Notes: The setting which follows was brought upon by the need to relocate a certain undercover agent for his own protection, combined with my decision to write what I know and my lack of knowledge about New York City anyway.
Information on local drug-running courtesy of the Missouri State Highway Patrol.

The black-haired man stared to the northeast out the upper floor window at the narrow, flat-roofed red brick houses, identical to the one he inhabited, across the street, their chimneys marching in regulated order down the narrow lane. In his mind’s eye he took the scene apart, viewing it as it had once looked 150 years before when the houses were new. It wasn’t difficult. The cars choking the narrow street had not been present, of course, and while the steeple of the church in the background had likely punctuated the horizon, the enormous parabola of stainless steel had not. Two houses down he could see the asymmetrical gap of a side yard which had once been filled by another home, not the frivolously blooming crabapple that grew there now. But that was all in the past, he thought, forcing himself back to the present, where he knew he had to live.

The house he had acquired needed work. Normally, he liked them like that after an assignment, particularly a difficult and exhausting one such as he’d just completed. He’d plunge right in to the structured creativity of therapeutic carpentry (as he termed it). But he’d been on his own here now for a full two weeks following his physical recovery, and the blueboard they’d supplied him with to repair the plaster walls still lay in a spare bedroom untouched.

Not that the house was unliveable, he acknowledged, but maybe that was the whole problem. He’d grown so accustomed to living on the edge, fighting every day just to stay alive, that non-emergencies just didn’t seem important any more. Denby wouldn’t have cared if the plaster was chipped and cracked, only if the rain was pouring in on his head.

He’d been Denby too long, an alcoholic ex-cop who’d turned to stronger poison, then tried to screw the mob. A manipulative S.O.B. He sighed and picked up the wallet that still lay open on the unmade bed. Again. Checked the name on the I.D. Again. Jeffrey Alan Neill, PhD., Visiting Adjunct Professor of Criminal Justice at Saint Louis University. Nice guy, but somewhat boring. Bookish. Denby was dead.

The thought, curiously, weighed on his chest, making it hard for him to breathe. Silly, he thought. He’d no more been Harry Denby than he was Jeff Neill. His real name - his true identity - had long since passed away itself, and he’d felt less remorse at its demise. And it wasn’t as if Denby had been someone he liked. In fact, he despised him, a fact that easily worked to his advantage since Denby despised himself so vehemently.