Night Work by Steve Hamilton

usually mean probation for first-time offenders. And probation means me in your life. I’m part cop, part social worker, part guidance counselor, part rehab coordinator, part bounty hunter. Every hour of every day, I’m your official court-designated guardian angel. I can come to your house on a school-day morning and drag your ass out of bed, because going to school is an absolutely nonnegotiable part of your probation. Or I can come calling on a Sunday, like I’m doing today, when everybody’s home and I can see what’s really going on with your whole family.
    I headed back down Broadway, toward the water. Passing the gym, then the two hills on either side of the street, City Hall on one side, Kingston High School on the other, where Howie and I both spent four colorful years. Now one of us was a cop, the other a PO. Hard to believe. When the fall comes around, I’ll go back to keeping once-a-week office hours there, in the same school I couldn’t wait to get out of. Every once in a while I’ll run into an adult who’ll seem shocked by this idea, that a kid would get out of class early to go keep his probation appointment. I had oneparent ask me with a straight face if I wasn’t worried about stigmatizing my clients this way. I told her that getting excused from biology class to go meet with your probation officer was worth about a hundred points in street cred. If you were one of the few kids who ended up wearing an ankle bracelet, it was a hundred points more. I’ve seen kids wearing shorts in the wintertime just to show them off.
    I kept driving down Broadway, all the way down to the Rondout District. This was the low end of the city, the place where things were once made and shipped out onto the Hudson River. Bricks, for many years. Then steel.
    There’s a strange sort of renewal going on down there now. You go all the way down to the water and you pass all the new condominiums on one side of the street, the new restaurants and little shops on the other. You see all the boats tied up at the docks, the people walking around enjoying the day. A hundred yards later the whole place is overrun with weeds as high as your head. Then there’s the old meatpacking plant, a spectacular ruin of crumbling brick and broken glass, and farther down an abandoned cement factory. That’s where I drove now, past Block Park and the kids out playing basketball. The houses were smaller on this side of town. People lived closer to the bone.
    The one I was looking for was a duplex. I parked in the driveway, went to the front door, and knocked. I stood there listening for a while. I heard a man yelling, but I couldn’t tell if it was from this side of theduplex or the other side. I knocked again. Finally, the kid’s mother opened the door. She was dressed, but there was no mistaking the fact that I had just woken her up.
    “Claire,” I said. “Good morning. Is Wayne here?”
    “No,” she said, yawning.
    “He missed his appointment on Friday,” I said. “He was supposed to come see me at the gym.”
    Wayne had been assigned to me for about three months now. He and some friends had broken into a couple of houses, stolen some cash, a couple of laptops, some prescription medicine. The kid who seemed to be the leader was from Newburgh. That’s in a different county, so I’d never even heard of him before. What he was doing up here running around with Wayne is something I never quite understood, but apparently that kid had a pretty long history. So he ended up drawing nine months at Coxsackie. Wayne was a first-timer, so he got a year’s probation. One year of Joe Trumbull, for better or worse.
    “He’s not here now.” Her hair was wet, pressed down flat on one side of her head. I was guessing she’d taken her shower and then given up on the day already, going right back to bed.
    “Can I come in?”
    “Sure,” she said. You couldn’t have ironed her voice any flatter.
    She stepped aside and I came in past her. I took