The Whites

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As Billy Graves drove down Second Avenue to work, the crowds worried him: a quarter past one in the morning and there were still far more people piling into the bars than leaving them, everyone coming and going having to muscle their way through the swaying clumps of half-hammered smokers standing directly outside the entrances. He hated the no smoking laws. They created nothing but problems — late-night noise for the neighbors, elbow room enough for the bar-cramped beefers to finally start swinging, and a plague of off-duty limos and radio cabs all tapping their horns to hustle fares.

It was the night of St. Patrick’s, worst of the year for NYPD’s Night Watch, the handful of detectives under Billy’s command responsible for covering all of felony-weight Manhattan from Washington Heights to Wall Street between one a.m. and eight a.m., when there were no active squads in any of the local precincts. There were other worst nights, Halloween and New Year’s Eve for two, but St. Patrick’s was the ugliest, the violence the most spontaneous and low-tech. Stompings, blunt objects, fists — more stitches than surgeries but some very malicious acting out.

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