the decoy beat for the New York Police Department, a short span in his life when his work was considered the best in the cop trade. But he had resigned himself to the handful of concessions he needed to continue his day-to-day without being haunted by the fire that had brought his career as a cop to a hard-brake end. The steady flow of nightmares had now been reduced to a few stress-induced occurrences a month, and the once strong-enough-to-touch urges to take his own life had all but dissipated. The salve to his wounds had been helped along by twice-a-week counseling sessions with a Lower East Side therapist and weekly visits with his father, Albert, a Korean War veteran who long ago had learned the harsh lessons of wrapping his world of pain inside a cocoon of silence.
    But the scars were always there to serve as a reminder. It didn’t matter that he hid them from public view by wearing long-sleeved shirts with high-rimmed collars, regardless of the time of year. Or that he never bared his chest to a woman, determined to avoid the look of pity he knew would be in her eyes—or, worse, the look of horror. But Rev. Jim had made his peace with the demons that raged within. He realized that his was, at best, a shaky truce, one that required a determined focus, but so far he was making it work.
    Rev. Jim was, for payroll purposes, a drug counselor for a West Side not-for-profit clinic. He had been with the small storefront outfit in the Eighties off Broadway for close to three years, starting as a volunteer and offering advice to any teenager who walked through the glass-paneled door with the look of the lost in his eyes. Soon enough, even the well-meaning couple who ran the clinic, Jeffrey and Annie Parsons, realized Rev. Jim could be a much more useful tool in their losing battles against the onslaught of the drug trade. He had made some impact with a few of the kids, but not enough of them to alter the balance scales. He wasn’t at his best or most comfortable in such situations, and they sensed his frustration at not being able to stem the problem. “Maybe we have you reaching out to the wrong group,” Jeffrey said to him late one morning as the two of them sat in a small back room with an overhead fan and a window facing an alley. “You’re good with the kids, don’t get me wrong. I just think you might be better talking to the ones we can never talk to—and, even if we did, wouldn’t care to listen.”
    “Who you got in mind?” Rev. Jim asked, already sensing the answer to his own question.
    “The dealers,” Jeffrey Parsons said.
    Rev. Jim stood and nodded down at Parsons, the street juice of the adrenaline-junkie cop starting its mad dash through his veins. “I’ll start in the morning,” he told him. “On one condition.”
    “Name it,” Parsons said.
    “You feed me the names of the kids in trouble,” Rev. Jim said. “I put a hand out to their street connection and take that to wherever it leads. The results will be there—trust me on that end. Just never ask me how I get those results.”

    Rev. Jim saw the overweight white man in the Lawrence Taylor football jersey lean up against a side of the batting cage. He had on a sweat-stained Raiders cap, baggy shorts, and high-top black sneakers with no socks. The back of his flabby neck was a