“Less,” says McLarney. “After a while, I told them that they ought to make it more challenging. You know, something better than a Part Two arrest. But they didn’t like that… too much work.”

Brown turns onto Bloom and then turns again at Etting. They watch more corner boys drop glassine packets or run into rowhouses.

“See that house there,” says McLarney, pointing to a two-story pile of painted brick. “I got thumped in there. Right in the hallway… Did I ever tell you that story?”

“I don’t think so,” says Brown, polite.

“It was a call for a man with a knife, and when I pulled up this guy just takes one look at me and runs into the house…”

“PC in my book,” says Brown, turning right and cruising back toward Pennsylvania Avenue.

“So I run in after him and there’s this convention of healthy black males in the living room. It was bizarre; we all just kinda looked at each other for a second.”

Dave Brown laughs.

“So then I grab hold of my guy and they’re all over me. Like five or six of ’em.”

“What’d you do?”

“I got hit,” says McLarney, laughing. “But I didn’t let go of my guy either. By the time my bunkies answered the thirteen, everyone had run out the back except for my guy, who ended up getting beat for all his missing friends. I kinda felt sorry for him.”

“What about you?” asks Brown.

“Stitches in my head.”

“Was this before or after you got shot?”

“Before,” says McLarney. “This was when I was in the Central.”

One story after another spills from Terry McLarney’s brain, his mood lightened by a night on the West Baltimore streets. A car ride through the west side never fails to have that effect on McLarney, who can roll through the ghetto remembering a strange thing that happened on this corner, a funny comment overheard down that street. On the surface, it all resembles a nightmare, but dig a little deeper and McLarney can show you the perverse eloquence of the thing, the unending inner-city comedy of crime and punishment.

That corner there, for instance, the one where Snot Boogie got shot.

“Snot Boogie?” asks Brown, disbelieving.

“Yeah,” says McLarney. “And that’s what his friends called him.”

“Nice.”

McLarney laughs, then leaps into the parable of Snot Boogie, who joined the neighborhood crap game, waited for the pot to thicken, then grabbed the cash and bolted down the street only to be shot dead by one of the irate players.

“So we’re interviewing the witnesses down at the office and they’re saying how Snot Boogie would always join the crap game, then run away with the pot, and that they’d finally gotten sick of it…”

Dave Brown drives in silence, barely tracking this historical digression.

“And I asked one of them, you know, I asked him why they even let Snot Boogie into the game if he always tried to run away with the money.”

McLarney pauses for effect.

“And?” asks Brown.

“He just looked at me real bizarre,” says McLarney. “And then he says, ‘You gotta let him play… This is America.’”

Brown laughs loudly.

“I love that,” says McLarney.

“Great story. Did it really happen?”

“Fuck yes.”

Brown laughs again. McLarney’s mood is contagious, even if the reason for tonight’s jaunt was wearing thin.

“I don’t think she’s out tonight,” says Brown, coasting up Pennsylvania Avenue for the fifth or sixth time.

“She’s never out,” says McLarney.

“Fuck this cocksucking bitch,” says Brown, slamming a hand on the steering wheel. “I’m tired of this fucking shit.”

McLarney looks at his detective with newfound delight, as if to encourage this sudden rant.

“I mean, we’re the homicide unit, the murder police, the highly trained investigative elite who always get their man…”

“Careful,” says McLarney. “You’re giving me an erection.”

“And who the fuck is she? She’s a disease-ridden twenty-dollar-a-fuck junkie from Pennsylvania Avenue who’s managed to elude us for three goddamn months. It’s fucking embarrassing is what it is…”

Lenore, the Mystery Whore. The lone witness to Worden’s September stabbing on Pennsylvania Avenue; the woman who can close the file by declaring that her now-dead boyfriend killed her then-dead boyfriend in a dispute over her affections. To Brown and Worden and everyone else in the squad, it is getting a bit embarrassing, this charging up and down the Avenue every other night, jacking up whores and addicts and coming nowhere near the elusive Miss Nore, who is always just beyond a detective’s reach. By now, they’ve heard every line:

“She was out walking last night…”

“Nore? She down on Division Street not a while ago…”

“She came out the carryout and went that way…”

Christ, thinks Brown. It isn’t bad enough that this junkie bitch doesn’t have a permanent address. No, she’s gotta move like the fucking wind. How in the hell do her customers find her?

“Maybe she’s not real,” says McLarney. “Maybe it’s a hoax and all the derelicts out here made her up. It’s a test to see how long we’ll ride around looking.”

McLarney smiles, warm with the thought of a $20 cockhound defying every law of metaphysics. A translucent wraith, she walks the streets of West Baltimore immune to the forces of authority. Some paid their $20 and swear her to be real, but to generations of homicide detectives, she is but the stuff of dreams, destined to be Baltimore’s contribution to the treasure chest of American folklore: Paul Bunyan, the Headless Horseman of Tarrytown, the ghost ship Mary Celeste; Lenore, the Mystery Whore.

“So why does James have her sheet in the file?” counters Brown. “And why do I have her B of I photo in my pocket?”

“Whoa,” says McLarney. “A clever hoax at that.”

“Fuck this bitch,” says Brown, still irritated. “She’s not out here.”

“What the hell,” says McLarney. “Let’s go ’round once more and then call it a night.”

They don’t have a prayer of finding her, of course. But McLarney loves being out on the street, out in the Western working a case that doesn’t matter to anyone. Not to Worden or James or Brown. Not to the dead man and, in this case, not to the killer either. Not even to McLarney. Tonight is police work with neither pain nor pressure, conducted at no emotional cost by men who have no real stake in the outcome.

For McLarney especially, the hunt for Lenore is a pleasing distraction, just as the murder he worked last month with Waltemeyer was pleasing. What could matter less than a drug robbery in a Pimlico alley, with the victim a doper and the witness talking bullshit? And then a young suspect, Fat Danny by name, claiming total innocence, crying for justice in his grandparents’ living room as detectives stalked through the house in search of the murder weapon?

“C’mon, stop crying,” McLarney told the suspect, a bruiser of a kid with at least six inches on him. “Calm down-”

“I DIDN’T KILL NO ONE!” screams Fat Danny, sliding away until McLarney backs him against the kitchen sink, one hand wrapped around the kid’s throat.

“C’mon, already,” McLarney said. “You’re gonna make it so we have to hurt you.”

“I DIDN’T-”

“Look at me,” said McLarney, glaring. “You’re under arrest. Do you want us to hurt you?”

And then a Northwestern DEU officer, one of the raiders, silenced the frantic, struggling suspect with an offhand remark: “For Chrissakes, kid, you did a man’s crime. Now act like a man.”

Later that night, after McLarney brought a Coke and candy bar into the interrogation room and made friends with the fat kid, he sat at his desk and thought about how simple and strangely enjoyable it all was. When nothing mattered, McLarney told himself, he could actually love this job.

Same thing tonight, he muses. If we never find Lenore, if she stays a mystery, then we live forever, rolling across West Baltimore in a four-cylinder go-cart, telling stories and cracking jokes and watching brain-dead homeboys drop their dope. But if we somehow find her, we gotta go back. We gotta go back and pick up the phone on something else, something that might just be real: a woman raped and carved up, an infant beaten, a cop you worked with and called a friend shot twice in the head.