“So,” he asked, “do you have somewhere that you take men?”

“I sure do,” I told him cheerfully, pulling my shield out of my leather coat.

It was after four in the morning when I left work, after staying late to cover for a co-worker whose child was sick. But even when I left, I wasn’t tired, just hungry. I was thinking that if I knocked on the back door of a bakery, I might be able to buy something really fresh and warm from the oven.

It was on this errand, which took me toward the outskirts of the city, that I saw a woman refilling a Star Tribune rack. Impulse made me pull to the side of the road. Shiloh had taken care of our subscription to the Strib, and in his absence, I’d let it lapse.

The days of the newspaper boy, the kid on the bike, are largely over. The circulation driver was perhaps 30, with a pinched, makeupless face and short, flyaway hair. Her Toyota Starlet idled by the curb. The look she gave me as I approached was wary; she thought I was looking for a free paper before she closed the rack.

“Go ahead,” I told her. “I’ll buy one after you’re finished.”

The woman set up the display copy in the window and let the door close with a slam. I stepped into the place she’d been, fishing for a pair of quarters.

“Is that a kid, at this hour?” she asked, behind me.

“Is what a kid?” I asked absently, feeding the coin slot.

“Yelling like that. You didn’t hear it?”

She must have had ears like radar. Or maybe she had kids and there was such a thing as maternal intuition.

“I don’t hear anything,” I said.

“Over there,” she said, pointing.

I looked. Empty street, streetlights, shuttered businesses. A running figure on the sidewalk, about 10 or 11 years old. A child in the street. At four-thirty in the morning.

I ran to intercept him.