For the life of me, I couldn’t imagine what that scent was.

At around midnight, it began snowing. Normally, the drive from Tomás and Elena’s house was five minutes tops in the winter. With the ’68 Olds 442 growling and ready to rip and run, it was a ten-minute fishtailing adventure.

“You know your car is—how you say?—stupid for the snow, ja?” Tatina said as I escorted her upstairs. She was asleep on her feet and reverting to broken English.

I undressed her, tucked her beneath the sheets and brought my thick down comforter up around her shoulders.

“So—we are not of the breaking up?” she said, her eyes closed.

“No,” I said. “We’re not broken up.”

“Det er bra,” she said. “Det er veldig, veldig bra.”

Then she was out.

I was about to cuddle in with Tatina when I heard a timid series of knocks on the front door. Knocks at an hour and in weather in which only amateur thieves, first-time murderers, drunk lovers and elderly priests timidly knock.

Wearing only boxers and hugging the shadows of my house, I made my way downstairs—Glock in hand—and peeked through the living room window.

I opened the door.

“Sorry ’bout the hour, ma brotha. You got some coffee or somethin’?”

12

12

There’s a man I know who wears the skin of this city, and he lives in the humid shadows of its writhing subterranean strata . . .

He is listening . . .

. . . always listening . . .

. . . taking four-dimensional mental notes . . .

. . . breathing when he needs to . . .

. . . holding his breath when he has to.

His name—or rather one of the names I’ve known him by—is Sweets.

Sweets is one of a number of itinerant intelligence operatives working the streets of Detroit. When alleyways get too cold and the streets too hot, he perches at a barbershop headquarters on 7 Mile Road near the Lodge Freeway where both the valiant and the villainous seek information one folded C-note at a time: Smitty’s Cuts & Curls.

He was dressed for a much harsher winter than had been forecast for southeastern Michigan: Canada Goose navy overalls topped off with a Canada Goose Wyndham Parka with fur-lined hood and midcalf Sorel Caribou wool boots. The kind of winter garb one wears to mush a sled-dog team along the Iditarod Trail.

“Sorry if I woke you, ma brotha,” Sweets said after a sip of coffee, black, two sugars. “Or, you know, if you was in the middle of somebody.”

“No problem,” I said. “Since when do you make house calls?”

“Since I’m on my way outta town,” Sweets said. “For good. Retired.”

“Comox, British Columbia?” I said. “In the middle of winter?”