So I’m sitting here pondering the meaning of the universe on this particular day, and I end up talking to one of the cub reporters about how I hooked up with Milky. I’d want to say, I suppose that my life has taken on new meaning and so forth and so on, that she makes me want to sing, dust the corners, worry about spiderwebs on the bookcases and make sure there’s fresh milk in the fridge. But nah, I’m not that kinda guy. I mean, yeah, I feel those things, and yeah, I act on them. It’s always been part of my routine though. I was raised in the kind of home where it was important to the quality of our lives that we keep things in order, make sure to feed ourselves, get enough rest, that sort of stuff. Instead, I tell the young fellow that sometimes shares my beat, a guy fresh out of college and raring to go, Donovan, that I had a wonderful time with a swell gal and I feel like a million bucks.

Donovan is listening with one ear cocked. He’s writing on a laptop that he takes with him when he goes home at night and says “uh huh” whenever I pause in my dialogue.

My job though, that’s the tough part. I write for a major metropolitan daily. I’m out there on the street day after day, me and my camera, which is always loaded with film. In summer I wear standard Bermudas and Hawaiian shirt and I might stop off for a quick beverage at O’Mulroy’s on 49th on the way home, if I’m in the neighborhood. Winter, I got my midcalf rubberboots on and my downlined carcoat with the hood. It gets cold, you know. This is meaning to say I have standard armor for the assignments I take.

The news itself, that’s the rough part. I got the assignment to Haarlem last summer and it damn near killed me. I was on 179th and Amsterdam, poking around the remains of a building that had been gutted by fire. It had happened the week before and there were families burned to death in the conflagration. My editor wanted me to go see if there were any clues to arson and such and so I’d been reading up on the telltale evidence that might present itself. I got clearance from the area precinct and went about my business, poking through the rubble. About halfway across the site I found a tibia and a femur of what turned out to be an eight-year old girl. I kinda got a cold feeling about then, even though it was one of those summer days you wish you were somewhere like the Poconos, on a rubber inner tube floating down the river. I poked the bones with my rubbish stick, which I got from Marty in the park, and I knew I had something interesting. The site had already been sifted by forensics so it should have been clean. I mean, the bones shouldn’t have been there. I had my cell phone with me so I called in to the desk and the middle cheese answers. “Bigby, I got bones here,” I told him upfront.