“I’m working a serial killing, down south of here on Cookacre,” he said, “heard the call and stopped by. Good thing or your black ass’d be on its way to county about now.”

The lump in my pocket grew warmer, even though it was physically impossible. When I didn’t answer, he kept up the rhetoric to cover the uncomfortable silence.

“This case is a bad one. You’ve seen it in the news. I know you have. All the good citizens are staying indoors because of this guy. After dark, they’re afraid to come out from under their beds.”

Robby didn’t wait for me to answer. He knew I had heard of this suspect. Like he said, everyone had.

“The dude tosses a coffee can of gas on the victim, holds up a lit lighter, and says, ‘gimme all your money.’ The victim complies, and the suspect lights his ass up anyway. Then he stands by and watches. Just stands there, cheering like it’s Saturday night at the fights.

“There have been three so far, and we don’t have a clue. The victims are too random. Wish you were still on it with me. We’d tear this town apart until someone told us. Right now they’re all too scared to give up the dude. Who could blame them? What a way to go, huh?”

In the twenty years working for the Sheriff’s Department I’d seen my share of burnt people, charred people, an image sewn into all your senses, the reek, the stark fear forever frozen in the victim’s eyes.

We made it over to the police line. The short, dumpy Mr. Cho elbowed his way through the crowd and pointed a stubby little finger at me. “You fired. You hear me, you fired.”

Robby gripped my arm tighter, spoke to me out of the corner of his mouth, “Sorry about that, man.”

“Don’t be. I was looking for a job when I found this one.” I had to make it look like I didn’t care, even though I did. I had a parole agent who insisted the members on his caseload remained gainfully employed. Worse, I didn’t know how Marie was going to take it. I needed the job for the kids.

We rode in silence in the undercover cop car. Neither of us wanted to talk about the stolen couple years that had slipped by. Largely unnoticed by him, I was sure. My hands and knees and eye throbbed with enough pain to keep the past embarrassment at bay. He took Roscrans west then Willowbrook up to 120th and over to Wilmington and up to Martin Luther King Hospital. The people in the area serviced by the hospital called it “Killer King.”

I basked in some relief. I’d been wrong about the surveillance. They had been staked out looking for this torch. I hoped with all my heart that’s what it was and that they weren’t there for me, watching me in order to find the kids I had stashed. Now I could see Marie without the worry of pulling her into what I had going on.

Robby stopped. Blood had pooled in the lap of my apron. I got out, flopped it out on the ground in a wet little splash, and closed the door. He rolled down the window. “Don’t be a stranger, huh?”

I turned and waved over my shoulder, more interested in seeing my Marie than to dredge up hot, angry memories with the likes of him.

Inside the packed emergency room sat a sorry lot of humanity, the sort in every ghetto across the US. Folks on the lower socioeconomic scale, who drank on Saturday nights to forget their hunger, folks in a dead-end life with nothing to look forward to and who picked up a knife, a club, or brick and took it out on their neighbor.

I checked in with the overworked receptionist then wedged myself into the only seat available, an unwanted half-seat next to a big mama who had one child clinging to her breast and a second on her lap, cute well-fed children who looked like they might have a touch of the flu.

An hour later when a seat with a view of the ER room door vacated, I jumped over to it. Thirty minutes after that I got a glimpse inside of a harried Marie who did a double take when she saw me. The ER door closed on automatic hydraulics as she approached, blocking her from view. It opened again. She cautiously ventured out, looked around, afraid the cops were about to jump her.

All because of me.

I had come into her life and fed her an idea, sold her some fantastical plan. I used her love for me to seal the deal. She’d agreed for only one reason, to help save the children. Guilt in the pit of my stomach overrode pain in my lacerated hands. She asked with her eyes if it was all right to contact me. I nodded and stood. We hadn’t seen each other in going on two weeks. A long, lonely two weeks that now made my heart ache just to see her.

A hot-blooded Puerto Rican fifteen years my junior, put her right about thirty-three. Five four and a little too lithe, she was feisty and not afraid to speak her mind, in rapid-fire English, heavily accented with Spanish.

She rushed out with a big smile. Until she saw the blood, the chewed-up hands, the eye all but welded shut with purple. Her face melted into sympathy that enlarged a lump, made it rise in my throat, and choke me. I didn’t deserve a woman like her, not after all I’d done in my previous life, not with what I had in the works and was now too afraid to tell her. She knew some of it, but not all. And she had already warned me if I held anything back, we would be “kaput.”

She hugged me and kissed the uninjured side of my face. “Come on.” She tugged me toward the ER door, hesitated, looked around, said in a low tone. “You sure it’s … it’s okay?”

“Yeah, I was all wrong about who was watching. It wasn’t me they wanted. The kids are safe. It was just the Boulevard, Long Beach Boulevard. A two-eleven team was staked out for a hood pullin’ robberies. They gunned him tonight, right out in front of my store. Shot him dead. There was nothing I could do, Marie. Just a kid.”

I tried hard but couldn’t stop the tears as they welled in my eyes and burned in trails down my cheeks. I had degenerated to nothing more than a tired, shot-out, overemotional old man.

“Aw, babe, come on in here and let me get you cleaned up.”

She guided me past the long queue in the hallway behind the ER doors, folks in chairs and on gurneys, who had waited hours in the waiting room and now waited their turn to see the overworked doctors in another line on the inside, their angry eyes blazing a path right through me for the unfair favoritism. We went on past all the curtained-off beds and into an empty trauma room with a hard door, that when closed gave us privacy. My Marie was a physician’s assistant and went right to preparing the tray to suture my hands.

She looked behind us one more time, even though the door was closed. I’d done that, made her paranoid to the point of distraction. I wasn’t any good for her. If I kept it up, before too long she’d need tranquilizers and a good shrink.

“You sure it’s okay now?” Her eyes big and brown yearned for a positive answer.

“Relax, okay.” Her paranoia turned contagious. And maybe I wasn’t so sure. Maybe they had been set up outside the store watching me, and the kid they gunned was nothing more than collateral damage, words from the BMF—a bonus.

She sighed. All the tension left her shoulders, and the muscles in her face, tense for the last two weeks, finally relaxed. In the next instant, her Puerto Rican blood flared. She pulled back and socked me in the stomach.

Not too hard.

“Then what the hell you doin’ gettin’ hurt like this?”

I didn’t have the nerve to tell her and make things worse. Tell her that I was going to court day after tomorrow, on Monday. In reality, it was already early Sunday morning. I’d be in court in a few short hours. I used to face down armed and dangerous suspects who would not hesitate to drop the hammer on me, and yet I didn’t have the guts to tell her.

To top it off, if she knew what I had in my pocket, well, she’d be done with me for sure. No questions asked. I wouldn’t blame her one bit. Not one damn bit.