"You know we have a day job?" Mort said. "Which, if we keep trolling this district at night, we won't be able to do. Not that we were destined for greatness or anything, even on a full night's sleep."  

He pulled down the armrest in the middle of the back seat, exposing the wet bar. "When did you put this in?" he asked, brightening. 

"When I had to contemplate driving around all night long with you grumbling in the backseat," Santini replied.  

"Consider me adequately mollified." Mort poured himself a brandy, took a sip, and made a sour face. "Though I'm more of a bourbon man myself."  

"I've always known you to be satisfied with what's in front of you," Santini said wearily. 

Mort eyed Gretchen in the front seat, fixing her hair. "Point taken." 

Tired of babysitting, Santini peeled his eyes off Mort in the rearview mirror. He showed Gretchen how to play with the police band shortwave, and scan for crimes in progress.  

They were driving the edge of the Jack London waterfront warehouse district, about as far away from the water as they could get. That put them across from the Amtrak lines, where rents on loft spaces dropped from somewhere north of stratospheric. "Possible 211 in progress, Jefferson Square, corner of Seventh and Eighth," spat a crackly voice over the radio.  

"What's that?" Gretchen asked. 

"Robbery," Santini said. 

"We should check it out," Gretchen said. "Nothing worth stealing in this end of town." 

"Makes you wonder what these sensitive 'artistes' did before Sister Gretchen here came along," Mort said, his pissy mood fueled by the brandy. He eyed the uninspired view and took another drink to numb the effect of the assault on his soul. "Hey, easy on those bumps," Mort groused, as the latest pothole sent the brandy splashing over his suit. Thor licked it up. "Leave it to you to drive a car big enough that a Bullmastiff can fight me for the brandy." 

Santini parked the 1949 Mercury convertible in front of Jefferson Square park.  

A figure was crawling up the fire escape on a building facing the park. The three of them studied the burglar. Mort said, "Five dollars says he's the pizza delivery guy, just wants to enjoy the breeze on the way up." 

Santini killed the engine. "Where's his box?"  

"They could have ordered bread sticks," Mort argued.  

Cracking the door, Santini suggested, "If your brandy's that important to you, why don't you bring it along."  

"I hate how easily you play me." Mort grabbed the bottle, anyway.  

"You should probably stay here, Gretchen," Santini said as sensitively as he could. 

Mort handed her his .44 magnum. "Here, I don't want it chipping the glass on the brandy bottle. I think he inherited it from his great-great-grandmother, long line of dedicated alcoholics that they are."  

She took the gun from him. "Don't worry about shooting," Mort said. "It's big enough to discourage most shooters without firing. If you do shoot it, don't worry about hitting anything. The sound'll deafen him and the discharge will blind him, so where's he gonna go? As a bonus, the recoil'll knock you out so you feel less pain than I do with the brandy." 

Santini grimaced. There was no more time to argue. They raced out of the car and toward the building.  

Santini headed up the fire escape. Mort and Gretchen took the more conventional route. Santini was counting on reaching the thief before the others got there. He could hear the elevator inside the building firing up, figuring that was Mort, who didn't fancy stairs. In his perennially pickled state, elevators made him especially woozy, but with his vision blurred, he rather fancied playing the elevator panel like a craps table at Reno, guessing what numbers to put his faith in.  

That left Gretchen to the stairwell. Flashing on the thief running down the stairs in response to noises coming from the fire escape and the elevator, and running headlong into Gretchen who probably didn't know one end of that gun from the other, Santini quickened his pace.  

That was item one for tomorrow, teach her how to fire first and ask questions later. He'd rather fix a botched killing than pick up the pieces of his psyche after finding her dead somewhere. He figured he could learn to live with the guilt better than a broken heart.  

Granted, she'd just recently graduated the police academy. But he and Mort didn't exactly specialize in police sanctioned weapons. Compensating for failing sight, and ever-better armed bad guys, had led to behaviors in general which weren't particularly approved of back at the precinct. She had already been cleared for detective work owing entirely to her exceptional mind. That was her secret weapon he was banking on getting her and the rest of them through this and all future engagements. 

His arthritic hip had picked a rare moment not to act up. Nice of it. That, or the fear of Gretchen dying on his watch was pumping enough hormonal pain killers to the region to keep him numbed and mobile.  

By the time he stuck his head in the opened window the thief had darted through, Santini had substantially closed the gap between them.  

There was something dry and unemotional about the way the man was moving ahead of him. He had no doubt heard Santini, and didn't seem the least rattled, which was certainly rattling Santini.  

The guy had to be a pro.  

Santini pulled out his .410, popularly known as "The Judge," whose bullet made a .44 Magnum's look like an afterthought. The Judge fired shot gun shells, any number of other suitably large cartridges more suited to rifles. Its most remarkable attribute was it could stop a Mack truck in one shot, and he didn't need to aim. With his astigmatism getting worse with age, he couldn't always count on an accurate assessment of his target. The boys at the office loved to chide him that he should learn to shoot one day.  

Of course, the corollary concern was hitting Mort and Gretchen along with the thief, and possibly any sensitive artistes living in the building, as well. Alas, solve one problem, five others sprout up to take its place. The story of his life. Like what the hell was he doing risking his girlfriend's life on these night escapades just as a way of holding on to her? 

Santini swept the gun in front of him like a lighthouse beacon. His shins took a beating from bumping into everything in the dark. Gretchen had been after him to take more bilberry to address his poor night vision. Only he tended to forget. Maybe she should first cure his memory problem.  

He hit another piece of furniture, and stifled his curses, coming out in Italian, Greek and Hungarian. When he was just plain mad he only swore in Italian. Fighting mad, and his worldliness tended to flower. 

Catching some of the iridescence off the street lamp, Darkman shined blacker than this, the blackest of nights. He had his arm outstretched and his gun aimed at a spot on the floor from which a sound had come. He fired. From the sound of the report, Santini figured a .22-the preferred gun of assassins.  

Santini figured he could thank his lucky stars later, and fired The Judge.  

Darkman went down and the room went quiet.  

Santini found his way to the lights and flicked them on.  

There was Mort, sitting in an easy chair by the ocean of windows, sipping his brandy out of the bottle. He was using it to wash down one of his Tourette's pills he preferred to sneak in the cover of darkness.  

"I remember when you preferred the passive aggressiveness of swearing out of turn to dousing with those pills." 

"I remember when your hip arthritis held you back more," Mort said."  

"I suppose Gretchen exerts a certain medicinal effect." Santini swept his eyes about the flat looking for her. "Where is she?"  

"Probably found another bleeding heart cause on the way up the stairs." 

Santini pocketed The Judge, and bent over the body.  

The guy was only playing dead.  

He brought his legs up off the ground and got Santini's head in a scissors lock. He had a tight-enough grip that Santini was seeing stars without looking out the window. They were quickly replaced by the blackness of space as if he'd beaten Einstein's speed-of-light law in his rush to get to the edge of the universe.  

Seconds later, his vision returned.  

And Darkman was gone.  

And there was a suspicious hole in one of the windows facing the park. 

Mort said, "It could do with a good draft in here. The air is staler than a pair of my socks at the end of the day." 

"It would have been nice to know what he was doing here, Mort," Santini complained. 

"You're welcome," Mort replied. 

"I think I have that part figured out," came Gretchen's voice from across the loft. 

"You want to send up a flare?" Mort said. "My echo-location isn't what it used to be." 

Santini imagined Gretchen's smile from across the room. They were feeling awfully connected these days.  

She pushed a box out of the way and stuck her head out. She was on all fours, exposing the path for them. Santini and Mort followed her through the tunnel, formed by the stacked cardboard boxes, though not without Mort first lending his usual wry commentary. "I love playing fort. It's why I became a cop. So I'd never have to stop." 

When they came to the "cave" opening, they were able to stand again.  

Loft Boy had himself a computer station tucked away inside the fort built of boxes, which admittedly could put a stop even to The Judge, if not the jury and the executioner. Santini felt as if he'd passed through a monkey's ass to land in the cockpit of a 747. "What's astro boy here up to?" he asked. 

"Show him," Gretchen said.  

The kid put his eye up to the scanner. It read his retinal pattern so he could gain access to the computer. Then the computer gave them a video-guided tour of another kind of scanner, a handheld one, sweeping an empty room. It revealed moving pictures of a murder that had happened in the apartment, only in strange colors, as if they were watching through an infrared camera.  

"That's a psychic impression left in the loft of a murder that took place sixteen years ago," Gretchen explained. 

"Yeah, right," Mort scoffed. "For the record, your hallucinations are way better than what this brandy has to offer me." 

"The device carbon-dates, in a sense, the psychic impressions it captures. He says he's gotten impressions so far that go back over two hundred years," Gretchen said, "always of some equally charged incident, a rape, a murder, a holocaust of some kind." 

"Otherwise the psychic impressions don't linger very long," Loft Boy explained.  

Mort took another swig from the now largely empty brandy bottle. "No way." 

"It could be why they want to kill him," Gretchen speculated. 

"Why? The cops'd love to have this," Santini said. "The FBI, CIA, every security agency in the country... Not to mention homebuyers who want to know if they have to hire an exorcist before putting any money down." 

"Maybe if it just went back a day or two," Gretchen said. "But hundreds of years? The powers that be couldn't cover their tracks. Not fully. Not ever. Not with these devices floating around." 

"I rather resent this wild speculation starting to make an ounce of sense," Mort complained. 

"How much would one of these toys go for?" Santini asked. 

Loft Boy did some quick math in his head, "Two, three hundred bucks maybe, if I had to make them one at a time. With mass production, who knows?" 

Santini peeled off three hundred bucks for the kid from a wad he kept in a gold money clip in his pocket. He paid for everything in cash as a rule; he essentially invented living off-grid. He spent less money than a sextegenarian spendthrift who peed on his lemon tree in the backyard to save on water. It came in handy for times like this. "I'll take the one you have in your hand." 

"It's just a prototype," Loft Boy warned. "Probably break down inside of a month. Not exactly field tested to last." 

"Which is why we're going to keep you in mind, and suggest strongly that you learn to continue your research off the net, where they can track your every keystroke," Santini said. 

"I'm no good at this cloak and dagger shit," Loft Boy admitted. Slouching to make his tall, lanky build less imposing, he combed his long hair back behind his ears with his fingers. "I pay for everything with a credit card, even my thrift-clothes and my café lattés at Starbucks-which cost more than my entire outfit." 

"Not to worry," Mort said. "Santini, and Sister Gretchen here are gonna school you on the ins and outs of living incognito. And I; I'm going to teach you to fight like a drunken Irishman. Drink like one too, for extra credit." 

Loft Boy smiled. He eyed the hole in his loft window, recalling recent events, Santini imagined, and said, "I'm in." 

They watched Thor approaching on Loft Boy's security monitor, explaining how Loft Boy knew to lie quiet as a church mouse while Darkman probed his interiors using his .22 pistol for an antenna.  

Thor bounded up the fire escape and stepped through the window. He trotted up, holding Darkman's severed head in his mouth.  

Flabbergasted by Thor, as usual, Mort said, "Well, I'll be damned." 

Thor held the head up before the eye-scanner. The computer, which had relocked itself after being on idle for more than thirty seconds, unlocked itself again.  

Santini popped the contact lens out of Darkman's eye.  

He had come prepared to grab what he could off the kid's computer and scrub the disk, after taking care of Loft Boy, in all likelihood, Santini figured. 

"So much for my airtight security," Loft Boy said, and squeezed Gretchen's hand.  

"What's with this dog?" Mort asked.  

"He's psychic," Santini explained. 

"How's that possible?" Mort finished the last of the brandy, pondering the point. 

"He was born in Berkeley," Santini explained.  

"I guess that explains it," Mort said, rubbing the top of his head. "Why doesn't he ever read my mind?" 

"There's nothing to read," Santini quipped. 

"Ha-ha." Mort abandoned the empty brandy bottle the same way it had abandoned him. "He could at least get me a beer out of the fridge when I want. I trained my last golden retriever to do that. He wasn't half as smart."  

"Probably just worried about your blood-alcohol level," Santini explained. "Afraid, with the next beer, you might confuse him for your ex-girlfriend." 

"That I could do stone-cold sober." Mort squirmed from the shiver riding up his spine just thinking about it. "Never get married and sign everything over to a woman when you're drunk, so you have to live with her and pray she dies prematurely to get it all back. Especially with women being better at getting away with murder than you are, if you get any funny ideas." 

Gretchen and Santini laughed. "I'll keep that in mind," Santini said, and kissed Gretchen. 

After rewinding the security video, Mort noticed Thor had accompanied Gretchen into the loft. He watched him use his night vision in tandem with effective body blocking to guide her out of harm's way.

***

Later that night, and half way into the morning, Mort dragged Santini over to see his dog eating the brains out of Darkman. "Yeah, he has some nasty habits I've learned to live with," Santini said. 

Mort shook his head, and took a nip of Loft Boy's Gallo wine, the bottle the size of a St. Louis slugger. "I guess it could be worse." 

Another sip of wine to clear his head, and he said, "You realize this makes your dog suspect numero uno in those Moonie murders?" 

"It's just circumstantial," Santini said. "Besides, we don't know the whole story. There are always mitigating circumstances." 

"Like codependence," Mort said, burying the bottle in his mouth.  

They returned to drilling Loft Boy, whose real name, apparently, was Lewis Lafferty, ("LL" for short, he explained) on how to survive the next few days and into the foreseeable future. They couldn't take him with, since they were headed into the kind of territory which would surely get him killed, lowering his chances, in Santini's mind, from zero to less than zero.  

Mort, who could barely stand up straight himself, taught the kid how to fight, at least how to throw off sneak attacks from behind, choke holds, and other dastardly stunts. How to rake his attacker's nuts with his fingers, jab the top of his foot with his heel, poke out his eyes, rip out his wind pipe, and other one-quick-stroke, then-run-like-hell stunts in case it wasn't enough.  

That took them through the rest of the night.

***

"Okay, what do you do before you cross the street?" Santini said. 

"Check for traffic-light cameras, store-security cameras, cameras mounted on the hoods of police cars, cell phones with people snapping pictures," LL said, sounding worldly, and as if he was running out of patience. "Hey, this is like Xeno's paradox: Is it possible to ever make it across the road, if you keep slicing time in half?"  

So the kid had a sense of humor. Santini was impressed. He'd need it in the days ahead to keep from going stir-crazy from the now-healthy paranoia, the kind for which most people took medication to keep from blowing their brains out under that kind of everyone's-out-to-get-you pressure. 

"What do you do when you see a lovely little bauble on Telegraph Avenue for your girlfriend?" Gretchen asked.  

"Pay in cash," LL said. "Check it for bugs with the latest de-bugging technology, which I have because I keep up with the spy shops by going in one at least weekly." 

"What about your next invention?" Santini said. 

"Design it on the computer under the protection of quantum encoding, as it can't be cracked," LL blurted proudly. "Wait for you to get me that coding with your ever-expanding network of techies under your protection. Make sure any parts I buy, come assembly time, are vetted by you guys, manufactured and distributed from the network." 

Mort shook his head, burped up the last of the Gallo. "How did this kid last this long?" 

"By proving angels live among us," Santini said. "Let's hope they stay on board." He shook LL's hand. "All right, kid. I certify you ready to go out and live in the world. Welcome to the Renaissance movement." 

"You think it's a real Renaissance?" LL asked. "Like the one they had after the Middle Ages?"  

"Only, instead of the church this time, we're fighting men in black. Hope you can adjust," Santini said. 

"If not, I know Thor'll be happy," Mort said. "Seems to appreciate brain food." 

They escorted the kid well beyond the building, in case any more men in black were lingering in the shadows of Justice Park.  

When they couldn't go any further, Santini signaled Thor to continue the escort, and only double back when he was certain the kid was in the clear. He didn't have to tell Thor any of this. He just thought it.  

Thor barked his understanding. Santini appreciated the fact that his doggie radar probably-the kind that made his hairs stand on end when trouble was near-beat the shit out of his policeman's radar. They'd spent enough time with the kid for him to start growing on Santini.