"You can take some soup with you," she tells Marino. "There is plenty. Very healthy. No fat."

"If it don't got fat, it's against my religion. I'm gonna head out." He avoids looking at me.

"Where is Lucy?" Anna helps me off with my coat, and I struggle to pull the sleeve over the cast, and then am dismayed to realize I still have my old lab coat on. "You have no autographs on it," she says to me, because no one has signed my plaster and no one ever will. Anna has an arid, elitist sense of humor. She can be very funny without so much as a hint of a smile, and if one is not attentive and quick-witted, he will completely miss the joke.

"Yeur joint ain't nice enough so she's at the Jefferson," Marino ironically comments.

Anna goes inside the hall closet to hang up my coat. My nervous energy is dissipating fast. Depression tightens its grip on my chest and increases pressure around my heart. Marino continues to pretend I don't exist.

"Of course, she can stay here. She is always welcome and I would very much like to see her," Anna says to me. Her German accent has not softened over the decades. She still talks in square meals, going to awkward angles to get a thought from her brain to her tongue and rarely using contractions. I have always believed she prefers German and speaks English because she has no choice.

Through the open doorway I watch Marino leave. "Why did you move here, Anna?" Now I am talking in non se-quiturs.

"Here? You mean this house?" She studies me.

"Richmond. Why Richmond?"

"That is easy. Love." She says this flatly with no trace of feeling one way or another about it.

The temperature has dropped as the night deepens, and Marino's big, booted feet crunch through crusty snow.

"What love?" I ask her.

"A person who proved to be a waste of time."

Marino kicks the running board to knock snow loose before climbing inside his throbbing track, engine rumbling like the bowels of a great ship, exhaust rushing out. He senses I am looking and puts on a bigger act of pretending he is unaware or doesn't care as he pulls his door shut and shoves his behemoth into gear. Snow spits out from huge tires as he drives off. Anna shuts the front door while I stand before it, lost in a vortex of spiraling thoughts and feelings.

"We must get you settled," she says to me, touching my arm and motioning for me to follow her.

I come to. "He's angry with me."

"If he were not angry about something_or rude_I would think he is ill."

"He's angry at me because I almost got murdered." I sound very tired. "Everybody's angry with me."

"You are exhausted." She pauses in the entrance hallway to hear what I have to say.

"I'm supposed to apologize because someone tried to kill me?" The protests tumble out. "I asked for it? I did something wrong? So I opened my door. I wasn't perfect, but I'm here, aren't I? I'm alive, aren't I? We're all alive and well, aren't we? Why is everybody angry with me?"

"Everybody isn't," Anna replies.

"Why is it my fault?"

"Do you think it is your fault?" She studies me with an expression that can only be described as radiological. Anna sees

right through to my bones.

"Of course not," I reply. "I know it's not my fault." She deadbolts the door, then sets the alarm and takes me into the kitchen. I try to remember the last time I ate or what day of the week it is. Then it glimmers. Saturday. I have already asked that several times now. Twenty hours have passed since I almost died. The table is set for two, and a large pot of soup simmers on the stove. I smell baking bread and am suddenly nauseous and starved at the same time, and despite all this, a detail registers. If Anna was expecting Lucy, why isn't the table set for three?

"When will Lucy go back to Miami?" Anna seems to read my thoughts as she lifts the lid off the pot and stirs with a long wooden spoon. "What would you like? Scotch?"

"A strong one."

She pulls the cork out of a bottle of Glenmorangie Sherry Wood Finish single malt whisky and pours its precious rosy essence over ice in cut crystal tumblers.

"I don't know when Lucy will go back. Have no idea, really." I begin to fill in the blanks for her. "ATF was involved in a takedown in Miami that turned bad, very bad. There was a shooting. Lucy…"

"Yes, yes, Kay, I know that part." Anna hands me my drink. She can sound impatient even when she is very calm. "It was all over the news. And I called you. Remember? We talked about Lucy."

"Oh, that's right," I mutter.

Anna takes the chair across from me, elbows on the table, leaning into our conversation. She is an amazingly intense, fit woman, tall and firm, a Leni Riefenstahl enlightened beyond her time and undaunted by the years. Her blue warm-up suit turns her eyes the same startling shade of cornflowers, and her silver hair is pulled back in a neat pony tail held by a black velvet band. I don't know for a fact that she had a face-lift or any other cosmetic work, but I suspect modern medicine has something to do with the way she looks. Anna could easily pass for a woman in her fifties.

"I assume Lucy came to stay with you while the incident is investigated," she comments, "I can only imagine the red tape."

The takedown had gone about as badly as one could. Lucy killed two members of an international gun smuggling cartel that we now believe is connected to Chandonne's crime family. She inadvertently wounded Jo, a DBA agent who at the time was her lover. Red tape is not the word for it.

"But I'm not sure you know the part about Jo," I tell Anna. "Her HIDTA partner."

"I do not know what HIDTA is."

"High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area. A squad made up of different law enforcement agencies working violent crimes. ATF, DBA, FBI, Miami-Dade," I tell her. "When the takedown went to hell two weeks ago, Jo got shot in the leg. It turned out the bullet was fired from Lucy's own gun."

Anna listens, sipping Scotch.

"So Lucy accidentally shot Jo, and then, of course, what comes out next is their personal relationship," I continue. "Which has been very strained. I don't know what's going on with them now, to tell you the truth. But Lucy is here. I guess she'll stay through the holidays, and then who knows?"

"I did not know she and Janet had broken up," Anna observes.

"Quite a while ago."

"I am very sorry." She is sincerely bothered by the news. "I liked Janet very much."

It has been a long time since Janet was a topic of conversation. Lucy never says a word about her. I realize I miss Janet very much and still think she was a very stabilizing, mature influence on my niece. If I am honest, I really don't like Jo. I am not sure why. Maybe, I consider as I reach for my drink, it is simply because she isn't Janet.

"And Jo's in Richmond?" Anna digs for more of the story.

"Ironically, she's from here, even though that's not how she and Lucy ended up together. They met in Miami through work. Jo will be recovering for a while, staying in Richmond with her parents, I guess. Don't ask me how that's going to work. They're fundamentalist Christians and not exactly sup-portive of their daughter's lifestyle."

"Lucy never picks anything easy," Anna says, and she is right. "Shootings and more shootings. What is it with her and shooting people? Thank goodness she did not kill again."

The weight in my chest presses down harder. My blood seems to have turned into a heavy metal.

"What is it with her and killing?" Anna pushes. "What happened this time worries me. If what I've heard on TV is to be believed."

"I haven't turned on the TV. I don't know what they're saying." I sip my drink and think about cigarettes again. I have quit so many times in my life.

"She almost killed him, that Frenchman, Jean-Baptiste Chandonne. She had the gun pointed at him but you stopped her." Anna's eyes bore through my skull, probing for secrets. "You tell me."