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For his part, Moreno has had bullets flying near him, during a bust in a bar, but he would still rank that number two as his worst moment. “There was a crib death, and my partner and I were the first on the scene,” the father of an eight-year-old girl and two-year-old boy says. “It was horrible. The mother screaming, not taking it in.”

The call turns out to be only a fender-bender involving a cab. The next summons comes from a panic alarm in a karaoke place on teeming St. Mark’s Place. The bar in front is two-deep in Japanese drinkers; a long wood-paneled corridor in the back runs past more than a dozen karaoke rooms where small parties have gathered to sing along with the lyrics flashed across their private TV monitors. The manager is surprised to see the cops — certainly he hasn’t been the one to press the alarm. A quick check reveals some wiring problems.

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Back outside, Moreno takes in the Technicolor sights of St. Mark’s Place — a hub of old beer bars, new vegetarian and Asian restaurants, old CD-record stores, new foot therapy and massage parlors, an herbal remedies chain store. “This is the one block that hasn’t changed all that much,” he notes. “It’s always been busy — the Times Square of the East Village.”

As though on cue, a string bean dressed in the bright blues and reds of the Cat in the Hat walks by to report some emergency a block away. “They got two EMS wagons out front,” he says.

Narvaez thanks the Dr. Seuss character for the tip but doesn’t move. She knows better than anybody that the corner indicated is where the EMS waits for emergency calls. The man she is scheduled to marry in October is one of the paramedics. “We met during 9/11,” she says. “I guess you could say it was the worst time of my life leading up to the best time.”

Neither Narvaez nor Moreno ended up on the job because of the usual family influence or a nothing-to-lose attitude toward taking the exam. “In my case,” she says, “it was because when I was 13, my father’s car was broken into. The guys who responded caught the perps right away, and I was real impressed. I stayed in touch with them after that until it seemed like the natural thing to want to be like them.”

For Moreno, the path was through the Police Athletic League. “I did some boxing as a kid, got to know a lot of cops.”

A call to a 10th Street apartment finds a twenty-something woman sprawled unconscious over a bed. Her groggy boyfriend admits she has overdosed. “We got high together and I passed out,” he says. “We were going to do the last two bags in the morning. But then I woke up and found her like that. She took all the breakfast bags by herself!”

Two EMS teams, including Narvaez’s fiancé, arrive and begin laborious efforts to bring the girl around. The boyfriend watches impassively as she is shot up with adrenalin, muttering only a “Thank Christ!” when she moans. The girl, though, has little to be thankful for as she is wheeled out to the EMS ambulance. With the drugs kicking in with a vengeance, her thrashing shrieks pierce the quiet street, bringing on lights in half a dozen windows. It takes a good 10 minutes to tie her down so she can be lifted into the back of the ambulance without falling off the gurney.

Watching the scene is a shaggy-haired kid in a windbreaker who periodically frames the gurney and the ambulance with his hands. As if it wasn’t already obvious, he informs Moreno he’s a filmmaker. What’s more, he’s been doing a documentary on a couple of Long Island cops, “so I understand what you’re going through here.” Moreno nods politely, keeping his attention on the girl still bucking on the gurney. “I’m sorry I don’t have my camera,” the guy says. “This would’ve made a nice little sequence.”

“I thought you’re doing Long Island.”

“Yeah, well,” the guy shrugs. “An OD’s an OD. They’re pretty much the same everywhere, aren’t they?”

“Twenty-two going on 40,” Narvaez says about the girl as the cops finally leave the scene.

“Don’t worry about it,” grunts Moreno. “I just got it from the horse’s mouth they’re pretty much the same everywhere. Or some part of the horse, anyway.”

The last job of the tour turns out to be a woman sprawled out on the sidewalk at Broadway and 13th Street. A few feet away from her are a couple of plastic bags, their contents now strewn around. She’s not especially well dressed, but she’s not a bag lady, either. No sooner does Moreno bend down next to her than she sits up as though having completed an afternoon snooze. One of her cheeks carries the impression of the manhole cover it has been resting on. “Oh,” she says, “did I go off? Must’ve been the meths. They just hit me when I turned the corner here.”

“Nobody assaulted you or anything?”

She’s already up on her feet and starting to put her plastic bags back together. “No, no,” she says, already sounding annoyed for the questions. “And yes, I have a place to live. My apartment’s down the street. I just conked out, that’s all.”

“Helluva place to do it,” Narvaez says. “Anybody at all could’ve come along and robbed you.”

“Oh,” the woman says with a wave, “that was years ago. It’s not like that around this neighborhood anymore. I just got to learn to deal with these meths. For the sins of yesterday, know what I mean?”

Donald Dewey's latest book is Total Ballclubs, The Ultimate Book of Baseball Teams.