Lou, normally, was not a morning person. But the minute she had a whiff of a mark, the whole game changed. When we were on a new case, she had an engine that couldn’t be stopped, and a cheerful, ruthless focus that had led to more than one marathon thirty-two-hour stakeout, me asleep in the car next to her, or else asleep in my bed, fielding phone calls with details on the mark’s bathroom habits. “Possible piss fetish,” she’d say, her voice bright and chirpy at 3 a.m. “Gotta go, I’ll call back when I’m sure.”

On my way to meet her, I passed the pool where kids were slapping pastel-colored noodles against the surface for maximum splash. Management kept the concrete crater filled to the brim with eye-stinging chlorine that tasted of salty, gone-off fruit. A bright blue light at the deepest end kept you from noticing, right away, the scrum ringing the edge, the oil-like sheen the too-still water took on immediately. Instead, that light made it look almost healthy.

After I’d finished my very first case, Lou and I had sat around the pool downing a bottle or six of champagne—“sparkle water,” Lou called it. I’d been so loopy from the bubbles that when Lou made some half-assed joke I’d nearly tumbled into the water, laughing.

“Don’t fall in,” she warned me. “I can’t swim, so I’d have to let you drown.” She looked at the water like an ex-lover.

“It’s only eight feet,” I said, my eyes burning from the chlorine fumes.

“I’d have to let you drown,” she said again, waggling her eyebrows so I was in on the joke, and then she poured me more champagne, finishing the bottle and tossing the glass carcass into the deep end.

The morning fog had turned into a miserable steamy mist that hung in the air like a wet wool blanket. Before I’d managed to buckle the seat belt, Lou stuck a freshly brewed cup of java in my face, and I took a long inhale, groaning in appreciation. It knocked me about halfway toward human.

Lou didn’t drink coffee. She smoked cigarettes (she said they were too tasty to kick, and besides, did you know you put on ten, maybe fifteen pounds once you did?—no thank you), and she drank—with me, mostly. But on the whole, she didn’t tolerate girls who blew shit up their nose, or jammed junk in their arms, and she didn’t even like caffeine, said the stimulants made her skittish. Instead she chewed gum in the mornings, said she thought the minty freshness jump-started her brain. And who was I to say she was wrong?

“So,” Lou said as she braked into the 405 and we settled into the stop-and-go, “Ellen. Is she in love with him or what?”