“Not on who makes the first first down or the biggest tackle,” I protested. “Five bucks on the final score, that’s all.”

“Come on, doll: a dollar if the Chiefs score first, a dollar if they get the first sack.” He enumerated about a dozen things I could bet on, then said scornfully, “I thought you called yourself a risk taker.”

“You’re a risk taker with a union pension,” I grumbled. “I just have a 401(k) that I didn’t even manage a contribution to last year.” Still, I agreed to his scheme and laid out fifteen singles on the coffee table.

Rose Dorrado called just as the Chiefs were mounting a heroic attack late in the first half, when I’d already lost six dollars. I took the phone into the hall to get away from the television noise.

“Josie didn’t come home from school today,” Rose said without preamble.

“She wasn’t at school today at all, according to the girls on the team.”

“Not at school? But she left this morning, right on time! Where did she go? Oh, no, oh, Dios, did someone steal my baby!” Her voice rose.

Images of the dark alleys and abandoned buildings on the South Side, of the girls in this city who’ve been molested and killed, flitted around the corners of my mind. It was possible, but I didn’t think that was what had happened to Josie.

“Have you checked with Sandra Czernin? She could be visiting April.”

“I called Sandra, I thought that, too, but she heard nothing from my baby, nothing since Saturday when Josie went to see April in the hospital. What did you say to her yesterday? Did you upset her so much she ran away from me?”

“I told her I didn’t think it was a good idea for her and Billy to spend the night together. Do you know where he is?”

She gasped. “You think he ran off with her? But why? But where?”

“I don’t think anything right now, Rose. I’d talk to Billy before I called the cops, though.”

“Oh, I thought nothing could be worse than losing my job, but now this, this! How do I find him, this Billy?”

I tried to imagine where he might be. I didn’t think he’d gone home, at least not willingly. I suppose his grandfather might have had him picked up-Buffalo Bill was clearly capable of anything. Billy had given his cell phone away, Josie said: obviously, my remark about the GSM chip in it had made him cautious. I wondered if he’d also ditched the Miata.

“Phone Pastor Andrés,” I said at last. “He’s the one person Billy talks to these days. If you can find Billy, I think you’ll find Josie, or, at least, Billy may know where she is.”

Ten minutes later, Rose called back. “Pastor Andrés, he says he doesn’t know where Billy is. He hasn’t seen him since church yesterday. You got to come down here and help me find Josie. Who else can I ask? Who else can I turn to?”

“The police,” I suggested. “They know how to hunt missing persons.”

“The police,” she spat. “If they even answer my call, you think they would care?”

“I know the watch commander down there,” I offered. “I could phone him.”

“You come, Ms. V. I. War-War-”

I realized she was reading from one of the cards I’d left with her daughters, that she didn’t in fact know my name. When I pronounced it for her, she reiterated her demand that I come. The police wouldn’t listen to her, she knew all about that; I was a detective, I knew the neighborhood, please, it was all too much for her right now, the factory burning down, being out of work, all those children, and now this?

I was tired, and I’d had two glasses of heavy Italian red. And I’d been in South Chicago once already today, and it was twenty-five miles, and I’d split my shoulder open this afternoon…and I told her I’d be there as soon as I could.

25 Bedtime Stories

It was close to eleven when we pulled up in front of the Dorrado apartment on Escanaba. Mr. Contreras was with me, and we’d brought Mitch as well. Who knows-his hunting stock might give him a good tracking nose.

My neighbor had been predictably annoyed that I was going out again, but I shut him up by the simple expedient of inviting him to join me. “I know it’s late, and I agree I shouldn’t be driving. If you want to ride along and help keep me alert, that’d be great.”

“Sure, doll, sure.” He was touchingly ecstatic.

I went into my bedroom and dressed in jeans and put on a couple of loose knit tops under my navy peacoat. I got my gun out of the wall safe. I wasn’t expecting a battle with Billy, if, in fact, he and Josie had run off together. But drive-by shootings were a dreary commonplace in the old ’hood, and I didn’t want to end up lying on the floor of an abandoned warehouse with some punk’s stray bullet in my back, just because I hadn’t come prepared. That was the real reason we were taking Mitch, too-not too many gangbangers dis a big dog.

Before we left Lakeview, I called Billy’s mother. Her phone was answered by a man who was some kind of butler or secretary-anyway, a call screener. He was very reluctant to disturb Mrs. William, and when I finally pushed him into bringing her to the phone it was clear why: Annie Lisa was high on something other than life. Whether it was modern and respectable, like Xanax, or old-fashioned and reliable, like Old Overholt, she had a delay, like a satellite echo, in answering anything I said.

I spoke slowly and patiently, as if to a child, reminding her that I was the detective who was looking for Billy. “When did you last hear from him, Ms. Bysen?”

“Hear from him?” she echoed.

“Did Billy call you today?”

“Billy? Billy isn’t here. William, William is angry.”

“And why is William angry, ma’am?”

“I don’t know.” She was puzzled and talked about it at some length. “Billy went to work, he went to the warehouse, that’s what a good boy does, he works hard for a living, it’s what Daddy Bysen always told us, so why does that make William angry? Unless it’s because Billy is doing what Daddy Bysen says, William always hates for Billy to follow Daddy Bysen’s orders, but William also likes children who work hard. Children who lie around using drugs and getting pregnant, they get sent away, so he should be happy that Billy went to the warehouse again.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I’m sure deep down he’s ecstatic, just hiding it from you.”

Irony was a mistake: she thought I was saying William was hiding Billy from her. I cut her questions off and asked for Billy’s sister’s phone number.

“Candace is in Korea. She’s doing mission work, and we’re proud that she’s turning her life around.” Annie Lisa spoke the sentences like an inexpert news reader looking at a teleprompter.

“That’s nice. But in case Billy called his sister to talk over his plans, can you give me her phone number?”

“He wouldn’t do that; he knows William would be very angry.”

“How about her e-mail address?”

She didn’t know it, or wouldn’t give it. I pressed her as hard as I could without alienating her, but she wouldn’t budge: Candace was off-limits until she’d finished serving her sentence.

“Would Billy have turned to any of his aunts or uncles?” I pictured him confiding in Aunt Jacqui while she smirked and preened.

“No one understands Billy the way I do. He’s very sensitive, like me-he isn’t like the Bysens. None of them has ever really understood him.”

That seemed to be the limit, both of what I could get and what I could take from her. Mr. Contreras, who’d gone to his own place for a parka and a pipe wrench, was waiting at the bottom of the stairs with Mitch. As we left, we could hear Peppy’s forlorn whine from behind his front door.

The Dorrados’ building was alive in the way urban apartments always seem to be. As we walked up the three flights of stairs, we heard babies squalling, stereos cranked up high enough to send vibrations down the banisters, people shouting in a variety of languages, and even a couple locked in ecstasy. Mitch’s hackles were on end; Mr. Contreras kept a tight hold on his leash.