Instead of driving to the Booking next to the Court downtown, the cops made an odd u-turn on Broadway and went north. Back in high school, after the incident with Mr. Falco, Fitz spent almost five hours in Staten Island booking before things were sorted out. But now they were pulling up to the 26th precinct, just a few blocks north of Columbia University. Things didn't seem right and Fitz was starting to worry.

Like all NYPD stations, it was a dreary looking place. A 1970s time capsule set in its wooden crudeness and glacial functionality, with subdued people who looked like they were born and reached adulthood in its waiting area. The officers walked Fitz past the front desk and across the main floor, where only cops and perps were allowed. Most policemen were young and broad, like weightlifters, with close haircuts, wearing sweatshirts and hoodies. Seeing them hobble about, laughing and cursing, Fitz imagined that, uncuffed, he looked exactly like them. But when the mustached officer and his tiny partner walked him right past two metal cages and into an empty room with no lock on the door, his hands began to perspire.

"Have a seat, buddy," the fat mustached cop smiled and pointed to the chair. "Want something from the soda machine?" he giggled.

When the cop walked out, leaving him alone in the empty office, Fitz realized that a desk and a chair were the only pieces of furniture in the room. Both chained to the wall, they had that unmistakable lasting simplicity—trademark of the New York State prison labor. Through the open door, outside the office, he saw two men in separate cells. With their ripped shirts and bruised faces, sitting behind bars in restless silence, they reminded him of the zoo. He wondered if they got arrested for fighting each other.

"Fitz?" Except for the gold shield and a gun holster at his waste, the man at the door was dressed like a stock broker, his hair dark and shiny with gel. He looked slightly younger than Fitz's father. Only unlike his father, who was short and overweighed, the plain clothes officer stood at least six and a half feet tall and held a posture so powerful and rugged that even in his blue button-down shirt he appeared carved out of granite.

"I am Detective DiPasquale," he said.

"How did you know to call me Fitz?"

"I talked to Mister Seltzer, your supervisor," the cop muttered, looking down at a sheet of paper in his hand. "And your father, Brian Fitzgerald."

"Fuck," Fitz whispered, remembering more of the fight, "How is he?"

"Who, your father?"

"No, the kid."

The detective looked up from the page, tipping the sharp geometry of his face, its dark protrusions of veins and bone, the ancient craters of shaving blade. "Why did you beat on the guy, Fitz?"

Fitz buried his face in his hands, "I don't remember."

DiPasquale put the paper on the desk. Fitz knew the cop did it deliberately, to make its contents visible to him from across the table, but he glanced anyway. On that stationhouse printout, in pale ink—under Christopher Francis Fitzgerald, LCpl—he recognized the real order of his memories. Everything he has done for the Core from the enlistment to the honorable discharge—Paris Island, Iraqi Freedom, the Surge, his Combat Action Ribbon for valor in "Phantom Fury"—all listed in imminent chronology, all meticulously remembered somewhere outside this room.

For a full minute the detective studied him, sinewy arms crossed at the chest. "You are free to go," he said finally. "The charges have been dropped."