“Easy, easy.” I patted his arm. “Mitch is strong, and he wanted those guys. If I hadn’t been playing Annie Oakley back there, maybe Mitch wouldn’t have gotten so wound up to begin with. And if I’d taken the car, instead of thinking I could catch two twenty-year-olds on foot—” I bit off the words: second-guessing and guilt-tripping are luxuries a good detective should never indulge in.

My neighbor and I called to the dog for a minute or two, straining to hear him. The Skyway is a diagonal road and was to our left here, close enough that the traffic made it hard to hear other sounds.

“This isn’t doing any good,” I said abruptly. “We’ll drive the area. If we don’t see him soon, let’s come back in daylight with Peppy—she might nose him out.”

Mr. Contreras agreed, at least with the first part of my suggestion. When he’d climbed into the passenger seat, he said, “You go on home, get some shut-eye, and bring Peppy back, but I ain’t gonna leave Mitch out here. He never spent the night outside by himself before, and I’m not gonna have him start now.”

I didn’t try to argue with him—I sort of felt the same way myself. We crawled west on 100th Street, Mr. Contreras with his head out the window, giving an ear-piercing whistle every few yards. As we got close to the river, the ram-shackle houses gave way to collapsing warehouses and sheds. The two punks could have sought refuge in any of them. Mitch might be lying there—I clipped the thought off.

We made a painstaking circuit of the four blocks that lie between the Skyway and the river. Only once did we pass another car, a one-eyed bandit missing the right headlight. The driver was a skinny, nervous kid who ducked his head when he saw us.

At the river, I got out of the car. I keep a real flashlight, industrial-strength, in my glove compartment. While Mr. Contreras stood behind me and played the light along the bank, I poked around in the dead marsh grasses.

We were lucky that we were on the far edge of fall, when the ranker vegetation has frozen and dissolved, and the marsh grasses no longer provide cover to a million biting insects. Even so, the ground was a clammy mud that sucked at my shoes; I felt the cold brackish water oozing into them.

I heard slithering and rustling in the underbrush and came to a standstill. “Mitch,” I called softly.

The rustling stopped briefly, then started again. A kind of rat came out, followed by a little family, and slid into the river. I moved on.