MARK DONAHUE AND I ARE GOING NORTH on the Expressway, past the colorful gas tanks that feature the profile of Ho Chi Minh etched into the artless-looking blue swath. Maps and files and court orders are scattered all over the inside of my car, along with orange peels, banana peels, apple cores, and old, sopping tea bags. It's Presidents' Day weekend and for the past month, this has been our rolling office. Buried in the back somewhere is my hockey equipment.

“Whew. That's what I smell,” says Donahue. “Your fucking hockey stuff.”

I laugh and roll down the window. “That smell is music to my ears, Coach,” I say.

Salt has turned the highway white, and near Melnea Cass Boulevard we turn off the highway and pass beneath a huge crane looming above the Boston Medical Center. “We're going to Roxbury,” says Donahue. He indicates the black pouch he wears on his belt. “I got my gun.”

“I don't have mine,” I say, “cuz I don't own one.”

Colorful panels mount the facade of a brand-new school on the edge of the Orchard Park Projects, the site protected by a ten-foot construction fence. We negotiate the odd-shaped intersection, studying the map and the overhead signs for a tiny one-way called Ambrose Street. Temperatures are in the single digits and a nasty wind is blowing up the sidewalk, creating little tornadoes of paper, cigarette ends and grit. Two young men in large black-and-white leather jackets with pink-and-orange sleeves are standing on the corner, blowing on their hands and stamping their feet, and a short ways along a woman smokes a cigarette at the bus stop. There's a dearth of white people around here and I don't have a problem with that. But we're conspicuous.

Behind the Dearborn School are three or four short streets into the project and we spot the one we think is Ambrose and have to drive around again since it's all one-way. On the second pass the corner and bus stop are deserted.

“The white man never brings good news around here,” says Donahue.

We turn into Ambrose Street, just an alley between the clapboard row houses, all of it newly paved and burgeoning to a double row of parking spaces on either side. The vehicle in question is a seven-year-old Ford Explorer, green on black, registered to a Clemzie Rostock. Halfway down the first row is a green truck with black interior and a vanity plate that reads “Clemzie.” Dust on the windshield and little mounds of plowed snow in front of the tires indicate it hasn't moved in a while.

“Think that's it?” I ask Mark, who is studying the cars on the other side and has missed it.

“Very funny, Coach,” he says, backing into the space beside the Explorer. “Get out and check the VIN.”

I glance over my shoulder, peering toward the windows of the nearest apartment. “The tag says ‘Clemzie.' How many can there be?”

“Sometimes a car gets wrecked or stolen and a guy'll buy the same model, different year, and put the old plate on,” says Donahue. “You come around, snap the car and boom— wrongful repossession. They win a judgment against the bank, and against us.” He screws his head around; the sidewalk is empty. “Jump out and check the VIN,” he says. “Ten seconds.”

I look in the file for the last five digits. Easing out of the car, I take one step and lean over the Explorer, cupping my hand against the glass to shield the sun. Again I find the “air bag” label and search up and down the dash but can't find the VIN. A couple of years ago, I detached the retina in my left eye while playing rugby and the operation to fix it was less than a complete success.

I get back in the car. “You're not gonna believe this,” I say.

“Jesus Christ,” says Donahue. He bursts from the driver's side with the file clutched in his hand, takes four giant steps around the hood of the car, whips open the manila folder, stabs his finger at the number, and raises his sunglasses to his forehead and leans over the dash. Unhurried, he returns to the car.

“Your eyes are going, Coach,” says Donahue.

Mark calls the wrecker on his cell phone and schedules the pickup for later that day. “The car looks good, but it hasn't been driven lately,” he tells the driver. “Clemzie's probably in the joint.”

Twenty minutes later, Donahue and I arrive in Winthrop, a small, neatly arranged town on a peninsula just north of Boston. Riding around the town's perimeter on Winthrop Shore Drive, we're afforded a great view of the ocean, the sky above dotted with gulls. Out beyond the jetty, the waves look like mountains viewed from a distance.

“It's rough out there,” says Donahue, the one-time harbormaster.

And it's rough in here. We turn onto Wave Way, dirty sections of old newspaper flapping ahead of us. Close on either side are three-families with their vinyl siding half stripped off, fronted by broken railings and jumbled up patio furniture. We're looking for Marco Zapato, and in front of the appropriate house Mark stops the car and I run out to check the mailboxes. One unit has six names on little plastic labels but no Zapato, and I take a quick look through the utility bills and missing children flyers stuffed into each of the rusted boxes. Mark gets out and we ring the doorbell to the apartments but nobody's home. The car we're looking for is a Honda Accord and that's not here either.

“Let's go to the father's house,” says Mark, and we climb back in the car and head north on the shore road, armies of gulls soaring ahead of us over the empty beach.

Zapato's father lives in “Severe,” which is what Donahue calls Revere, part of a lexicon that includes “Slum-erville,” “Poor-chester” (Dorchester), and “Murder-pan” (Mattapan). In front of a three-story brick building on a narrow, dingy street Donahue stops the car and skims over the Zapato file. The information is sketchy. Either Zapato's father lives in this building or he used to, and now a friend of Zapato's named Alberto Flores lives here. Flores is listed as a reference on Marco Zapato's loan application.

Inside the tiny foyer we study the various combinations of names listed over the security buzzers. Donahue presses one of them and asks the woman who answers if she knows anyone named Zapato or Flores.

“No,” she says, terminating the conversation.

While we're standing there, a man in a black ski hat enters the cramped foyer. He's wearing a perforated black face mask against the cold, with only his eyes showing. They are wide and blue, with exclamatory black dots in the center.

Donahue turns to him. “Does Marco Zapato or Alberto Flores live here?”

“Who are you?” the man asks.

Looming over him, Donahue asks, “Who are you?”

I can't see Mark's face from this angle but I have a fair idea of what it looks like. Most of the time he's a gregarious, easygoing family man, and I often leave him in charge of my son, who is eight years old and whom Mark treats like his own child. But under fight or flight conditions, Mark stretches himself to his full six feet three, his ears turn red and his jaw drops and he maintains a petulant Irish squint that usually backs the other fellow up.

The man unhooks his mask; he is in his late fifties, with a narrow, lined face and humanitarian eyes. “This is my building,” he says, with touches of Central America in his accent.

“I'm from the bank,” Mark says, handing him a business card. “We're looking for Alberto Flores or Marco Zapato.”

The super unlocks the inner door and waves us inside. Going up the stairs, he says something to Donahue that I can't make out and upon the first landing he gestures toward the door opposite and then unlocks his own unit and disappears inside without another word.

Mark knocks on the door to Number 4. There's the sound of a television from inside, a couple of loud bumps against the wall, and muffled voices. After a long interval the chain is removed and the latch unbolted and the door opens. Standing there is a chubby, preadolescent boy in a pajama top and sweatpants with bare feet although it is approaching noon on a school day. The apartment is dark behind him, except for the play of light from the television, and from the look of a sleeping bag on the floor, which still bears his impression, the boy has been lying around in that dank, stuffy room all morning.

“Does Marco Zapato live here?” asks Donahue.

The boy is staring up at Mark. His straight black hair droops over his forehead and his body is soft all over, like it's never been used for anything. “No,” he says.

“What about Alberto Flores?”

“I don't know,” says the boy.

“You don't know if he lives here?” asks Mark.

“I don't know.”

Suddenly a dark-haired woman in a bathrobe appears and puts her arms around the boy's shoulders like she's protecting him. “What do you want?” she asks.

“We're from the bank and we're looking for Marco Zapato,” says Mark. “Does Alberto Flores live here?”

“No,” the woman says.

“You don't know Marco Zapato?”

The woman eases the boy out of the way and closes the door. “No,” she says, as the door clicks shut.

Back on the road Donahue expresses surprise over the building superintendent's cooperation. “What an idiot,” he says. “All I showed him was a little piece of cardboard. He never should have let us in.”

“Every man for himself,” I say.

After he calls Ray at the bank to fill him in, Mark asks, “What's your instinct?”

“I think the woman sent the kid to the door, which is disgusting. I think Zapato doesn't live there and the kid doesn't know him. But I bet Alberto Flores lives there.”

Mark nods his head. “The kid knows Flores. He was lying through his skull.”

It's a long drive from Revere to Fall River, and to break up the monotony we're treated to a phone call from Joe McCain. “Ass bag,” says Donahue, greeting his old friend. “Whatcha doin'?”

Detectives in Somerville have their own separate locked area and a degree of autonomy not enjoyed by the patrol division. Joe's plan for his space includes a Persian rug (which for some reason Donahue advises him to buy at Home Depot) and a beaded curtain instead of a door. Above his desk he's going to hang a portrait of his late father.

“Real cops on this side, fake cops on the other,” he says.

Donahue is amused by his buddy's antics and after I shout over that I'll help Joey get a couple of file cabinets from the office on Fulton Street, they hang up. Joe is in a hurry to have lunch.

“He'll probably call Mike Kennelly to ask him where he should eat,” I say. “He always tells me that Kennelly is a genius. His lunch guru.”

Mark and Joey “Elbows” McCain have been friends since they played peewee hockey together in Somerville. From those days up through their stint on the Winnissimett Chiefs when they were fifteen all the way to the high school varsity, the two played street hockey in Foss Park, sat in class together, and drank beer and listened to music in the McCain basement. In the early years, big Joe drove a cement truck for Boston Sand & Gravel while also working as a cop, and Mark rarely saw him, although the reputation of the elder McCain was well established. He was a real-life detective, a large, impressive man who drove around in jazzy sports cars, in sleek black undercover cars, and in race cars that had been seized from drug lords and kingpins.

Joe Sr. often drove the two boys to hockey practice, roaring up Route 93 at 120 miles an hour, with Joey laughing like hell up front and Donahue terrified in the backseat. “Don't worry, boys, I'm a professional,” said Joe, who once covered the ten miles from the McCain residence to the Stoneham rink in just six minutes.

While we putter toward Fall River at seventy, Mark receives a flurry of telephone calls on his two cell phones. One of the calls is from Kevin McKenna, a veteran McCain operative who's busy with several workmen's comp cases, and the next one is from Eugene Rearborne of Taunton, the factory worker we visited last week who said that he would turn over his Isuzu Trooper later that day after consulting with his lawyer. In the meantime, Rearborne's father-in-law has grown ill and died, his lawyer has gone out of town, and the car has disappeared again. Rearborne himself has been incommunicado for a while but is now responding to messages left with his employer.

“You're fucking up my job,” he says. “Don't call me at work.”

“I'm not fucking up your job, you are,” says Mark. “If the sheriffs show up with an injunction that's really gonna fuck things up. I didn't default on the bank loan— you did. I'm just trying to schedule the car for pickup.”

Rearborne hangs up, and Donahue pitches the tiny plastic phone into the file folders, banana peels, and court orders piled around my ankles. “His main objective every day is to hide that car,” says Mark.

The phone rings again and I go rummaging for it, look at the caller's name on the tiny screen and hand the phone to Mark: “Rearborne again.”

Calmer this time, Eugene Rearborne admits that he removed the battery and hid the car behind his house to “protect it.” Apparently his lawyer has abandoned the case and he wants to give the car up now. “Please don't let it go to the sheriff,” he says.

Mark tells Rearborne to put the battery back in the car, get it started, and drive it two blocks to the parking lot at Stop & Shop and he'll send the wrecker for it. “The neighbors won't have to see,” he says.

A couple of minutes later, Ray calls from the bank to tell us that Essex County sheriffs found Denny Dexteris's welding truck hidden in a grove of trees behind his uncle's house in Rowley, Mass. When Mark had visited Dexteris's stepfather the first time, the Rowley harbormaster said that his twenty-nine-year-old stepson had gone to sea in a tugboat, and not to venture into those particular woods because of the dogs. Mark didn't go there but in the end, the sheriff did and found some Doberman pinschers and the truck.

Soon we are passing over the expanse of Battleship Cove into north Fall River. Once filled with more than one hundred textile mills employing thirty thousand immigrants from around the world, “the Spindle City” never really crawled out of the Great Depression back in the twenties and thirties. Earthmovers and cranes are pushing great mounds of frozen dirt beneath the pilings of the bridge and puffs of steam are floating into the vast blue sky above the city. The traffic lights run in our favor and we glide past the tiny used car lots, tenements, and beauty shops, the B's Nest Liquor Store and several Portuguese markets. But dominating every aspect of the landscape from this vantage point is the battleship Massachusetts, tied up at the bridge, painted with “53” in large white numerals and bristling with guns.

Nicknamed Big Mamie, the Massachusetts was launched in 1941 just up the coast in Quincy, Mass., the heaviest ship ever built in the yard. She participated in the invasion of the Marshall Islands in '44 and helped bombard Iwo Jima and Okinawa. The Massachusetts fired the last sixteen-inch projectile of World War II, and in the early sixties was saved from the scrap yard by its remaining crew members. It has been a historic landmark since 1965. But seeing it docked by the highway— large, gray, and incongruous— gives me a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach.

Against this backdrop, we're searching for a woman named Martha Pacquin and her Kia Spectra, no color or year listed on the application. She lives at 593 Sunrise Hill, and an obliging postman directs us past Coney Island Hot Dogs to the grim-looking row houses of the Sunrise Hill projects. Each section is a squat brick building resembling a military barracks, the complex arranged over the expanse of a bald ridge overlooking the river and a large, foul-smelling industrial plant on the other bank. Standing on an empty stretch of lowland, the factory is medieval and sinister, throwing huge plumes of smoke into the air.

Donahue parks the car just as Ray calls again from the bank and I get out and go looking for Number 593. There's very little snow here and the bare earth is strewn with condom wrappers and lumps of frozen dog shit. A clothesline rattles in the wind and a young man with buzzed hair and a dozen piercings in his face walks past on the sidewalk. Unit 593 is located beside a Fall River police outstation, and I whistle to Mark and raise my arm. The car we're looking for is nowhere in sight.

At first the noise of the wind blocks out everything else, but as I wait for Donahue to catch up, I tune in the various sounds coming from the apartments. A loud television dominates in many of them, but I can also make out a man and a woman arguing in Number 592 and a drunken voice singing in Spanish in the apartment next door. Right in front of me, I can hear a woman talking to herself or to someone on the phone.

Mark knocks on the door to Number 593 and the woman answers the door. “Are you Martha Pacquin?” he asks.

The occupant of Number 593 is a rail-thin female of indeterminate age, with a tattered mop of long brown hair. A pointy nose and dark circles under her eyes give her the look of an anemic raccoon. “I'm Martha's roommate, Sandra Dionne,” the woman says. She's lost in the beer company sweatshirt she's wearing and carries a small, hairy dog under her right arm. “What's this about?”

“Where's Martha?”

“Martha ain't here,” says Dionne with her small, ugly, mobile mouth. “She's at work.”

Donahue raises himself to the top step. “Where does Martha work?”

“Over in New Bedford,” says Dionne. “She's a metal finisher.”

“Really? What's the name of the place?”

“I don't know,” Dionne says. “So, what's this about?”

Donahue explains the terms and conditions of Martha Pacquin's bank loan. Sandy Dionne replies that Martha gives her cash and she deposits it in her account and mails a check for $224.92 to the bank every month. “I just faxed everything over to them, every check, every stub, everything about the car,” says Dionne, pronouncing it “cawh,” a New Yorker. “Just yesterday I faxed it all over. I got it all upstairs. Everything. You wanna see it?”

The apartment is poorly lit and smells of dog. When Dionne, despite Mark's remonstrance, slips away to produce some document or other, there's just the shaggy-haired mutt pressing his nose against the screen. But Mark keeps his foot against the bottom of the door so the mutt can't escape.

“It's just a little Pekingese or something,” I tell him.

“There's another one in there,” says Mark.

Dionne reappears with a small white envelope in her hand. “Oh, I got a Rottweiler— she's trained,” she says, turning to flip the envelope onto the counter. “If you live down here, you gotta have a Rott or a gun.”

“What kind of gun you have?” asks Donahue, joking with her.

“I ain't got no gun. I got my baby here,” Dionne says, laughing. She bends to scratch the ears of the Rottweiler, who's an indistinct shape from where I'm standing. “Right, baby? You protect us.”

There's a certain ragged charm to Sandy Dionne's monologue as she runs out the length and breadth of the effort that she has expended to keep Martha Pacquin rolling down the road to her job in New Bedford. “I got the checks, the money order stubs, the stamped envelopes, and the files,” she says. “The files I have, you wouldn't believe.”

Mark speed-dials Ray at the bank and explains the situation. Ray wants to talk to Sandra and Mark hands over the phone. “That's impossible. That's bullshit,” says Dionne. “I paid it and I got the stub to prove it . . . last week. . . . I make out all the envelopes. . . . I already faxed it to you, all of it. . . . Don't I fuckin' know it. . . . You wanna hear a secret? Listen.”

She hangs up on Ray. “That's what I call it— a secret,” she says with a nasty laugh. “I don't have to listen to that bullshit for another minute.”

The long-suffering Ray calls back and Donahue answers and takes a little walk into the quad, picking his way around the frozen turds and flat, yellowish disks of used condoms. Dionne hoists up her own cell phone and dials Martha Pacquin at work and gets her voice mail. “She don't turn on her phone when she's working,” Dionne says to me. “Martha, this is Sandy. There's two gentlemen here wanna tawk to you about your cawh. Call me back.”

Sandy clicks the phone shut and gropes around on the counter behind her and produces the envelope, which she presses against the screen. “Lookit. I got one right here,” she says, beckoning me up to the top step. It's a self-addressed envelope, made out to the bank in shaky blue script. “I send the checks in these every month.”

The envelope doesn't even have a stamp, but it makes for good theater. Mark walks back over and gives me the eye; we're leaving.

“Tell Martha that the bank wants the car,” he says. “Forget about the money— she's nine hundred sixty-eight dollars in arrears.”

Dionne shakes her head. “I'll tell her.”

We move off down the sidewalk, and I turn back for a moment. “Martha's car, is it the green one?” I ask Dionne.

“It's cranberry,” she says. “I ain't gonna lie to you.”

We're about twenty feet apart, looking at each other through the screen. “You from Staten Island?” I ask. “You sound like you're from New York.”

“Manhattan, born and bred,” says Sandra. She throws out her arms. “And now I'm living here.”

We get in the car and drive up the hill. Offstage throughout this dark little comedy is Martha Pacquin, who's just the sort of person Joe McCain would have taken pity on. She's at some metal-finishing plant over in New Bedford, struggling for her wages. At the end of each day she comes home to the stench of dogs and the blare of a television and with Sandra Dionne concocts whatever schemes are necessary to make it through the week. No doubt her days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle, and will come to their end without hope.

“Ray says he got their fax, all right,” Mark tells me. “All the checks— but just the fronts. Know why? The backs are stamped ‘insufficient funds.'”

Donahue turns left onto South Main Street. “You're learning, Coach,” he says. “You got the color of the vehicle out of her. But you didn't see the knife, did you?”

“What knife?”

We pass the oxidized spires of St. Anne's Church, and then the square, brick buildings occupied by the Dominican Sisters of Hope. “She had a paring knife in her left hand the entire time,” Mark says. “With about a three-inch blade. Always watch the hands, Coach. The bad guys are gonna hurt you with their hands.”

When I think of being called to the top step to look at that envelope I get that same queasy feeling I had when I saw the battleship Massachusetts. My midsection was right against the screen and if she had felt like it, Sandra Dionne could have stabbed me through the liver.

“What do you think?” Mark asks. “Will she leave the car out?”

I make no reply, but my guess is that the malevolent forces arrayed against Martha Pacquin will grind her down to some tortured end and she'll finish up on top of the hill at St. Anne's Church. Under the best of circumstances she'll be wearing a clean set of clothes amidst the incense and gladiolus, and a nice woman from the choir will sing “Ave Maria,” with burial to follow in Notre Dame Cemetery.