But tonight, I was having no luck. Men passed on the street in cars, on the sidewalk on foot. They looked at me, some of them, but none stopped, and I didn’t try to stop them. The idea to commit a crime has to originate with the arrestee, not the officer, otherwise it’s entrapment.

At least it was a pleasant night to be outside.

May weather in the Twin Cities is anybody’s guess. It could bring a record heatwave. Or a series of bone-rattling, drenching thunderstorms, the kind that started up in the mornings and worsened as afternoon came on, until they shaped their anger into destructive tornadoes outside the city, on the farmland and the prairie. Conversely, it was possible that a freak storm could blow into Minnesota in the next few days and dump inches of snow on us.

The latest had been two days of storms, rains that were fitful but kept coming back, often torrentially, overloading the gutters and the drains. Tonight was a pleasant exception; the clouds had parted to reveal a polished twilight sky. But the aftereffects of the rain were everywhere: the roads were still dark with it, and the air smelled clean and damp.

A bus swept to the curb, picking up a teenager in a wheelchair. When it wallowed back into traffic and away, I saw that I’d attracted someone’s attention. A late-model, midsize car was pulled to the curb across the street. Mentally, I wrote up the man inside: white, mid-thirties, hair color brown with some gray on the temples, eye color unknown, no distinguishing marks or scars on the face. Clothes I couldn’t see much of, except for the dark knot of a tie against his white shirt.

Something else, too: there was no sexual interest in his eyes. None at all, yet he didn’t break his gaze.

Come on, you need a first arrest of the night. Get him over here and bust him.

I walked a few paces, tried to swing my hips a little. Turned to make eye contact again, sending him an overtly questioning look.