“What’d you do to get a police commander so annoyed with you, Pepperpot?” Morrell asked.

“Nothing he won’t get over in another decade or two.” I leaned against him and shut my eyes.

“He thinks Cookie here got him shot four years ago,” Mr. Contreras put in, “when it was his own darn fault for not listening to her to begin with. Good thing, if you ask me, ’cause it made him-”

“It’s never a good thing to get shot.” I couldn’t bear to hear Mr. Contreras celebrate Conrad’s and my breakup, especially not in front of Morrell. “And maybe I should have had that bullet instead of him. Anyway, Marcena will charm him out of his bad mood.”

“Probably will,” my Job’s comforter agreed. “She’s perky enough for a whole squad of cheerleaders.”

Morrell laughed. “She’s a prizewinning journalist-I don’t think she’d appreciate being compared to a cheerleader.”

“But she is full of zip,” I murmured, “and she knows how to home in on everyone’s wavelength.”

“Except yours,” Morrell said.

“But I’m a pepperpot, not a cheerleader.”

He pulled me closer. “I like pepper better than cheers, okay?”

“Yeah, but, cookie, you could learn something from her,” Mr. Contreras said, his brown eyes full of concern. “Look how she got Conrad Rawlings eating out of her hand, after he’d been threatening you.”

I stiffened but didn’t say anything; the old man had been so supportive all day it would be mean to turn on him, and, anyway, it would just prove his point. I looked up to see Morrell grinning at me, as if reading my mind. I punched him in the ribs, but settled back against his shoulder.

Finally, after fidgeting around the living room for several minutes, my neighbor announced he was taking the dogs out. “You two ain’t fit for anything but sleep right now,” he said, then turned brick red at the innuendo.

“Don’t worry; sleep is all I’m fit for.” I thanked him for all his help during the day. “Especially the spaghetti-a real corpse reviver.”

“Clara’s old meatball recipe,” he beamed.

It took another ten minutes for him to finish his strictures on Conrad, his advice for my recovery, his promise to intercept Marcena so she wouldn’t wake us when she came back.

“That’s right,” I said. “You two figure out a strategy for the Arlington track that’ll set you up for the rest of your life. Morrell and I will design a strategy for healing our torn-up bodies.”

We did pretty well sleep the clock around, at least in shifts. I got up briefly to talk to Marcena, who came up the stairs, despite Mr. Contreras’s efforts to hold her at bay, so she could fetch Morrell. Morrell hobbled out in his jeans to say he’d stay with me until I could drive him home myself.

Marcena lingered in the doorway to report on the super time she’d had with Conrad; he’d promised her a ride-along next week to round out her picture of the South Side-she’d get a Kevlar vest and everything, just like being back in Kosovo.

I felt as though my skin might ignite from the force of the energy she was putting out, or maybe from my jealousy. “You able to tell him anything useful out of your nocturnal junkets?”

She grinned. “My eyes haven’t been scanning the streets that closely, Vic, but I did want to thank you for not ratting out Bron to him-if word gets back to By-Smart about him having me in his truck, it could cost him his job.”

I felt a sudden jolt: I couldn’t believe I had forgotten about April Czernin so completely. “When did you last talk to Bron? Since yesterday? Does he know about April?”

“Oh, his daughter, right, Morrell told me. He can’t take personal calls on his cell phone: it belongs to the company, and they monitor every call he makes and gets, so I didn’t try to reach him. Anyway, he was headed for home, so I’m sure his wife told him.”

“You didn’t try to reach him yourself?” I couldn’t keep the scorn out of my voice. “Even when you found out his kid was close to dying?”

“I don’t think it would have been helpful for him to hear it fourth-hand from the hospital via you to Morrell to me. Or for his wife to talk to me if I reached her.” She sounded disdainful, like the headmistress annoyed with the poor work of an unpromising student, but at least she’d stopped bubbling over like the La Brea tar pits.

“No wonder Sandra Czernin thinks my name is mud down there. I’m the person who introduced him to the woman he’s been seeing the sights with.”

I shut the door on her, but had to open it a second later-Peppy and Mitch had followed Marcena upstairs, and while Mitch, like every other male I knew, was clinging to Marcena, Peppy wanted to be let in with me. I glared at Mitch’s retreating tail and stumped over to the phone.

Once again I got Sandra’s stilted voice on her answering machine; I figured she, at least, was at the hospital-who knew where Bron was. I left a message, explaining that I’d been hit in the explosion at Fly the Flag, and asking Sandra to call me with news about April.

I was still groggy from anesthesia and my long day with Conrad, but Morrell said he’d slept enough for the time being. He settled himself on the couch with Peppy and his new laptop. He was working on the book he’d been researching when he got shot. His original laptop had been stolen while he lay bleeding on a mud track in Afghanistan; he’d backed up most of his files onto a portable key, but there was material he was trying to reconstruct, notes he’d been taking shortly before he was hit that he hadn’t had time to organize or copy.

I went back to bed but slept fitfully, the pain in my shoulder jerking me awake whenever I turned in my sleep. At one-thirty, I woke to an empty bed; Morrell was still working. I got out two of my mother’s red Venetian glasses and poured Armagnac for us. Morrell thanked me, but didn’t look up long from his screen-his reconstruction had him totally absorbed. While he wrote, I watched William Powell and Myrna Loy dash around San Francisco, solving crimes with their faithful terrier, Asta.

“Myrna Loy solved crimes in evening gowns and high heels; maybe that’s my problem-I spend too much time in blue jeans and sneakers.”

Morrell smiled at me absently. “You’d look wonderful in one of those old forties dresses, Vic, but you’d probably trip a lot chasing people down alleys.”

“And Asta,” I went on. “How come Mitch and Peppy don’t cleverly retrieve clues as people hurl them in through the windows?”

“You shouldn’t encourage them,” he murmured, frowning over his computer.

I finished my Armagnac and went back to bed. When I woke again, it was nine and Morrell was sleeping soundly next to me. He’d flung his left arm clear of the bedclothes, and I sat for a while, looking at the jagged raw scar along his shoulder where one of the bullets had gone in. Conrad had scars like that, older, less angry, one underneath his rib cage, one in his abdomen. I used to look at those while he slept, too.

I got up abruptly, staggering slightly as the pain hit me, but made it to the bathroom without falling. Disregarding the young surgeon’s instructions, I stood under a hot shower, protecting the wound by wrapping a dry-cleaning bag over my shoulder. Come to think of it, I’d have my own jagged little scar, discreetly concealed on my back. A dainty, ladylike scar, the kind that Myrna Loy could have sported and still looked sexy in her backless gowns.

Peppy tapped after me while I struggled into a bra and a blouse. I let her out the back door before trying to make my breakfast. I had planned to go to the store this morning. No bread. No fruit, not even an old apple. No yogurt. A little milk that smelled as if it should have been drunk yesterday. I poured it down the sink, and made myself a cup of stove-top espresso, which I drank out on the back porch, hugging my arms against the thin gray air, eating some rye crackers to keep my stomach company.