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that.”
    “No.”
    “How ’bout I just run him for outstanding warrants? Get him like that? You don’t have to have nothing to do with it. Just give me a name.”
    “No. No. No.” A weary, determined chant.
    “Ray, please don’t make me go out to the lounge and get all psychological on your pretty daughter out there. ‘Did you ever see your dad have an argument with anybody. Did your dad ever seem worried about anybody. Can you think of anyone who’d want to hurt . . .’ Because I tell you, Ray, I don’t know about your wife . . .”
    “Ex.”
    “Whatever, but I took one look at your daughter’s sad little face out there? And I
know
she’s got something for me.”
    His eyes reflexively shifted to the right of her, trying to see through the glass wall to the elevator banks. The girl and her mother must have left, because when he spoke again his voice was stronger. “What’s with all the videotapes?” He nodded to the shopping bags at her feet.
    “We had a homicide in a Burger King down on JFK. These are from the security cameras. Twenty-four hours of people eating themselves to death.”
    “Tweetie,” he said in that flat tone of his. “Last time I saw you, you were getting snatched up for spray-painting ‘White Bitch’ on the side of Eleven Building. How are you a cop.”
    “C’mon, Ray,” she said softly, “I was thirteen years old.”
    “How are you a cop.”
    “I’m gonna save that one for down the line with you,” she said cleanly. “When I, re-know you better. Because that one there, is the story to end all stories. But I’ll make you a deal . . .”
    “What’s the N. for,” nodding to her shield.
    “Nerese.”
    “Nerese,” he repeated. “Where’d ‘Tweetie’ come from.”
    Nerese smiled; they were drifting way off subject; but if he needed to shoot the shit for a while, hear a story or two before he would give it up to her, she could do that.
    “My grandmother had a cleft palate or something. That’s how she said ‘Sweetie.’”
    “Sweetie,” Ray tried it on for size. “Officer Sweetie.”
    “Actually, it’s Detective Sweetie. At least for the next few months. Then I’m out.”
    “Out?”
    “Retiring.”
    “Retiring . . . What are you, forty? Forty-one?”
    “Something like that. See, you can retire after twenty years, go out with half pay for the rest of your life, and believe me, I am going. This job’s for shit these days if you don’t have a political hook, which I don’t, so come this summer? I’m moving to Florida, like near Jacksonville? That’s where my mother’s people are from originally. My son’s father’s people, too. You ever been to Florida?”
    “Tweetie, I’m a Jew,” he said, and from the great effort he made to smile she guessed it was some kind of joke.
    “Ray, I swear to God, every time I get off the plane down there? It all slows down. Air’s all sweet . . . And, I tell my son Darren, he’s almost eighteen, I tell him if he don’t get accepted into a college with a scholarship attached, or have a real job come June? He’s going into the army, ’cause Mommy has left the building. Not that he believes me or anything. He’s just like his father, wherever he may be, a big baby, thinks I was put on this earth to stuff his face and clean his mess. But it’s not just my son. I got a ton of people I’m carrying, and I more or less need to square them all away before I go.”
    She took a breather, checking Ray out, not wanting him to go south on her, his hobbled mind lagging too far behind what she was building for him here. He looked fairly sunk into himself but was still listening.
    “See, I bought this house in Jersey City, about five years ago, right? I gave the upstairs to my mother, she’s so preserved in alcohol I don’t think she’ll
ever
die, she’s like seventy-five now and she’s up there with her brother, my uncle, he’s like seventy-eight, and downstairs it’s me and my son, OK?
    “Now,