“You know what, Rollie, sometimes you just need to take one deep breath and relax. Really, Wheels, it’s okay to enjoy Schitt’s Creek.” She leaned over and kissed me, a really sweet patronizing kiss. “Life goes on, you know. As painful as it is sometimes, life goes on.”

Well, except for the victims, I thought. For the victims, this is a bitch. Jenny was right, though. I have to admit that most often Jenny was right, the world had moved on. By late September, Detroit had become last summer’s news. Or “olds,” as Howie referred to it. “If it isn’t new, it’s no longer news.” Within a period of a few weeks, a Belgian submarine had disappeared in the Adriatic and a joint naval force that we had formed with the Chinese had located the damaged vessel and made a daring rescue of its crew. A North Korean defector claimed the food crisis inside that country had become so bad that farmers in rural areas had resorted to cannibalism, while Kim Jong Un had suddenly begun promoting tourism. Putin was hinting that he planned to annex Ukraine unless American sanctions were removed while still bemoaning the loss of his “good friend President Trump.”

I’d made changes to deal with this new reality. I installed surveillance cameras in my apartment and linked them to Mighty Chair. I set up a bright red dye-pack trap that would paint any intruder with indelible ink. And at night I felt myself holding on to Jenny just a little more tightly.

I’d moved on, although there remained an unfinished pang in my heart. It appeared no one was going to pay for what happened in Detroit. I wrote several good stories and came within one coffee cup of topping the tower record. 7/11 was taking its place as another sad day on America’s calendar to memorialize each year. My involvement in it might have ended there for me, and I might have let it go and gone on to a long and semi-distinguished career in journalism, at the end of which I would write a fine and unpublished memoir. That might have happened. But then my phone rang.

It was a dreary December day. There was light snow in the forecast. The early afternoon light was the pale yellow of faded newsprint. The landline on my desk rang only occasionally, most often with an announcement that my excellent credit score had earned me the right to go deeper into debt. So when it did ring, I expected to hear a recorded woman’s voice gleefully informing me that there was no problem with my credit. Instead a man asked in a mildly accented voice, “Is this Stone?”

There was a tremble in that voice. Whoever it was, he was hesitant about making this call. “It is.”

“I need help, man.” It came in a rush. “Please, you help me.”

The voice of a stranger reaching out for help was a siren song no journalist could resist. Of course, it was also the opening line of an infinite number of bad detective novels. In various forms I’d heard the same plea several times before; they had ended up being about as exciting as the early bird special at IHOP. “Okay, if I can,” I said. “But I can’t guarantee this call isn’t being tapped, so be careful what you say.”