One Cold Night

you.”
    “Patty Orenstein.” Dave recited her phone number from heart, and Ramos relayed the information.
    “Jesus freak left us a pretty ghost on Lisa’s letter.” Ramos flipped shut her phone. “A phone number, somewhere upstate. Nine little numbers lined up like target practice.”
    Nine numbers. One was missing, then, and upstate New York was a big place; you could drive nine hours north before you hit Canada.
    “Did they get the area code?” Dave asked.
    “Eight-four-five.”
    Ulster County, he thought. From beginning to end, the drive could take anywhere from two to four hours. He tamped his excitement; it was just the imprint of a phone number, written on a page above, and possibly had nothing to do with this case.
    It was three long minutes before Ramos’s phone rang again. When it did, she listened intently before speaking.
    “Okay, Brunocello, call Aviation, order a copter; that’s the fastest way. I want you and Strauss to go together.” She ended the call without a pause in her talking — no chance for Dave to ask where he was going or exactly why — and shifted her attention to him. “Rental house, upstate New York. Town of Gardiner. House rented last year to one Mr. David Strauss.”
    She smiled an are you thinking what I’m thinking smile that Dave read instantly: Peter Adkins was dropping crumbs, luring Dave to him, and there was no doubt in any of their minds that Dave would follow the trail and go.
    “Bruno called the local cops,” she said. “They’ll go take a look right away. Meantime he’ll meet you at the copter.”
    “You’re staying here?”
    “Yeah. I got a feeling one of us should stay behind, supervise this end of things, and I’m it.”
    “I’d better get going then,” Dave said. It would be a good twenty minutes on the highway, with no traffic, to Floyd Bennett Field at the far end of Brooklyn where the police department kept some helicopters ready to go in an old hangar.
    “Yo, Strauss, they’re sending you up in the Bell Four-twelve,” Ramos said. “Ever use it before?”
    “Nope, not yet.”
    “Me neither. Tell me how it rides — I hear it’s a doozy of a bird.”
    She winked good-bye to him and he nodded goodbye back. He knew her well enough by now to know she wasn’t giving up a chance to ride in the PD’s fanciest copter or to get in on the upstate action out of any sense of altruism. She was thinking something, staying back for a reason. He didn’t know what it was, but he had started to trust her instincts enough not to question her.
    It was thirty minutes before the helicopter was in the sky, carrying Dave and Bruno above the far edge of Brooklyn into a crisp blue horizon. The pilot’s mumbling code-talk with air traffic control became a buzz as Dave’s thoughts veered to Lisa; he hoped with every iota of his being that this flight would bring him closer to her, not farther away. Then he thought of Lisa and Susan, their similarities and their differences, their life together this past year and his life with them as a family. In a certain simple way, it had been Lisa’s bad fortune to have been fathered by Peter Adkins, and Susan’s bad fortune to have loved him. Blind badluck. The truth was you never really knew the capacities of the people you loved until they were tested. Now, the more Dave learned about Peter, the less stinging Susan’s confession became. Her adolescent error had gone very wrong; couldn’t he forgive her for that? She had intended to tell him about Lisa; everyone made mistakes; and no one could plan a catastrophe like today. One thing Dave had learned in his nearly forty years was that if love was transformative, it was also transformable; that it was meant to change and you were meant to adjust. He remembered reading once that the hallmark of a healthy mind was flexibility, and that long marriages adapted over time. Yes, they would survive this... if only he could bring Lisa home. Alive.
    The blades roared above their heads, chopping low-drifting clouds that had appeared as they headed north. Dave looked to the left and felt liberated by the endlessness of the view. Up here, flying in a bubble through the sky, he didn’t belong, he was nothing, and this sense of his own inconsequence lightened and comforted him.
    Bruno sat beside him, sucking on the filter of an unlit cigarette. In this confined space his ripe body odors were peaking. He turned to Dave and spoke through the half of his mouth not clutching the