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Angela said, but he could swear she was smiling.
    â€œI love you, bro,” she said.
    â€œI love you, too,” he said, “I have to get out of here. Talk to you later.”
    â€œGive my love to Teddy and the kids.”
    â€œI will,” he said. “Bye, sweetie.”
    He pressed the receiver rest button, waited for a dial tone, and then began dialing home.
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    A RELATIONSHIP CAN settle down into a sort of complacency, you know. You forget the early passion, you forget the heat, you begin to feel comfortable in another sort of intimacy that has nothing to do with sex. Or if it does, it’s only because the idea of being loved so completely, of loving someone back so completely, is in itself often sexually exciting. This profound concept did not cross the minds of either Bert Kling or Sharyn Cooke as they spoke on the telephone at eighteen minutes to four that afternoon. They simply felt snug and cozy with each other, sharing their thoughts as their separate days wound down in separate parts of the city.
    Sharyn worked in the police department’s Chief Surgeon’s Office at 24 Rankin Plaza, over the bridge in Majesta. As the city’s only female Deputy Chief, she was also its only black one. A board-certified surgeon with four years of medical school, plus five years of residency as a surgeon, plus four years as the hospital’s chief resident, she now earned almost five times as much as Kling did. Today, one of the cops she’d seen on a follow-up had been shot in the face at a street demonstration six months earlier. Blinded in the left eye, he was now fully recovered and wanted to go back to active duty. She had recommended psychiatric consultation first: a seriously wounded cop is often thought of as a jinx by his fellow officers, who sometimes tended to shun him. She told this to Kling now.
    â€œI’m seriously wounded, too,” he said.
    â€œOh? How’s that, hon?”
    â€œWe’ve been on the phone for five minutes, and you haven’t yet told me you love me.”
    â€œBut I adore you!” she said.
    â€œIt’s too late to apologize,” he said.
    â€œWhere do you want to eat tonight?”
    â€œYou pick it, Shar.”
    â€œThere’s a place up in Diamondback serves real down-home soul food. Want to try it?”
    â€œWherever.”
    â€œSuch enthusiasm,” she said.
    â€œI’m not very hungry. Cotton and I were working a burglary over on Mason, we stopped for a couple of late pizzas afterward.”
    â€œShall we just order in?”
    â€œWhatever,” he said. “ Law and Order is on tonight, you know.”
    â€œ Law and Order is on every night,” she said.
    â€œI thought you liked Law and Order. ”
    â€œI adore Law and Order. ”
    â€œThat’s just what I mean,” he said. “You say you adore me, but you also adore Law and Order. ”
    â€œAhh, yes, but I love you,” she said.
    â€œAt last,” he said.
    Not exactly hot and heavy.
    But they’d been living together for quite a while now.
    And neither of them ever once thought trouble might be heading their way.
    Had they but known.
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    T HIS WAS STILL the early days of their relationship. Everything was still whispers and heavy breathing. Innuendos. Promises. Wild expectations. Covert glances around the room to see if the phone conversation was being overhead. Hand cupped over the mouthpiece. Everything hot and heavy.
    Honey Blair was in a large, open room at Channel Four News, sitting at a carrel desk, her back to the three other people, two men and a woman, occupying the room at the moment. What they were doing was frantically compiling some last-minute news segments that would go on the air at six P.M. Honey was telling Hawes that before she saw him tonight, she would have to run downtown to do a remote from the Lower Quarter, where some guy had jumped out the window of a twenty-first-floor office. She’d be