Dehan took hold of my arm, “Like you, my friend,” she said, and I realized I had been thinking aloud.
I gave a small, humorless laugh. “Like Stewart said, this is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Perhaps Jennifer Cuevas was right. Perhaps I do belong to a bygone age. Perhaps I have lost my relevance. Perhaps, Dehan, we are entering an age when aliens murder humans. Perhaps the race riots of the future will be between humans and aliens, and the hated color will not be black or brown or white, but green.”
She was silent for a while, then she smiled fondly at me and asked, “Do you know what my father would have called you?”
“A dreamer? A visionary? A man ahead of his time?”
She shook her head. “Uh-uh, a schmuck.”
I unlocked the door, not with a button but with a key, climbed into the leather seat behind the wooden wheel, and shoved that same key in the ignition. I turned that key and gunned the engine, and sat for a moment listening to the satisfying rumble, visualizing Danny, standing on that grassy knoll, looking out over the vast, dark East River, watching those lights flashing in the sky, with those lasers shooting down at him out of the sky, out of the dark clouds and the rain. Did I believe it? I turned to Dehan.
“Fire from Heaven. Three hundred years ago, they would have said it was an angel or a demon that had struck him down.”
She nodded. “A different age. A different kind of myth.”
I nodded back. “Or a different kind of explanation.”
Six
Dehan dialed, waited a moment, and said, “Paul Estevez…? Good afternoon, this is Detective Carmen Dehan of the NYPD. I was wondering if you could spare some time to see us this afternoon…? Yeah, it’s about Danny Brown… Uh-huh, a long time, I know. We could come to you. We can be there in twenty minutes… Thank you. Appreciate it.” She hung up. “He can give us half an hour before his first class.”
“Good.”
I put the beast in gear, pulled out into the traffic, and headed up Sound View Avenue at a slow cruise. Dehan checked her watch. “What do you say, we talk to Paul, pick up some groceries, and head on back…” She looked at me sidelong with a stupid sheepish grin on her face and started laughing.
It was contagious. I laughed back. “What?”
She turned and looked out the window, pinching the bridge of her nose and still laughing. “I dunno, Stone. It’s stupid. It’s just…”
“What, Dehan? Say it.”
“I was going to say, ‘head home’. It just sounds so weird to me.”
“You don’t like it? You know my house is your home. Mi casa es tu casa, right?”
She blushed like a teenager. “Yeah, I know. No, I do like it. It’s good. It just feels weird.”
I was still smiling. “So we get some groceries and go home…”
She spent the next minute laughing like a fifteen year-old and she finally said, “Yeah… and we go through everything over a glass of wine or two.”
I nodded. “What, and we don’t put in an appearance at the station today?”
She shrugged. “What for?”
“When was the last time you were at the station?”
“What are you, my boss now?” She was still smiling but there was an edge to her voice.
“You know I’m not. I’m just curious. In all the time I’ve known you, you have never once not set foot in the station.”
She shrugged. “So what? Back then I was trying to prove something.”
I eyed her sidelong for a bit and she stared straight ahead, with her face concealed behind her shades.
Finally, I said, “Can I tell you what I think?”
“No.”
“I think you are worried about how Mo and Maria—and the whole damn precinct—is going to react if they find out we are…”
I gestured, searching for the word. She turned and stared at me, repressing what seemed to be involuntary, nervous laughter. “Don’t tell me the great John Stone is suddenly lost for words! Find out we are what?”
I shook my head, feeling oddly embarrassed. “Sixty-five million years ago, when I was young and the dinosaurs walked the Earth, people like me would have said, ‘an item’, ‘going out’, ‘a couple’, or even ‘boyfriend and girlfriend’. But nowadays terms like that can be a minefield.”
“Bullshit.” She said it without anger. “You just don’t know what to call us. Don’t worry, I don’t either.” She shrugged. “Maybe that’s why I don’t want to…”
I nodded. “I hear you.”
She frowned, suddenly anxious. “I didn’t offend you? I didn’t mean…”
I smiled and tried to look like I meant it. “Of course not. It’s cool. We’re learning as we go. Groceries and review… at home.”
She grinned. “Cool.”
“But tomorrow we go back to the desk. Or the inspector is going to want to know why. And so are Mo and his pals. The longer we leave it, the worse it gets.”
Paul’s gym was on the corner of Randall and Rosedale, in a rundown shopping mall by the gardens there. We were ten minutes early but we found him in a small office in his dojo, dressed in his dobok, sitting behind a desk under a Korean flag. He was going through his books and stood and smiled as we walked in. He pulled up a couple of chairs for us. And as we sat he glanced at the clock on the wall.
“I don’t mean to be discourteous, but my class starts in forty minutes. I am always drumming into my pupils the need to
