The rain in New York doesn't wash things clean. It makes the grime slicker, reflects the neon signs in the puddles like a broken mirror, turns the city into something you could lose your teeth in if you're not careful.

I lost mine at seven. Well, not mine—my father's. He was called Jack. Jack O'Brien, according to the obituary that ran in the Morning Telegram on a Tuesday in November, buried between the society pages and the classified ads. "Local Man Dies in Boating Accident," it said. Three paragraphs. That was all. The first paragraph told us he had been rowing on the Hudson. The second said the weather was bad. The third said the body was recovered two days later.

My mother didn't believe it. She moved back to her mother's in the Bronx the next week, and I stayed with a cousin in Brooklyn who didn't want me and knew it. I don't blame him. I was seventeen, thin as a rail, and I carried my anger like a coin in my pocket—always there, always cold.

I watched him go.

I was sitting in a bar called The Blue Note on 125th Street. The kind of place with a jukebox that only played jazz and a bartender named Sal who never looked at you when you ordered. Jack walked in at half past nine. He was smiling. He always smiled when he was nervous, even though nobody around him knew he was nervous because nobody around him knew he was writing stories that got people killed.

Two men came in after him. They didn't sit. They didn't order drinks. They just stood near the door, hands in their pockets, watching Jack with the patient eyes of men who had done this before.

I didn't stand up. I didn't follow him out. I watched through the rain-streaked window as they led him down the street, three blocks west, toward the river. They didn't push him. They didn't handcuff him. They just walked beside him like friends escorting a drunk home.

That was the thing about the Special Operations Division. They didn't need handcuffs. Nobody fought back against men who carried authority like a second skin.