"How many were there?" asks Garvey.

"Three, I'd say. But I only know two."

"Who were they?"

"The one's name is Stony. He's my rap buddy."

"What's his real name?"

"I dunno that," says Red.

Garvey stares at him, disbelieving. "He's your rap buddy and you don't know his real name?"

Reds smiles, caught in a stupid lie.

"McKesson," he says. "Walter McKesson."

"And the other guy?"

"I only know him by Glen. He's one of them boys from North and Pulaski. I think Stony be working for him now."

Little Glen Alexander, an up-and-comer in the shooting galleries along West North Avenue. McKesson is no slouch either; he beat a murder charge back in '81. Garvey knows all that and more after a half an hour on the BPI computer. Alexander and McKesson were up in Pimlico on business, putting out free testers for all the Park Heights fiends, trying to expand their market share at the expense of someone else's territory. A minion of one of the local Pimlico dealers, Cornelius Langley, took exception and there were some words on Woodland Avenue between Langley and Alexander that same morning. Like MacArthur, little Glen left the neighborhood declaring that he would return, and like MacArthur, he surely did.

When the gold Volvo pulled up on Woodland Avenue, Reds was walking through the alley from the Palmer Court apartments, where he had gone to score his dope. He came out on Woodland just as McKesson was taking aim at Cornelius Langley.

"Where was Glen?" asks Garvey.

"Behind McKesson."

"Did he have a gun?"

"I think so. But it was McKesson who I seen shoot the boy."

Langley stood his ground, a true stoic, refusing to run even when the men poured from the Volvo. The victim's younger brother, Michael, was with him when the shooting started, but ran screaming when Cornelius. .h.i.t the pavement.

"Did Langley have a gun?"

"Not that I seen," says Reds, shaking his head. "He should've though. Them boys from North and Pulaski don't play."

Garvey runs through the scenario a second time slowly, picking up a few more details and committing the story to eight or nine sheets of interview paper. Even if they weren't going to get rid of his dope charge, Reds wouldn't make much of a court witness, not with his long arrest sheet and the HO-scale tracks running up and down each arm. Michael Langley, however, will be another story. McAllister goes downstairs and brings Reds a soda, and the man stretches his thin frame back from the table, his chair sc.r.a.ping across the tile floor.

"All this dopin' is running me down," he says. "You all took my s.h.i.t and now I got to deal with that. Hard life, you know?"

Garvey smiles. In a half hour, the papers come downtown from the Northwest District Court and Reds signs the personal recog sheet and squeezes his gangly body into the cramped back seat of a Cavalier for the short trip up the Jones Falls Expressway. At Cold Spring and Pall Mall, he slumps down, head below the window's edge, so as not to be seen in an unmarked car.

"You want to get out at Pimlico Road or somewhere else?" Garvey asks, solicitous. "Is this safe for you?"

"I'm fine right here. Ain't n.o.body around. Just pull up on that side of the street."

"Take care, Reds."

"You too, man."

And then he is gone, sliding out of the car so quickly that he is a half block away and moving fast before the traffic light changes. He does not look back.

The next morning, after the autopsy, McAllister gives his patented do-right-by-the-victim speech to the dead man's mother, delivering it with so much apparent sincerity that as usual it makes Garvey want to throw up and has him wondering whether McAllister is going to finish by falling to one knee. No doubt about it, Mac is an artist with a grieving mother.

This time, the plea is for Michael Langley, who has not stopped running since the gunshots on Woodland Avenue. Rather than stand up as the eyewitness to his brother's murder, the boy raced two blocks to his room, packed a bag and headed south for the Langley ancestral lands in Carolina. Bring him back to us, McAllister will ask the mother. Bring him back and avenge your son's death.

And it works. A week later, Michael Langley returns to the city of Baltimore and its homicide unit, where he wastes no time identifying Glen Alexander and Walter McKesson from two photo arrays. Soon Garvey is back in the admin office, pecking out two more warrants on a secretary's IBM Selectric.

Eight cases, eight clearances. While summer bleeds the rest of the shift dry, Rich Garvey is once again communing with an electric typewriter, building the Perfect Year.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 9.

h.e.l.l Night is three men on a midnight shift that never ends, with the office phones bleating and the witnesses lying and the bodies stacking up in the ME's freezer like commuter flights over La Guardia. It arrives without pity at a quarter before midnight, little more than a half hour after Roger Nolan's crew started walking through the door. Kincaid showed up first, then McAllister, and then Nolan himself. Edgerton is late, as usual. But before anyone can finish even one cup of coffee, the first call is on them. And this time it's a little more than the usual corpse. This time it's a police-involved shooting from the Central.

Nolan calls Gary D'Addario at home; protocol dictates that regardless of the hour, the shift lieutenant is to return to the office to supervise the investigation of any police-involved shooting. Then he calls Kim Cord-well, one of two secretaries a.s.signed to the homicide unit. She, too, will have to come in on overtime so that the 24-hour report will be typed to perfection and copied for every boss by morning.

The sergeant and his two detectives then head for the shooting scene, leaving the phones to be answered downstairs in the communications center until Edgerton arrives to staff the office. No sense holding a man back, Nolan reasons. A police-involved shooting is by definition a red ball and, by definition, a red ball requires every warm body.

They take two Cavaliers, arriving at a vacant parking lot off Druid Hill Avenue, where half the Western District's plainclothes vice unit is standing around a parked Oldsmobile Cutla.s.s. McAllister takes in the scene and experiences a moment of deja vu.

"Maybe it's just me," he tells Nolan. "But this looks a little bit too familiar."

"I know what you mean," says the sergeant.

Following a brief conversation with the Western's vice sergeant, McAllister walks back to Nolan, quietly wrestling with the humor of it all.

"It's another ten seventy-eight," says McAllister, dryly creating a new 10 code for the occasion. "Your basic b.l.o.w.j.o.b-in-progress interrupted by police gunfire."

"d.a.m.n," says Kincaid. "It's gettin' so a man can't even get blowed without gettin' himself shot."

"This is one tough town," agrees Nolan.

Three months ago, the same scene was played out on Stricker Street; McAllister was the primary detective for that one as well. The scenario in each case is the same: Suspect picks up a Pennsylvania Avenue prost.i.tute; suspect parks at isolated spot, drops his pants and consigns his nether regions to $20 worth of f.e.l.l.a.t.i.o. Suspect is approached by plainclothes vice officers from the Western District; suspect panics, doing something that seems to threaten the arresting officers; suspect is. .h.i.t with a .38-caliber bullet and ends the evening in a downtown ER, reflecting on the relative joys of marital fidelity.

As law enforcement goes, it's downright ugly. And yet with the right amount of talent and finesse, both incidents will be ruled justifiable by the state's attorney's office. In a strictly legal sense, they can certainly be justified; before firing their weapons at the two men, both officers may well have believed they were in jeopardy. When ordered to surrender, the suspect on Stricker Street reached for something in the back of his truck and a plainclothes officer fired one shot into his face, fearing that he was trying to grab a weapon. The officer in tonight's incident fired one shot through the windshield after the suspect, attempting to drive away from the plainclothesmen, struck one of the officers with the car's b.u.mper.

For homicide detectives, however, a justified police shooting means only that there was no criminal intent behind the officer's actions and that at the time he used deadly force the officer genuinely believed himself or others to be in serious danger. From a legal standpoint, this is a hole large enough for the proverbial truck, and in the case of these two vice squad shootings from the Western, the homicide unit will feel no qualms about using every inch of that chasm. The equivocation inherent in every police-involved shooting probe is understood by any cop with a year or two on the street: If Nolan or McAllister or Kincaid were asked at the scene whether they truly believed the shooting to be justified, they would answer in the affirmative. But if they were asked whether that shooting represented good police work, they would provide an altogether different answer or, more likely, no answer at all.

In the realm of American law enforcement, the deceit has been standardized. Inside every major police department, the initial investigation of any officer-involved shooting begins as an attempt to make the incident look as clean and professional as possible. And in every department, the bias at the heart of such an investigation is seen as the only reasonable response to a public that needs to believe that good cops always make good shootings and that bad shootings are only the consequence of bad cops. Time and again, the lie must be maintained.

"I take it the lady in question is already downtown?" says Nolan.

"Yes indeed," says McAllister.

"If it's the same girl as on Stricker Street, I'm going to bust a gut hearing about how every time she goes down on a guy, he gets shot."

McAllister smiles. "If we're all right here, I think I'm going to head for the hospital."

"You and Donald can both go," says the sergeant. "I'm going back to the office and get things started."

But before he can do so, a nearby uniform overhears the citywide dispatch call for a multiple shooting in the Eastern. The uniform turns up the volume and Nolan listens as the call is confirmed and an Eastern officer asks the dispatcher to notify homicide. Nolan borrows a hand-held radio and a.s.sures communications that he's responding from the shooting scene in the Central.

"We'll meet you back at the office," says McAllister. "Call if you need us."

Nolan nods, then heads across town as McAllister and Kincaid go to the emergency room at Maryland General. Twenty minutes later, the thirty-six-year-old suspect- "a working man," he is quick to a.s.sure them, "a happily married working man"-is sitting up in a back room, his upper right arm bandaged and encased in a canvas sling.

McAllister calls his name.

"Yes sir?"

"We're with the police department. This is Detective Kincaid and I'm Detective-"

"Listen," says the victim. "I'm really, really sorry, and like I wanted to tell the officer, I didn't know he was a police-"

"We understand ..."

"I had my gla.s.ses off and I just saw him coming up to the car waving somethin' and I thought I was gettin' robbed, you know?"

"That's fine. We can talk later ..."

"And I wanted to apologize to the officer but they wouldn't let me see him, but really, sir, I didn't know what-"

"That's fine," says McAllister. "We can talk about this later, but the important thing is that you and the officer are both all right."

"No, no," says the suspect, waving his sling in the air. "I'm fine."

"Okay, great. They'll be taking you down to our office and we'll talk there, okay?"

The suspect nods and both detectives walk toward the emergency room exit.

"Nice guy," says Kincaid.

"Very nice," says McAllister.

The guy is telling the truth, of course. Both detectives couldn't help but notice that the suspect's eyegla.s.ses were still sitting on top of the Oldsmobile's dashboard. Parked in an isolated spot with his pants at his knees, the man probably felt particularly vulnerable at the sight of a young man in street clothes walking up to the car with something shiny in his hand. The victim on Stricker Street had the same fear of a robbery and, as a supermarket security guard, he impulsively reached for his nightstick in the back seat when the first officer jerked open the pa.s.senger door. Mistaking the stick for a long gun, the cop fired one round into the man's face, and only by the grace of the University ER did the poor guy survive. To the department's credit, the second shooting will be enough to prompt the deputy commissioner for operations to pull the district vice units off the street long enough to make changes in the prost.i.tution detail procedures.

Over on the east side, Roger Nolan is dealing with the fallout from a triple shooting. The scene on North Montford is a wild one, too, with a young girl shot dead and two other family members wounded. The wanted man is the dead girl's estranged lover, who compensated for the end of the brief relationship by shooting everyone he could find in his girlfriend's rowhouse and then running away. Nolan is at the scene for two hours, prying witnesses from the neighborhood and sending them downtown, where Kincaid begins to sort through the early arrivals.

Returning to the homicide office, Nolan checks the small interrogation room, satisfying himself that tonight's streetwalker is not the same girl whose customer was shot on Stricker Street. He checks in with D'Addario, who has arrived, and with the twenty-six-year-old plainclothesman who pulled the trigger and is now a nervous wreck in D'Addario's office. Then he scans the bustling activity in the office and does not see the face he is looking for.

Sitting at Tomlin's desk, he dials Harry Edgerton's home number and listens patiently as the phone rings four or five times.

"Hullo."

"Harry?"

"Uh-huh."

"This is your sergeant," says Nolan, shaking his head. "What the h.e.l.l are you doing asleep?"

"What do you mean?"

"You're supposed to be working tonight."

"No, I'm off. Tonight and Wednesday, I'm off."

Nolan grimaces. "Harry, I got the roll book right in front of me and your H-days are Wednesday-Thursday. You're on tonight with Mac and Kincaid."

"Wednesday and Thursday?'

"Yeah."

"No way. You're kidding me."

"Yeah, Harry, I'm calling you up at one A.M A.M. just to f.u.c.k with you."

"You're not kidding me."

"No," says Nolan, almost amused.

"s.h.i.t."

"s.h.i.t is right."

"Anything going on there?"

"A police shooting and a murder. That's all."

Edgerton curses himself. "You want me to come in?"

"f.u.c.k it, go back to sleep," says the sergeant. "We'll be all right and you'll work Thursday. I'll pencil it in."

"Thanks, Rog. I could swear I had Tuesday and Wednesday. I was sure of it."

"You're a piece of work, Harry."

"Yeah, sorry."

"Go back to sleep."

In a few hours, when events again overtake the squad, Nolan will regret his generosity. Now, however, he has every reason to believe that he can make do until morning with two detectives. McAllister and Kincaid have returned from the hospital with the wounded suspect, his arm in a sling, and an interview is already under way in the admin office. From the look of things, it is going pretty much as expected, too. After giving a half-hour statement to Kincaid and McAllister, the victim's most sincere desire is to apologize to the cop who shot him.

"If I could just see him for a moment, I'd like to shake his hand."

"That might not be a good idea right now," says Kincaid. "He's a little upset right now."