The girl said, “I didn’t know her,” but the two guys did, and they shared the photo kit, and both shook their heads. “It looks a little like her, but the hair’s wrong, and this woman is skinnier than Frances. She had a little heft to her. Not fat, but she wasn’t this small.”

The hat guy looked over the back of the booth and said, “Hey, Darrell, look at this.”

In a couple of minutes, a half- dozen Goths had checked the photo kit, and asked why he didn’t have a regular photograph, and then one of them said, “This isn’t Frances. This is the fairy Goth. I heard you guys were looking for her.”

Lucas nodded. “The fairy Goth. You sure?"

"Yeah. I saw her,” the guy said. “In this picture she looks a little like Frances, but she doesn’t look like her in real life. She’s smaller and skinnier and darker.”

“You know both of them.” He shook his head. “I don’t know the fairy, I just saw her one night

I didn’t know anybody was looking for her until tonight.” He glanced at the bartender. “Jerry told me. Anyway, they are definitely different people.”

“Well, shoot,” Lucas said. But he’d known that. Frances Austin was dead. He spent a couple of minutes taking down names. Then, an odd event. A dark- haired man, with a funny fuzzy mustache, in sunglasses and a leather jacket, stepped through the back door and looked directly at Lucas, held his eyes until he saw Lucas look up at him, held them for another beat, then backed out through the door.

Wanted to talk privately? Lucas said, “Excuse me,” and went after him. The alley behind the building, where Dick Ford had been killed, was illuminated by a single electric lamp above the A1 door, and by a streetlight down at the end of the alley. The mustachioed man was down there, at the end of the alley, looking at the door when Lucas came through, and behind him a slender dark- haired woman who darted out of sight. Lucas took a step that way, aware of the litter and the Coke can to his left, the uneven brick surface, and then the man made a gesture with his right hand, and everything seemed to go sideways.

In the first millisecond, Lucas continued with the step he was halfway into; in the second millisecond he recognized the gesture; and in the third millisecond he may have thought, Gun… and his hand started moving toward the pistol on his hip. Then the man opened fire, white sparkles and firecracker bangs and Lucas caught the closing steel door with his hand and lurched back behind it, feeling pain in his left leg, and he sagged against the wall, fumbling his pistol out.

He was hurt and bleeding, he thought, and he peeked, heard people shouting in the club, and he saw the man running out of the alley. There was something wrong with him, fire in his leg, but Lucas lurched that way, and he thought about getting hit in the groin and all the arteries down there and he followed his pistol down the alley, limping, hopping, hurting, then he was at the corner and he heard a car accelerating hard, around the corner, a half- block away, out of sight, and then he thought, Hope it didn’t hit me in the balls hope it didn’t hit me in the balls…

And the pain came in a wave. He lurched back to the bar and the crowd growing around the door, waving his pistol with one hand, and he groaned, “I got shot,” and he sat down in the alley just outside the door, under the light, and people were shouting about ambulances and cops, and one of the Goth women said, “I’m a nurse, let me look at it,” and she and one of the Goth guys got his jeans down and they looked at his bloody thigh.

“No artery,” she said, looking up at him. “You’re bleeding. We’ve got to get you to the hospital, but it’s not pumping, it’s not pumping, it’s through- and- through.” She shouted over her shoulder, “Ask Jerry if he’s got a first- aid kit.” And to Lucas: “We gotta get some pressure on it. Get some pressure on it.”

Jerry shouted, “Cops are on the way, ambulance on the way.” The cops were there in one minute: a red- faced blond and his black partner, who looked down and said, “Holy shit, Davenport, man, what happened?”

“Motherfucker mustache guy shot me,” Lucas said. The Goth nurse was pressing an antique gauze pad, from a thirty-year-old first-aid kit, against the hole in his thigh. “I’m working the Austin case, ahhh… and the Dick Ford case, with Harry Anson,” Lucas told the cop. The leg was on fire, was burning up. He grunted to the nurse, “Goddamn, that hurts. That hurts.” And to the cop again, “Call Anson. Guy ambushed me. Middle height, black hair, mustache, black leather jacket, had a car parked around the corner. Might have a limp. Jesus, that hurts.”

The ambulance was there a minute later and they put him on a gurney and ran him out, and the EMT started running down his list, asking about aspirin and street drugs and heart medications, and Lucas answered and then got his cell phone out and the EMT said, “You can’t use that here,” and Lucas said, “Bullshit. I’m gonna call my wife before anybody else does.”

He did and it was confusing, but she was coming. Because his mind was still operating in some cold not- quite- shocked mode, he made one more call, almost fumbling the phone as he worked down through his call list. But he got it, finally, and Alyssa Austin answered the phone. He hung up without saying anything: but Austin was at home. If the woman he saw running away was the fairy, and it could have been, then Austin was not her.

The ambulance made a swooping move and one of the EMTs said something he didn’t understand, and then the doors were popping open: the hospital. He’d been there before, rolling down a hallway looking up at the passing lights, talking to the docs in their scrubs. One of the docs said, “Sir, you understand me? Sir? It’s more than a couple of stitches, you’ve got a hole there and I’m going to have to clean it out? Do you understand that, sir?”

They were pulling his pants off as they talked and Lucas asked, “What’d it hit?”

“Your leg; I’m going to have to clean it out, okay? We have your permission to clean it out?”

“Yeah, yeah, go ahead."

"Do you take a heart aspirin or Plavix or Coumadin, any drugs that you think might affect…” Some time passed; he didn’t know exactly how much, and then he was moving again. He was out of his clothing and there was something cold and wet on his leg and belly and nurses were pushing and pulling on him, transferring him to an operating table, and a masked man looked down at him and then he went away for a while…

Weather was sitting white- faced in a chair next to the bed when he came back. He was in a recovery room, and she must’ve gotten in on her physician’s ID. He groaned, “Ah, man,” and she stood up clutching a purse to her chest and she began to weep and said, “Oh, God you scared me, goddamn, you scared me…”

Lucas said, “I’m gonna kill that motherfucker.”