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And, to give the devil his due, Parker had once approached this somewhat elusive task of law and order with a distinctly different viewpoint. When he was a patrolman - though it never broke his heart to tag a car - he was inclined to be lenient with petty offenders, letting them off with a whack of his billet and a warning. There was, he had concluded, enough real crime going on in this precinct without persecuting decent people for minor infractions. He learned in those days that the law was open to interpretation long before it reached the law courts. He learned that the lowest arbitrator in the city's judicial system was a man who wore no legal robes at all; he was the patrolman on the beat. And so he handed down a dozen decisions each day, and his decisions definitely leaned toward giving the petty offender a break. At the same time, he felt he was tough and uncompromising with the out-and-out thief. He considered himself a good cop.

One day, the good cop who was Andy Parker was walking his beat when the proprietor of a dry goods store called him over. The man was holding the wrist of a young kid who had allegedly stolen a bolt of silk from the sidewalk stand. Parker questioned the owner, and Parker questioned the kid, and then he donned his judicial robes and said, "Well, we don't want to cause this kid any trouble, do we? Now, can't we just forget about all this?" The proprietor of the store was loath to forget about all this because the kid had allegedly passed the bolt of silk to an accomplice who had made his escape with the merchandise. But Parker kept administering his sidewalk practice, and finally everyone seemed satisfied to let the entire matter drop.

That evening, after he had changed to his street clothes, Parker went for a beer in a neighborhood bar. He had the beer, and he had a shot, and then he had another beer and another shot, and he was feeling like a pretty nice guy by the time he left the bar, and that was the last time in his life he ever felt like a pretty nice guy.

He was ambushed on his way to the subway by three men who didn't allow him the opportunity to draw his revolver. He was ambushed and beaten within an inch of his life. He lay on the sidewalk in a pool of his own blood, and when he regained consciousness he wondered why he'd been beaten or who had done the beating, and he drew what seemed to be the only logical conclusion. He figured that he had been beaten by friends of the shopowner because he'd let the kid get away with the theft of the silk.

He never did find out who had administered the beating on that lonely autumn night.

Perhaps it had been friends of the shopowner. Actually, it could have been any one of a hundred people who disliked Parker even in those days of amiability. Actually, it didn't matter who'd beat him up.

He learned several things.

The first thing he learned was that it wasn't nice to receive a beating. In the movies, a beating is usually a battle. The person getting the lumps is a fighting devil.who manages to pick off a dozen of his assailants before he is finally subdued. Then he gets up, shakes the dizziness out of his head, wipes a trickle of blood from his lip, dusts off his clothes, and narrows his eyes, leaving the audience to speculate on just what that narrowing of eyes meant. In real life, a beating is very rarely administered with fists. The men who worked over Parker on that night in autumn were all as big as he was, and they were armed with sawed-off broom handles, and they really beat the piss out of him. They kept beating him long after he was unconscious, they beat him within an inch of his life, and the cliche happened to fit the situation well because they damn near beat him to death, and he may have been a lot closer than an inch to leaving the land of the quick. He had not liked that experience at all. So the first thing he learned was that he would never again, ever, as long as he walked the earth, be on the receiving end of a beating. Ever. He learned this the way a young boy learns his catechism. I will never again take a beating. I will never again take a beating.

And the way to be certain you will never take a beating is to hit first and ask questions later. It's handy to own a policeman's badge at such times. It makes apologies to innocent people easier afterward.

The second thing that Parker learned was that he was being entirely too easy and naive in his approach to police work. From that day on, Parker would give a summons to anyone who so much as spat on the sidewalk. In fact, and curiously, from that day on Parker brought in more drunks, vagrants and innocuous offenders than any other cop working in the precinct. In his own eyes, Parker had stopped being a nice guy. He was a mean, tough son of a bitch, and he knew it. And if you didn't happen to like him, that was just too bad. Parker had a life to lead, and he knew how to lead it.

I will never again take a beating, he told himself.