“Coming,” I hissed. “He’s coming / oh god / got to move / where? / away / coming? / on foot / jesus jesus jesus / listen / oh god oh jesus jesus / listen we have to…”

Too late. Janus uncurled and crawled up on to our feet. “No, wait,” I gasped, but he was already staggering out through the broken door, and for a second I saw a shape move by the containers, dark beneath the dull street light, then a forklift truck, disguised as a nine-millimetre bullet, slammed into my left leg, spun me against the door frame and dropped me back down on to the cabin floor from whence I came.

Janus screamed, and screamed, and kept on screaming, even as I scrambled back into the shelter of the cabin, pressing my hand against the growing shock, the growing cold, the growing mess that had been my thigh, and breathed in

until Janus screamed again

and breathed out, which he seemed to find easier, and it occurred to me that this was it, dead in a cabin in the Port of Miami, gunned down by a stranger in a stranger’s body, and that all things considered, give or take a variation of geography and time, this was probably how it was always going to have been. How it always had to end.

Then the door opened at the other end of the cabin.

A flashlight swung into my face. Janus’ jolt as he tried to flee sent puke into my mouth. The flashlight came towards us, and behind the light was a security guard, from his peaked black hat to the revolver on his hip, his face open in an expression of shock and concern, and as he knelt down beside me he said, “What the hell…”

Janus moved

faster than me. He caught the guard by the wrist

and was gone.

The security guard fell back on to his buttocks, a toddler learning to walk. Then full control kicked in: his eyes went from me to the door directly in front of us, and at once he fumbled at his side for his revolver, drawing it and locking it in place with a two-handed grip, the barrel fixed on the rectangle of light through which our assailant should walk. I lay beneath him, gasping for breath, the shock of my shattered limb beginning now to assert itself in strong, clean waves of physical pain, even as the blood slowed in my brain and I blinked scarlet tears from my eyes.

We waited, eyes on the door, Janus on one knee, torch beam and barrel pointing towards the exit.

Silence, and the hot slow passage of blood between my clenched fingertips.

“Where is he?” Janus whispered, for himself, not me. “Where is he?”

“Two doors,” I wheezed, and at once Janus snapped round to face the other door, through which the security guard had come. The bouncing of the phone on its cord had subsided, so had the voice on the other end of the line. “Cops are coming,” I added. “Help me.”

Janus turned again, gun swinging from one door to another. “Where is he?” he breathed. “Where is he?”

“Help me!”

His eyes flickered down to me, then away again.

“I’m sorry, Carla,” got to his feet, “I’m sorry,” gun held in front, “I’m so sorry,” and elbows bent, Janus turned and ran.

I lay in a body

whose I do not know

in a shed God knew where

and didn’t want to die.

My uniform was white, all the better for showing up the blood. I imagined that at some stage I’d taken a great deal of pride in the uniform. I’d pressed it, steamed it, made sure the crease down the trousers was just so. Perhaps, as I drove the boat

because I was a captain

I’d reflected on ancient seafaring days when I’d guided tankers into port, or sailed through the twenty-foot waves of the Atlantic, or dressed as the god Poseidon for the young novices as they crossed the equator or the dateline or, on those rare occasions when fortune was fair and navigation liberal, both at once, whooping my way across the centre of the world.

That would have been when I was young, but who knew? Maybe I’d been the captain of a tourist barge my whole life, chugging through the bay. Maybe I’d lied on my CV. Maybe no one would remember my name, whatever that turned out to be. Maybe I was the last person left alive who loved the body I was going to die in.

I tried getting up.

Getting up wasn’t happening.

I tried crawling for the door.

Crawling was within my repertoire, rolled out, snake-like on to my side, kicking with one good leg and pulling with my hands.

I thought I heard sirens, then thought I had imagined it.

A policeman’s body would be ideal.

A policeman’s body would come with a policeman’s gun.

I crawled to the door through which Janus had fled, and peered through it at a sodium-soaked car park adorned with no cover save for one disregarded black van and one overflowing grey dustbin.

Somewhere out on the water a ship blared its horn, proud and lonely in the night. I crawled back across the floor to the still-dangling telephone. The police operator had given up, and the line hung silent, whining like a hurt child. I braced my back against the wall and pushed myself up high enough to get a blood-smeared finger into the top drawer of a desk, yanking it out on to the floor beside me. The owner, damn him to a lingering demise, kept neat papers, business cards and a photograph of his smiling wife and daughter inside. Not a stapler, pair of scissors or sawn-off shotgun in sight.

The next drawer offered up a more promising arsenal of paper clips, sticky notes, pencils, pencil sharpener and a mug proclaiming WE ARE THE BEST in heavy black letters around the side. I smashed the mug against the floor, fumbled through the pieces for one large enough to sit in the palm of my hand, sharp enough to draw blood, wrapped my fingers around it, my hand beneath my body, and lay down on my side, knees tucked in, head down. The doctors call it the recovery position, though all that was recovered was that warm sense of comfort you possessed when, as a child, you curled up by your mother’s side and had not a care in the world.

If I survived this, I told myself, I would be a child again, if only for a few hours, and feel the warmth of unconditional love that forgave all sins.

A siren shrilled in the distance. It sounded too slow, too low, no urgency to it, no audible Doppler effect, and so I gripped my ceramic shard tighter and told myself that I was alone, always had been, and that was nothing new.

A footstep on concrete, taking its time.

Climbing the steps, a slightly different tone of concrete, hollow, ringing with bass. A footstep on carpet, the sound of breath. The hand that held the gun had no need to pull the safety off, that had already happened, but I fancied I could smell the cordite, taste the metal.

The breath above me moved.

Closer.

Denim crunched, haunched, hunched. A man squatted down, his elbows swinging out above his knees, wrists loose, hair white, gun in hand, and smiled at me, and he was

Will.

He was old now, not merely older. His skin was layered on top of itself like folds of cotton, his hair gone to reveal the irregularities of his skull, dotted with yellow. His hands were moulting, his eyes were grey with gum, but he was still William who loved the Dodgers when he was young, and Joe when he was old, and had dreamed of living for ever and becoming someone else.

Which, in a sense, he was.

I looked, and must have lost a little breath for my chest felt tighter, and he smiled, and though it was Will’s lips that parted, it wasn’t Will’s smile that settled there, but someone else’s, a Will who as a child had pulled the wings off flies, a Will who as a young man had been banished from his home and who had not, perhaps, in a single moment of change, chosen to share his body with a stranger for three weeks in California but had taken some other path, to some other person.

Not-Will, smiling still, looked my body up and down, taking in my face, my clothes, my shattered and bleeding leg. He reached out with his left hand and brushed my cheek, a lover’s touch, felt the half-growth of beard across my chin, loosely tugged at my hair, scrutinising its colour. His hand drifted down, my neck, my chest, my thigh, and came to rest just above the gunshot wound in my leg, suspended an inch in the air.