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into the flow of tepid air coming from the defroster.
    â€˜I think,’ he told me, ‘if I touched my ears, they’d crack.’
    After giving the car and himself a chance to warm up, Aveda went on to admit that the canvas wasn’t going particularly well. That was because most of the houses and apartments along Palmetto were empty, the parents off to work, the children either in school or day care.
    But Aveda’s partial canvas hadn’t been entirely without results. Three elderly women had walked up Palmetto around nine, on their way back from the eight o’clock mass at St. Catherine’s. They’d seen nothing amiss.
    â€˜These kind of old ladies,’ Aveda told me, ‘you find ’em all through Ridgewood. They’re the alarm system for their blocks. I couldn’t tell ya how many times I been called out because one of ’em saw something out of place.’
    â€˜Something with the wrong color skin?’
    â€˜You got it.’ Though Aveda was Puerto Rican and fairly dark, his tone was matter-of-fact. This was an issue he’d dealt with long before. ‘I also talked to three other people, a disabled guy with an aide who pushed him around the block in a wheelchair, and a woman who went shopping. Nobody saw anything out of place.’
    We were parked before a line of modest row houses that stretched the length of the block. The houses were of brick and flat-roofed, with bow windows on the upper and lower floors. Under a noon sun, the yellow brick appeared warm to the touch, an illusion dispelled by the icicles dangling from cornices so uniform they might have been part of a single structure.
    I was gathering the courage to suggest that Aveda and I face the cold implied by those icicles when my cell phone began to ring. Though I was hoping for rescue, I was nevertheless surprised when my partner told me that a pair of Bushwick cops had located the red sedan beneath the El on Broadway.
    â€˜There was a handgun inside, a TEC-9,’ she explained. ‘We better get over there.’ Then she hung up.
    Delray Webber, a patrol sergeant from the Eight-Three, was waiting for us at the intersection of Broadway and Linden Street when we arrived ten minutes later, along with a pair of uniforms who had the good sense to remain in their cruiser. Adele went off to get the names of those officers, along with a few details, in case they were needed to testify at some later date. Across the street, on the south side of Broadway, a maroon Toyota Camry was double-parked beneath the elevated tracks carrying the J line. Surrounded by ribbons of yellow tape fixed to the girders of the El, it looked to me like the featured vehicle on a used car lot. The one I couldn’t afford.
    â€˜The officers noticed the car double-parked and ran a check,’ Webber explained. ‘When the vehicle came up stolen, they moved in for a closer look and found the gun. Then they called me.’
    â€˜You know when the car was stolen?’
    â€˜Last week, on the eighth.’
    Webber led me to his patrol car, then pointed through the window. A TEC-9 was lying on the front seat next to Webber’s driver. In appearance, it was nothing short of ferocious. The fifty-round magazine was a foot long and the barrel was surrounded by a stainless-steel baffle. You couldn’t look at the weapon without imagining a gangster spraying bullets in all directions. But appearances are deceiving. Relatively cheap, the TEC-9 is a triumph of style over substance. It fires ordinary 9mm cartridges, one round at a time, just like the Glock parked at my hip, the main difference being that my Glock is far more accurate. True, the TEC-9’s magazine holds thirty-two rounds to the Glock’s fifteen, an advantage for street criminals with no training and no opportunity to practice. But that’s not why the mutts love them. No, mutts are attracted to TEC-9s because their own lives are a triumph of style