"How can something be there and you can't remember it?"

"It was something ordinary. Something you take for granted."

The bomb-squad detective was looking around. A lone EMT ambulance stood nearby, in case an unsuspected body turned up. A fire engine was pulling away, its job done. The air smelled of hot metals and warm blood.

"What color?" asked the detective.

"I don't remember that, either. Damn it, why won't my mind work?"

"Was it green?"

"Huh?"

The detective was on his knees. He waved Guiterrez to join him.

Near the pediment of a door, something had chipped at the concrete. A fragment lay on the ground. It was scorched black, but as the detective nudged it with a pen, the other side came to light. It was olive drab.

"Could be military ordnance of some type," the detective was saying.

Guiterrez shook his head slowly. "I don't remember anything military."

"A jeep? A duece-and-a-half truck?"

"It wasn't a car bomb, I tell you," Guiterrez said angrily.

The detective got up and looked around. He held the fragment of scorched olive drab metal in a clean handkerchief.

"It wasn't any guy wearing a brace of M-80s for a girdle, either," he said grimly.

AT THE FIFTH AVENUE city morgue, the coroner extracted a large section of steel from the body of the woman whose pureed innards had come bubbling out of her mouth.

Patrolman Guiterrez was there to see it.

The coroner laid the piece of metal on a stainless steel circular tray and with a thing like a tiny flexible shower nozzle, hosed it clean.

As the blood ran clear, the steel turned olive drab. And embossed on one side were two raised letters: U.S.

"Damn," the bomb-squad detective muttered. "Damn. Maybe it was an ammo box. I hope to hell we don't have militia loose in Manhattan."

"We don't," Guiterrez said slowly. "I don't think."