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sly cat burglar who’d been ripping off houses in the neighborhood for the last five weeks. The department stopped short of giving Officer Quinn a commendation for ridding the city of this menace.
    But this was when Lady Luck entered Brian Quinn’s charmed young life.
    When Quinn shot Connors, bad luck really had nothing to do with that. Quinn was practically a rookie, he was probably scared chasing a man he thought was a burglar down a dark alley, and he reacted without thinking when he saw something flash in Connors’s hand. It was just a case of bad judgment combined with inexperience and too much adrenaline—but it wasn’t a matter of luck.
    Nor did luck have anything to do with Quinn’s decision to try to cover up the killing. That was just Quinn thinking he was smart enough to get out of the situation, and lying about what really happened was better than admitting he’d made a mistake that could blemish his spotless record. Where Lady Luck walked into the picture was in the form of another lady named Janet Costello, who had insomnia.
    Janet taught fifth grade at a public school in Queens. She also had twenty-twenty vision. Janet, in other words, was a good citizen and a reliable witness. When she couldn’t sleep, which was almost every night, she liked to sit on her balcony—a balcony the size of a doormat with a view of an alley—and smoke and drink white wine. Her landlord wouldn’t allow her to smoke in her apartment.
    Janet was also the girlfriend of a man named Sal Anselmo. Janet had been raised in Queens and she knew Sal from grade school and dated him all through high school. She was heartbroken when he married another girl—and he was still married to the other girl and had three kids—but he came around one time when Janet was feeling lonely and vulnerable and she was now his mistress.
    Janet saw Quinn put his backup gun in Connors’s dead hand that night; she saw him toss the beer can under the Dumpster. If Quinn or his partner had ever looked up—instead of down at the dead man—they would have seen Janet sitting two floors above them, her hand clamped over her mouth. A couple of days later, Janet sees in the papers that Quinn is now some sort of hero for killing an unarmed man. She thought about going to the police and telling them what had really happened but was afraid to because she knew how the NYPD protected its own. So she called Sal and asked what he thought she should do. Sal said, “You keep your mouth shut, you fuckin’ dummy,” and then Sal told his boss, a guy named Tony Benedetto, who then told his boss—Carmine Taliaferro.
    Carmine had several NYPD cops on his payroll. They kept him informed of investigations that might hurt him, kept him up to speed on problems his rivals were having, and, most important, they didn’t usually arrest his people. But he could always use another cop, particularly if he could purchase him with blackmail instead of cash.
    Carmine didn’t approach Quinn right away, though. Patience was possibly Carmine Taliaferro’s greatest virtue and the thing that distinguished him more than anything else from the gonzos who worked for him. Instead, he took a week and did his homework on Quinn and learned about the cop’s father-in-law, the judge, his rabbi, the chief of D’s, his richer-than-God mother-in-law, and the fact that he’d already passed the sergeant’s exam and was getting a law degree. Now Carmine really wanted this cop.
    Ten days after Quinn killed Connors, Carmine set up a meeting with Quinn and explained the facts of life to him, the main fact being that he now worked for Carmine. Carmine admitted that Quinn might be able to impugn an eyewitness but he told Quinn that this particular witness was a prosecutor’s dream. He didn’t, of course, give him Janet Costello’s name. When Quinn said he didn’t believe there was a witness, Carmine said, “Then how do I know exactly what you did, pulling your gun out of an ankle holster and