One Cold Night

suggest the real possibility that Lisa had not run away; nor was she out late with her friends, all of whom had already been contacted and none of whom had heard from her. There was the paint, its jarring termination, the angry splash of yellow, the thrown paintbrush, the footprint.
    “Well, since you’re an MOS, maybe we can throw protocol to the wind, just this once,” Johnson said.
    To the wind. As Dave’s mind spun over and into and against that wind, he reached for Susan’s hand. He thought again of Lolita and he thought of Becky Rothka and he thought of Lisa, and into all his senses the yellow paint kept spilling. He held on to Susan’s hand, which had grown warm and was sweating now, and watched the hour split open like a burst metal can.

Chapter 5
    Wednesday, 2:08 a.m.
    When Detective Lupe Ramos saw the white couple standing on Water Street, shivering, she figured they were either very cold or very scared. They had good reason to be cold — it was the time of year the temperature started to drop at night. They might also have had good reason to be afraid — though they couldn’t possibly have known that yet.
    Last week, Lupe had responded to a call about a suspicious person lurking around the Water Street area. Supposedly some guy had been seen around the neighborhood on street corners, keeping a little too still, staying a little too long. The officer who took the message hadn’t been able to get the caller’s name. He couldn’t even say for sure if the caller was a man or a woman; it was either a man with a high voice or a woman with a low voice. Translation: Some jerk was probably pulling their chain.
    But the cops were always on the lookout for child molesters and such, and as a policy they took these calls seriously. There was a methadone clinic in thatneighborhood, a psychiatric halfway house and up the hill was the world headquarters for the Latter-day Saints; all manner of wackos roamed the waterfront alongside the artists and lawyers and bankers who were buying up apartments like hotcakes. So Lupe had grabbed her partner, Alexei Bruno, and gone to check it out.
    The person who’d called in the complaint wasn’t waiting when they got there, like s/he’d promised, and the information s/he’d given the officer on the phone wasn’t much to go on: white guy, blond hair, not tall, not short, not even good-looking. Plain, the message said. Right; thanks. And oh, yeah, by the way, the guy’s got a fleshy pink scar under one of his eyes. Now that was something to work with. They walked around for two hours and nothing. No scar-faced loners were loitering in any dark doorways wearing placards reading, STALKER. Not a one. Most of those guys had some kind of radar that told them when to get lost, so it had been a long shot to begin with. Ramos and Bruno had filed their report and that was that, until tonight.
    Bruno had been nearly out the door on a sandwich run when she’d reeled him back in, saying, “Not so fast, Bozo.” She put down the phone and told him, “Missing girl over on the waterfront, general location of our stalker the other day, family member’s an MOS. Let’s hit the road.”
    He punched his big fist into his big hand. “ Shit. My stomach he is volcano of hunger.” She was used to his heavy Russian accent and had long ago stopped treating him like someone with a brain defect, though she wouldn’t swear on a Bible that he didn’t have one. Sooner or later, every detective’s brain got warped.
    “Yeah, and my stomach she is hurricane. Come on,this is New York City; you got a deli open twenty-four-seven on practically every block.”
    “In my dreams.”
    “That’s right, baby, in your dreams.”
    He picked up his leather cap from the corner of his desk, put it on and followed her out of the detectives’ squad room.
    “Don’t think about that corned beef on rye,” she razzed him as they walked along the buffed linoleum to the staircase leading down into the lobby of the Eighty-fourth Precinct. “Don’t think about that hot coffee and cream. Do not think about that piece of coconut cake. ”
    “Loopy, you are going to kill me one of those days.”
    Man, she loved this guy, just loved him, the way he mashed up the American language.
    In the little bitty police parking lot right out front, they got into the gold sedan that was their specially designated unmarked car. She let him drive, figuring all guys liked the ego boost. Personally, she didn’t need the