Kenny's blood raced as she skimmed along the rooftops, occasionally glancing down to focus her gaze on the four men running below. Hot on their trail was a laughing and whooping Cecil Dykstra, covering ground so quickly that he occasionally would surge forward to smack one of the fleeing felons across the seat of the pants before dropping back. At least one of the men was still armed, and Cecil was being cautious.

This was her fifth night out with Cecil in a week, and he had so far required her to stay high on the roofs. She glanced ahead and saw a gap between the buildings. It was scarcely twenty feet, and she crossed it without slowing. Ahead, the alley into which Cecil now herded the fleeing men came to a T-intersection. In the distance, she caught a flash of colored light.

"Cecil, police ... a block and a half left ... two cars. They have the alley blocked," she said into her Bluetooth. The big man's reaction astonished her. Without breaking stride, he threw a kick into a dumpster along the right side of the alley with such force that the enormous container skidded past the fleeing men and blocked the alley to the right. The men went left, Cecil hard on them, until they were visible to the police.

Once challenged by the officers, the men slid to a halt before going to their knees and into police custody. Cecil turned on his heel, ran half a block, skipping and jumping along the way, and scampered up the four stories to where Kenny waited faster than most men could run. He snatched off the leather mask he always had with him and shoved it into his back pocket. The old man was hardly even out of breath.

"That was a good idea," he said smiling. It had been Kenny's notion to film the felons at work and then simply to call the police. "Forty years ago, I just woulda beat the hell out of 'em and left 'em outside the precinct."

"But you had all the fun," she complained as the two began to run east toward the Park, skipping and cartwheeling, and jumping from roof to roof. With their occasional hoots and laughs, anyone spotting them might have thought them a pair of escaped lunatics.

"Bullets don't hurt me too much, kiddo," he called back after a short time. "I don't wanna hafta glue you back together."

It was true. Kenny had realized in the last year training with Tommy, and now running the alleys and rooftops with Cecil, that she was much tougher than she ever could have imagined. But she knew she could be hurt.

Some months before, when she'd first started goofing with Cecil, she had miscalculated a jump from one rooftop to another and had plummeted three stories to land flat on her back on the roof of a car. To her surprise, she hadn't broken a single bone, but the pain had been unimaginable, and she was laid up for many days nursing her "ouchies," as Cecil had teased her.

Tommy had introduced her to Cecil nearly eight months before, and she was immediately taken by the jovial giant. He was six and a half feet tall if he was an inch, had a physique like a linebacker, and had an easy gait and a boyish smile that belied his 70-plus years. With his blonde hair and silver trimmed goatee, he looked like nothing so much as an especially congenial Viking somewhere in his 50s.

They had struck up an unconventional friendship, first by capering about the city at night, him showing her the more interesting sites and dangerous haunts of the place she always had called home. Later, he'd taken her into darker spaces still, many of which were underground. It was an entire world of which few knew.

Ultimately, Cecil had spent months, on and off, showing her around, sometimes skipping, running, and frolicking through underground halls and tunnels, later dancing, vaulting, and swinging through caves, across alleys, and, ultimately, over rooftops.

Kenny had gotten the sense early on that it all was some sort of training or a test—it seemed like the kind of thing Tommy might do—but she'd soon realized Cecil was just a big kid, and their cavorting about the roofs and tunnels of the city was simply a delight he enjoyed sharing with another. It was only then that it had dawned on Kenny how much she too had come to revel in that delight. She was nine weeks shy of her 38th birthday, and for the first time in her life she felt like a kid.

A week before, things had gotten serious. Cecil had told her of a small gang of thugs who had been robbing late-night revelers in an area north of Hell's Kitchen. It was a high drug area, and the police had done little. He had wondered if she might not wish to come along as he sorted things out.

Their first encounter with the group had ended badly. The felons simply had scattered when the police the two had summoned arrived. Cecil had come up with the idea of herding the youthful assholes to the police rather than bringing the police to them. With Kenny's keen eyes on the rooftops guiding Cecil and communicating anonymously with the police on a prepaid phone, it had gone brilliantly. Cecil had only really needed to hurt one of the men, a fifth felon who he had disarmed and tossed high against a wall before lighting out after the others.

The videos Kenny had taken of the vicious young gang in the act of armed robbery were pristine. She sent them incognito to the PD. Along with the testimony of the victims, it would be more than enough to get a conviction.

The rest of their evening was spent gamboling about the city, running the rooftops and occasionally slipping down to the streets for a bite to eat. By 3:00 am, the two found themselves on a high rooftop with a crystal-clear view of the Empire State Building above. Cecil had just finished boasting of the first time he'd scaled the building, when something occurred to Kenny.

"Why did you quit it all?" she asked, "... 30 years ago?"

"What? The whole beating-the-hell-out-of-crooks thing?" He leaned back on a ledge as if in thought. "I dunno. Money. Time. The kids were starting to get older, and about that same time money got tight. I suppose I just started spending more time working my day job and going to soccer games. And then '91 came along .... I don't think you're old enough remember all that mess."

He sat up and looked at her.

"Things just changed after that. I mean, I was more or less out of the game by then anyway ... but, how have I heard it said, 'the writing was on the wall'?"

"So, what changed?" she asked. "Why you back to beating the hell outta mooks again?"

He laughed one of his pirate laughs.

"I dunno. You're asking hard questions, tonight. You know ... Missy passed away a few years ago, and the kids are all out on the West Coast now." He seemed to think before slowly shaking his head. "I love it when they visit, especially the grandkids, but I can't leave the City ... and a boy's gotta have a hobby."

It was late, and a laughing Kenny rose to leave.

"Well, tomorrow's Monday, and I have to concentrate on my day job." A naughty look grew on her face, and she motioned toward the Empire State Building. "Let's get together next weekend and climb."

Cecil howled.