“The action is breathtaking and the book is a spellbinding view of a world like no other.”—Detroit News   Another night falls on New York City. A victim screams. A siren wails. Eddie Kennedy is on his beat. He’s a gold shield homicide detective, and his next week of investigations is a journey you will never forget—an electrifying rite of passage into the heart of what it takes to be a cop. From hookers to murderers, from street-wise muggers to stationhouse rats, from the hectic squad room to a bloody alley, Kennedy takes on a killing city—and takes the reader on a rare ride into a frightening hidden world.Carsten Stroud is the author of the New York Times bestseller Close Pursuit, and the award-winning Sniper’s Moon, both set in the New York City Police Department. He lives and writes in Thunder Beach.CHAPTER 1 DREAM SEQUENCE   This little black kid is running, he’s got one knee out of the fabric and every time his right leg comes up the cap shows like the top swivel of a camshaft rod, down it goes again and up comes the other. Kennedy is watching this from his car and he can see that the kid isn’t running for fun: His blue-black skin is streaming wet and pulled back tight and his mouth is wide and gasping, the bony little body stretching out for every yard of sidewalk. Kennedy can see the kid coming from two blocks away but the scene is compressed: just a small nigger kid racing toward Kennedy, straight into the slanting sundown so that the dusty yellow light is glinting off the kid’s cheeks and his eyes are almost closed, he’s flying up this street with a solid wall of grills and smashed headlights and rusting fenders on his left and the tenement stoops and the garbage on his right. Kennedy can l.