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bathroom, but they got this picture here on page 86—Del, she’s got a yellow bikini on and she’s lying back in a boat deck, all slicked up with tanning butter, and you can see her—”
    “Monty.”
    The bathroom door opened and Monty stepped out, still putting himself together.   “Some day I swear I’m going to live in a place where I’ll never need long johns,” he muttered as he buckled his belt.   “I mean someplace where they don’t have them on sale eight months out of the year at Shopko.   Someplace where if you mentioned your long johns they’d think you were referring to your tall uncles, one from each side of the family.”
    “Monty.”
    “Yeah?”   He looked up at Del.
    “Stick by the phone.”
    “Sure thing, Delbert.”
     
    •

 
    It had been a problem in school:   Delbert.   The first week of school every year the teacher would call roll, and being one of the M’s, Delbert Maki’s name would come somewhere in the middle of the list.   When the teacher got down to the L’s Delbert would sense the tension developing around him—a little stiffness in the postures in the other boys, a descent into a more complete silence as his classmates waited for his name to be called.   After Delbert would say “Present” there’d be the faintest snickers.   Or maybe a cough.   He’d turn—it always seemed to be boys seated behind him—and find the source.   One year it was Tommy Lebeau and his pal Nick Thornton, a team.   Another year it was a fat kid named Jimmy Nugent.   It was always kids with names like Tommy, Nick or Jimmy.   Eventually there’d be a fight, usually outside during recess; once, with Nugent, it was in the basement during lunch.   Delbert didn’t always win—boyhood fights rarely ended in clean decisions—but afterwards he was left alone for the rest of the year.
    Then there was the song, “Runaway,” by Del Shannon.   A number one hit in 1961.   He was a rocker, he was from downstate Michigan—all the kids thought it was the coolest song, and one morning in the schoolyard a kid had an autographed photo of Del Shannon, and looking at those three letters, D-e-l, Delbert saw something else.   The kid holding the photo whispered, "Look at this guy.   Look at that hair!   Del's so cool."   So from then on he insisted that his classmates and teachers call him Del.   For years Delbert seemed to have vanished; even in the official class rosters he was Del Maki.   Only his Marquette High School diploma stated his full name Delbert Esa Maki.
    At Tooley’s Stop & Go Del parked next to a county snowplow, which was still running, its yellow lights rotating on the roof.   The truth was he went into law enforcement because he as a boy had always wanted to drive vehicles with flashing, rotating lights.   There were no cars at the gas pumps.   An orange ambulance from Marquette General Hospital was angled so that its back was just outside the door to the station.   Inside Del found Tooley and the plow driver, Viekko Rupp, watching as two paramedics worked on a woman lying on a gurney.
    “S-she's still alive,” Tooley said, as his fingers pulled nervously on his gray beard.   “But v-very cold.”
    Viekko probably weighed over two-hundred-fifty pounds, and with so many layers of cloths on under his brown snowsuit he might have been mistaken for a bear in this snow.   But here, inside under the florescent lights, he had the soft pale face of a boy, startled blue eyes and a slack mouth that revealed teeth that were already going bad.   The earflaps on his hat stuck straight out sideways, like stubby airplane wings.   “Found her up the road a couple hundred yards,” Viekko said.   “She was in the snow, on the other side of the bank, eh?”
    The woman wasn't a snowmobiler; they always wore jazzy snowsuits and helmets like they were riding motorcycles through the great white.   She had on brown corduroy pants, with the wale warn thin at the knees, heavy