Best Friends Forever Part 9

He cleared his throat. "Ma'am, I'm on duty."

"I'm kidding." Red lipstick had come off her upper lip and stained the skin beneath her nose crimson. "Unless you want to. I mean, if this were a p.o.r.no, we'd have to, right?"

"We'll be in touch," Jordan managed, getting to his feet.

"It'd be my tax dollars at work!" Judy said.

"Take care," he said stiffly, seeing her face crumple before he turned toward the door.

"Cute guys," she said. "Screw 'em." And she slammed the door hard enough to make it rattle in its frame.

NINETEEN.

Jordan Novick could read people-at least that's what they told him at work, where he'd become, at thirty-five, the youngest chief of police that his hometown had ever employed. But he'd failed to read his own wife, failed to notice the array of textbook signs: the new hairstyle, the gym members.h.i.+p that she was actually using instead of just paying for, the new underwear (sc.r.a.ps of black and nylon embellished with lace and embroidered rosebuds, items so intricate and tiny that when they'd shown up in the laundry basket, he hadn't even known at first that they were underwear). He hadn't registered any of it until Patti sat him down one Sunday night two years ago and told him that she thought they were drifting apart.

Yes, he'd said, pathetically eager. He had noticed the same thing. It wasn't surprising, after what they'd been through. Maybe they could give counseling another try or plan a trip. He had four weeks of vacation coming. They'd always talked about Paris...

Patti had cut him off. No Paris, she'd told him. He'd noticed how tired she looked, how, underneath the layers of her chemically brightened hair, the skin of her cheeks was stretched and papery and her lips were pale. I am sorry, she'd said. Jordan, I'm so, so sorry. But I can't stay here anymore.

"In the house?" he'd asked stupidly.

"In this marriage," she'd said.

Patti's mom and sister had come up the next night, and the three of them had moved Patti's things-which, per Patti and her mother, included most of the furniture and all of the wedding gifts-to Patti's sister's house. Jordan had been left with the bookcases and most of the books, the futon he'd had since college, a few IKEA chairs that wobbled if you looked at them too hard. He'd been abandoned in a house where every door-k.n.o.b had a plastic baby-guard around it, where every outlet was plugged with a safety lock, where there were gates in front of the staircase, top and bottom, and a lock on the toilet tank. Patti had told him she just wanted to "be by herself" to "sort things out" until she could "see things clearly," but the truth was, not three weeks after she'd left their house and their eleven-year marriage, she'd moved out of the sham condo that she'd rented and in with Rob Fine, their dentist. Their dentist.

"We just got to talking," Patti told Jordan three months later in the mediator's office when, sitting across from his wife at a s.h.i.+ny conference table, in a voice that was too loud for the room, Jordan had recited the demand of cuckolded husbands the world over and asked his wife how all of this had started.

"Just got to talking?" he'd repeated. "With your mouth full of cotton, and that tube for the spit?"

"He listens to me," Patti had said.

"I listen to you!" said Jordan, jumping to his feet, leaning across the table, speaking right into her face. "I do your temperature charts on PowerPoint! I measure your cervical mucus! I..."

"Let's maintain a respectful tone," said the mediator, a smoothy in a red-and-gold silk tie that he stroked like a pet, a man who had the nerve to charge two hundred bucks an hour for his services. Jordan circled the table, heading toward Patti. The big muscles in his thighs were twitching; he had to move.

"I measure her cervical mucus," he said to the mediator, who'd pursed his lips in a prissy little line.

"I'm not sure this is a productive line of discussion," he'd said, and put his hand between Jordan's shoulders, trying to ease him back into his seat.

Jordan ignored the man. "How long?" he asked Patti.

She twisted in her chair. "Maybe six months," she muttered.

"Six MONTHS?" He leaned across the table, unable to believe what he was hearing.

"Please," said the mediator, pus.h.i.+ng on Jordan's shoulder harder. Patti crossed her legs and stared at a spot on the wall just above Jordan's head, refusing to meet his eyes.

"Six months?" Jordan repeated. His hands clenched into fists. I'm a detective, he thought. How could I not have seen this?

"We can discuss this reasonably," said the mediator.

"She told me she had bad gums!" He turned on the mediator, who stared back at him, the gold frames of his gla.s.ses s.h.i.+ning in the lamplight. "Advanced gingivitis!"

"Please," the man said, and pointed to the chair. Reluctantly, Jordan sat down. He knew when he was beaten. He scrawled his signature on the forms they slid in front of him without looking at his wife and without reading a word.

"Good luck," he told Patti once it was over. She'd put one soft hand on his arm and said, "Be happy, Jordan. That's all I want. For both of us." He'd kissed her cheek numbly. He couldn't stop looking at her teeth, which glittered like a mouthful of pearls. Ill-gotten gains. Dr. Fine was probably giving her freebies.

He and Patti had hooked up junior year at a party, when Patti, tipsy on foamy beer pumped from a keg, had tried to climb a tree during a game of Truth or Dare. She'd been doing a pretty fair job of it, too, until someone had howled, "I can see your bush," and Patti, startled, had groped for her skirt and lost her grip and would have gone tumbling ten feet to the ground if Jordan hadn't been there to catch her. Later, with the two of them sitting on the lid of the Petrillos' hot tub, he'd wiped the tears from her face and a.s.sured her that n.o.body had been able to see anything (even though he had been able to make out a faint shadow underneath the taut nylon of her panties, and the sight had excited him wildly).

They had gone to prom and graduation and Ohio State University together, where he'd studied criminology and she'd majored in early childhood education. He'd wanted to be a policeman since one had come to his sixth-grade cla.s.s on Career Day. Jordan had been impressed by the man's uniform, by his gun, certainly, but, more than anything, by his aura of composure, the stillness at his center, the way he'd gotten the whole cla.s.s to quiet down just by standing in front of them and slowly removing his tinted sungla.s.ses (a feat Mrs. McKenna, their teacher, could manage only sporadically). Jordan craved that kind of authority, the silence that emanated from the man. At his house, his mother screamed at his father, and his father hollered at Jordan and his brother, Sam, and all four of them were given to bawling at the television set when the Bears and the Cubs disappointed.

So he'd gotten his degree, and three years after graduation, he'd married Patti and moved to a walk-up apartment in a three-story building in a Polish neighborhood in Chicago that had one bedroom, a tiny galley kitchen, and a gla.s.sed-in porch that rattled every time the El went by. They'd take long walks on Sat.u.r.day mornings, go shopping in the afternoon, and spend Sunday cooking elaborate feasts from one of the ethnic cookbooks Patti had bought and invite a bunch of friends over and eat from mismatched bowls on the floor. Patti got a job as a reading specialist in the neighborhood elementary school, and Jordan worked his way up through the ranks of the Chicago police department.

When they were thirty, they'd decided that small-town life suited them better than Chicago. Jordan had taken the job in Pleasant Ridge, and they'd moved from their apartment in the city back home, into a three-bedroom house in the same neighborhood where Patti had grown up. The house needed some updating-particularly the bathrooms, which boasted foil wallpaper in psychedelic 1970s patterns-but there was a big backyard, and a finished bas.e.m.e.nt, an apple tree growing outside their window, and of course it was baby-proofed, wanting only a baby.

Patti threw out her birth control pills the month of her thirtieth birthday. At night, Jordan would pause, balanced on his elbows, to look down at his wife, flushed and breathing hard, and he would marvel, We could be making a baby. We could be starting a whole new life. The first month, nothing happened, but neither of them worried. By the third month, they were making anxious jokes about how they'd keep trying until they got it right. After six months with nothing to show but some rug burns from the night when they'd decided to spice things up and do it on the living room floor, Patti called her gynecologist for an appointment, but the doctor couldn't find anything wrong with either one of them. Patti's eggs were healthy and her uterus was inviting, and Jordan's sperm were plentiful and perky, but for whatever reason, nothing had taken. "Just keep trying," the man said, and so they had, every other day, except on days fourteen through eighteen of Patti's cycle, when they did it every morning, and Jordan showered and shaved while his wife lay in bed with her legs pretzeled and held in the air.

Patti's doctor put her on Clomid, which made her moody and gave her backaches and acne and caused her to gain, as she put it, ten pounds in ten minutes. Four months later, Jordan came home to find his wife weeping and waving a pregnancy test over her head like the Olympic torch. "Finally," she cried, throwing her arms around his neck, "finally!" Jordan hauled the elliptical trainer into the bas.e.m.e.nt and replaced it with the crib that had held Patti's nieces and nephews. Six weeks later, she'd come out of the bathroom one night after dinner with her eyes wide and her face pale. Jordan had scooped her into his arms, the way he had when he'd carried her over the threshold of their hotel room on their wedding night, and driven her to the emergency room. Too late.

"The good news is, we know you can get pregnant," the doctor had told them as Patti lay crying on the hospital bed after the D and C. Good news, thought Jordan, turning away. Yeah, right. More hormones were added to the mix. Patti stopped eating foods that weren't organic. Then she stopped eating meat and dairy altogether, and added fistfuls of vitamins and supplements-iron and folic acid, flaxseed oil and garlic capsules-to her morning regimen. When she started smelling vaguely like shrimp scampi, Jordan knew better than to mention it. She joined an online support group. Then she joined a real-time support group that met each week at the hospital, and encouraged Jordan to attend with her, but after one night spent listening to a bunch of weepy women and their beaten-down husbands talking on and on about deteriorating follicles and poor motility, "pre-e" and "PCOS," Jordan had decided he'd had enough. "If it's meant to happen, it'll happen," he'd told Patti, parroting a line their doctor had given them. "We have to let nature take its course." She'd looked at him with big, mistrustful eyes before pointing out that she was thirty-two, almost thirty-three, that she didn't have forever. Clearly, nature needed some help.

She got pregnant again that September and miscarried November third. Their doctor told them to wait a few months before trying again, but Patti ignored him. She also neglected to pa.s.s this piece of information on to Jordan, who would have been happy to abstain. s.e.x with Patti had become as routinized, and every bit as pleasant, as emptying the dishwasher or taking out the trash. Instead of looking down at her in ecstasy and thinking We could be making a baby, the only thought going through his head as he pumped and thrust (always in the missionary position, to maximize their chances, Jordan's body slick with sweat and Patti's teeth bared in a joyless grin) was Please, please, let it work this time. It was G.o.d's joke on him. When he was fourteen, s.e.x was all he thought about and all he wanted, and even the cleft of a peach in the produce section could get him going. Now that he could have all the s.e.x he wanted-or at least all the s.e.x he wanted during the six days when Patti was most fertile-all he wanted at night was a cold beer and a soft pillow.

By January, Patti was pregnant again. By the middle of February, they were back in the hospital, Patti crying on the bed, Jordan standing beside her, their doctor at the ultrasound monitor, saying These things happen and Sometimes it's for the best and You're young and healthy, you just need to be patient.

In the car, on the way home, Jordan, stumbling, had suggested that maybe they could adopt or think about a surrogate. He'd read an article somewhere, and there'd been that actress who'd given the interview on TV... Patti had turned on him, eyes blazing, lips drawn into something just short of a snarl. "You want to just give up? After everything I've been through, you want to just quit?"

"No," he'd said, backing off clumsily. No, of course he didn't want that. He just thought that maybe they could give themselves a break. Tears spilled from his wife's eyes. "I don't want a break," she'd said, her voice cracking. "I want a baby."

They moved from the hormones to in vitro. Instead of having s.e.x, Jordan got to m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e into a Dixie cup every other month, with a tattered copy of Penthouse in his free hand and a nurse hovering on the other side of the door. Patti spent two nights a week at her infertility support group, and every spare minute online, researching homeopathic remedies and alternative medicines, or studying first-person accounts from women who'd managed to give birth to healthy babies in spite of a history of miscarriages, in spite of breast cancer or a tipped uterus or a missing fallopian tube, in spite of strokes or lupus or polycystic ovarian syndrome or, in one case Patti had shown him, in spite of having no arms and no legs.

She was pregnant again by April. She lost that baby (that was how she'd started referring to her miscarriages, as "lost babies") the third week of June. On the Fourth of July, they were supposed to attend a neighborhood picnic, then drive into Chicago and watch the fireworks over Lake Michigan. At four o'clock, Patti handed Jordan a hollowed-out watermelon filled with fruit salad and told him to have fun. "You're not coming?" he'd asked.

"I can't," she'd said, and he knew why. Larry and Cindy Bowers, who lived down the street, were hosting the party, and Cindy was pregnant with twins. Sarah and Steve Mullens from the next block, who surely would be invited, had a three-month-old, a little boy named Franklin whom Steve insisted on wearing strapped to his chest like a bomb. Steve had told the rest of the men that he had started a blog that was all about the baby-"about our adventures together," was how he'd put it-and instead of looking at him like he was crazy, the other men had nodded solemnly, had tapped at their BlackBerries, bookmarking the link.

Patti got pregnant again in September, and after she'd lost that baby the last week in October, she came home from her support group and announced that she wanted to hold a memorial service.

Puzzled, Jordan looked up from his magazine. "For what?"

She'd stared at him as if he'd grown a second head. "For our babies."

He'd folded his magazine and set it down on the side table. "Patti," he'd said. His voice was calm, even though he could feel four years' worth of frustration and disappointment seething in his veins-the pills and the shots and the IVF cycles (none of them were covered by insurance, and their respective 401(k)s had dwindled from thousands to hundreds of dollars), the nights Patti had spent weeping at her support groups or welded to her laptop, convincing herself that this was going to happen, that she could make it happen by sheer force of will, the way books about pregnancy had crowded every novel and biography from their shelves, how every conversation they had-in bed, in the car, over dinner, on vacation-came back to this: sperm and egg and the empty crib in the third bedroom, so sunny in the mornings, tucked up under the dormer windows. "You can't have a service for something you flush down the toilet."

It was an awful thing to say. He'd known it was an awful thing to say almost before he'd finished saying it, even before he saw Patti's eyes narrow and her hands ball into fists. She'd taken three steps toward the kitchen. Then she'd stopped, turned, picked up the cedar box that they'd bought on their honeymoon in Mexico and heaved it, as hard as she could, at Jordan's head. The corner of the box had caught him in the corner of his left eye. The pain was instant and enormous. "Ow," he cried. "Ow, s.h.i.+t!" Patti had stalked to the bedroom, closed the door and locked it, leaving him sitting there with the box broken in his lap and blood running down his cheek.

He'd packed a towel full of ice, held it against his face, and driven himself to the emergency room, where he'd told the attending physician and the nurses and, later, the ophthalmologist on call that he'd walked into an open door. If a woman on his watch had given him an excuse half as lame, he'd have brought in the social workers before the lie was out of her mouth, but the eye doctor just told him to tilt his head back while she gave him drops. "You've got a bad scratch on your cornea," she proclaimed after he'd spent an eternity with his chin propped on a metal crosspiece, trying not to blink as she shone violet-tinted light into his eyes. No surprise. Every time he blinked, it felt like there were grains of sand rubbing against his eyelid.

"What do we do?" Surgery, he thought glumly. He'd probably need surgery, and wouldn't that be a perfect ending to the perfect day?

"Can't do much of anything but wait," the doctor said. She gave him an antibiotic cream and a prescription for Percocet, and told him he might notice his eye watering on and off as it healed.

Back home, he'd cleaned up the mess, sponging blood off the carpet, throwing the broken cedar box away. At nine o'clock at night, he'd tried knocking at the locked bedroom door.

"Patti?" he'd called. She hadn't answered. "I'm sorry," he said. Still nothing. "If you want to have a service, that's okay," he said. "Whatever you want." Silence... and then her voice had come, cool through the door. "What I want," she'd said, "is for you to sleep somewhere else tonight."

They'd stayed together for another year. Jordan went back with her to her support group. He'd sat beside her, holding her hand while she cried. They had done couples' therapy and had had date nights every Sat.u.r.day: dinners and movies, then back to the dark house where there was no sitter to pay and dismiss. They'd slept underneath the darkened third bedroom, which was now empty-at some point after the night of the box, Patti had gone to her mother's for the weekend, and Jordan had devoted a Sat.u.r.day morning to dismantling the crib and carrying it, piece by piece, down to the bas.e.m.e.nt. When they made love, Jordan got used to reaching up to caress his wife's cheek and having his hand come back wet with her tears. Later, he'd decide that their marriage had died the instant she'd picked up that box, but at the time he'd managed to convince himself that they were doing okay. They'd gone to the Bahamas for their tenth anniversary, and on the plane ride back, Patti had fallen asleep with her head on his shoulder, and he'd thought, with pride swelling his chest, of the t.i.tle of a poem he'd read in college: Look! We have come through. He thought they had.

And then had come the dentist.

Jordan shook his head and rubbed roughly at his eyes. The left one was watering again, so he wiped it with a napkin. It had healed, but it still watered three years later, and sometimes he had double vision, which, technically, he should have told the town manager about, but he never had. What was a little bit of blurriness compared to a busted marriage, and babies that never were?

He'd told the patrol-people to divide up the names on the guest lists and call them all, to stay on top of the hospitals, to make sure the dispatcher hadn't gotten any news about men wandering around with head injuries and droopy pants. Then he got in his car and called Paula the dispatcher, double-checking the database's last listing against Christie Keogh's roster. He thought he'd take a swing by Crescent Drive to see if Jonathan Downs was around.

TWENTY.

"We made it," said Val as we drove up the driveway. The sun was melting the frost from my lawn, and my newspaper, in its blue plastic bag, was waiting. Val cut the engine, and I got out of the car as the Buccis' SUV backed down the driveway. Mr. Bucci stuck his arm out of the window. "Morning, Addie," he called, and I said "Good morning" back, just like nothing had changed.

At Val's instructions, I pulled her Jaguar into the garage next to my parents' old, tarp-draped station wagon and rolled the door closed behind it. "So what now?" I asked as I picked up my paper and unlocked the front door.

"I need a shower and some coffee," said Val. "After that..." She stretched, tilting her hips forward and her head back.

"Did you bring the cla.s.s guide inside?" When Val waggled it at me, I said, "Maybe we should make a list of everyone Dan knew, or everyone he was hanging out with last night, and call them and ask if they've heard from him."

Val thought for a minute, then shook her head. "We don't want people to know we're looking for him."

That gave me pause. "Okay, what if we don't say it's us? We could pretend to be telemarketers or something, and we'll just say we're trying to reach Dan Swansea, and either they'll say, 'Wrong number,' or they'll say, 'Actually, he's right here on my couch.'"

Val nibbled on a fingernail. "I think maybe we need to get out of town."

"Oh, Val..." A dozen excuses rose to my mouth: my deadline on the bunch-of-flowers card, my responsibilities, my brother. The doctor's appointment I had on Thursday. My lump.

"Just think about it!" she called over her shoulder as she headed toward the stairs. "Pack a bag. It could be fun!" I heard the bathroom door open and the water turn on. "Hey, can I borrow some clothes?"

"Take whatever you need," I yelled. Don't you always? I thought, my old anger rising up as unavoidably as a knee jerking when the doctor's hammer hits. But it was reflexive resentment, and it didn't last long. The grudge I'd held for more than fifteen years was deflating like a pin-stuck balloon. It had been awful for me, being a teenager in Pleasant Ridge, but apparently it had been awful for Valerie, too... and maybe, somewhere, I'd known that all along.

In the kitchen, I sliced two bagels and put them in the toaster, and pulled out b.u.t.ter and cream cheese and jam. I added a few bottles of water to my tote bag and stood for a minute, breathing the smells of home: paint and Earl Grey tea and Murphy Oil Soap, the wool of the new carpets, other scents I was sure couldn't still be there except in my memory: the bay rum aftershave my father wore on special occasions, the milk of roses hand cream my mother had kept beside her bed, maple syrup heating on the stove.

I was pouring cream into a ceramic pitcher I'd painted when I heard a car door slam. I ran to the window, and there it was: a police cruiser parked in front of my house. A man with dark hair, his shoulders slumped underneath his sports coat, peered at my house, then crossed the lawn, heading for the front door.

s.h.i.+t. s.h.i.+ts.h.i.+ts.h.i.+t. I raced up the stairs and knocked on the bathroom door. "Val," I panted, "the cops are here."

She opened the door and stood there with a towel wrapped around her body and another one wrapped around her hair. "Oh my G.o.d. Oh my G.o.d!"

"Just stay up here. I'll deal with it." My heart was thumping and my mouth was dry, but a preternatural calm had descended on me. I didn't have a plan-didn't even have an inkling about what I'd say-but somehow, I thought that I could talk my way out of the situation, which was strange, given that, in my entire life, my mouth had gotten me into plenty of trouble and out of precisely nothing.

"Stay up here. Don't say anything. And don't come downstairs no matter what." Valerie backed into the shower, pulling the curtain shut behind her. I shut the bathroom door as the doorbell rang, then dashed down the stairs, took a deep breath, smoothed my hair, and opened the door. "Ms. Downs?" said the policeman. He was handsome-a crazy thing to notice, given the circ.u.mstances, but there it was. He had a strong jaw and a cleft in his chin. His big brown long-lashed eyes had purplish circles underneath them, and there was stubble on his cheeks. "Police Chief Jordan Novick. May I come in?"

"What's going on? Is everything all right?"

"Okay if I talk to you inside?"

"Of course," I said, and opened the door wider.

TWENTY-ONE.

Jordan Novick did not believe in love at first sight. l.u.s.t, absolutely: the turn of a knee, the way a woman's hair fell against the nape of her neck, a warm smile, a nice rack-he was no more immune to those pleasures than any man. Adelaide Downs-"Call me Addie," she'd said, slipping over the floor in wool socks-wasn't a supermodel. Nor was she some four-hundred-pound behemoth, as Judy Nadeau had suggested. Addie Downs was simply a pleasant woman with a decent body in jeans and a black sweater, a nice-enough woman with a nice-enough smile, honey-colored hair and full lips and laugh lines at the corner of her eyes. Her house, though, he thought as she hung up his coat and led him into the living room, looking over her shoulder with a worried expression as he followed-her house was something special.

"What is this about?" she asked again as Jordan settled onto the couch, which was covered in some soft golden fabric and seemed to be psychically transmitting the suggestion that he slip off his shoes and put his feet up. The cherry-red blanket draped over one arm seemed like just the thing to pull up to your chin for an afternoon's nap. There were small paintings cl.u.s.tered in groups on the walls, some in gold frames and some in wooden ones, and they were Jordan's favorite kind of art, paintings that looked like actual things, instead of being a collection of smears and blotches called Arcadian Sunset or Woman on the Verge. Adelaide Downs had paintings of flowers that looked like flowers, and oceans that looked like oceans. There was a picture of a slice of birthday cake, with a lit candle stuck in frosting so realistic Jordan thought he could dip his finger in it for a taste, and another one of a black cat peering up, cool and green-eyed and sly, from a saucer of milk.

He looked away from the cat so he could answer. "We have a few questions about the high school reunion last night."

She looked tense as she settled into the chair beside the sofa. Then her eyes darted toward the kitchen as bluish smoke filtered in. "Oh, jeez. Hang on." She hurried out of the room, calling over her shoulder, "Hey, do you want a bagel?"

Jordan had never accepted food when he was working. Not until today. He was, he discovered, starving. He hadn't had breakfast, and he hadn't managed more than a few bites of gluey pot pie the night before, and, he realized, he wanted Adelaide Downs to bring him a bagel, and eat one with him. "If it's no trouble."

"No, no, it's fine. You okay with well-done?"

He told her that he was, and got up to study the paintings. There was one of the ocean he particularly liked, a beach scene with no people, just the water and a single brightly hued umbrella, red and orange, stuck in the sand like a flower. He stood looking until she came back, carrying a tray with toasted bagels, a pot of golden-orange jam, cream cheese and b.u.t.ter, a pot of coffee, a pitcher of cream, and a pair of mugs. Jordan sat down, catching a whiff of her hair as she bent over the tray, arranging plates and folding napkins. She smelled like sugar and lemons, sweet and tart, and the skin on her arms, where she'd pushed up the sleeves of her sweater, looked smooth as a magnolia petal. He bet if he touched it, it would be soft.

She was fussing with the coffee cups, still looking worried. He wanted to take her hand and squeeze it, tell her that everything would be fine, and he couldn't figure out why. It didn't make sense. Sure, she had a decent figure, a curvy bottom, neither sinewy nor stick-thin, as so many women were these days, but she was no Holly Muoz. Holly, with all of her running and biking, her lunges and squats, had a truly admirable a.s.s. But that wasn't a fair comparison. Holly was twenty-six. She'd never had kids. Had Addie? With a great deal of effort, Jordan pushed himself upright, tried to shake off the pleasant torpor that the couch had induced, and pulled out his notebook. No kids, he decided-there were no telltale plastic toys, no baby playthings or big-kid paraphernalia. No husband, either-he hadn't noticed a ring, and more tellingly, there was only one remote control on the coffee table.

"So what happened at the reunion?" she asked. He was about to tell her when he noticed that Addie was looking down, blus.h.i.+ng. "Do you want a doughnut?" she asked. She pulled a bag out of her purse and set it next to the coffeepot. "I wasn't sure if I should put them out. You know, cops, doughnuts..." She laughed nervously, then put her hand over her mouth.

Jordan breathed in as steam from the coffee curled in the air, and opened the bag. Raspberry jelly. G.o.d was in his heaven, and all was right with the world. "Like many cliches, the one about cops and doughnuts has endured because it is true. Are these from Ambrosia's?" he asked, naming Pleasant Ridge's best and only twenty-four-hour doughnut and coffee shop.

"They're the best, right?" Jordan nodded. He ate half of a doughnut and spooned sugar into one of the cups. Good coffee and real half-and-half, none of that skim milk or fat-free c.r.a.p. Another point in her favor. "So what else?" she asked. "What other cop cliches are true?"

He sipped his coffee. She was teasing him. It felt nice. "Okay. You know how everyone thinks we've got quotas to make and we just hang around outside bar parking lots or places where we know people are speeding or driving drunk?" She nodded. "That's true. I mean, you want money, you go to the bank. You want drunks, you go to the bars. Oh, and we beat suspects."

She was smiling. "Well, why wouldn't you?"