Yuki and I both whooped, our shouts of laughter nearly drowning out Keiko’s protestation that “no man want a woman with a gun.”

I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand as we stopped and waited for the light to change.

“I do have a boyfriend,” I said.

“Doesn’t she though,” Yuki said, nearly bursting into a song about my beau. “Joe is a very handsome Italian guy. Like Dad. And he’s got a big-deal government job. Homeland Security.”

“He make you laugh?” Keiko asked, pointedly ignoring Joe’s credentials.

“Uh-huh. Sometimes we laugh ourselves into fits.”

“He treat you nice?”

“He treats me sooooo nice,” I said with a grin.

Keiko nodded approvingly. “I know that smile,” she said. “You find a man with a slow hands.”

Again Yuki and I burst into hoots of laughter, and from the sparkle in Keiko’s eyes, I could tell that she was enjoying her role as Mama Interrogator.

“When you get a ring from this Joe?”

That’s when I blushed. Keiko had nailed it with a well-manicured finger. Joe lived in Washington, DC. I didn’t. Couldn’t. I didn’t know where our relationship was going.

“We’re not at the ring stage yet,” I told her.

“You love this Joe?”

“Big-time,” I confessed.

“He love you?”

Yuki’s mom was looking up at me with amusement, when her features froze as if she’d turned to stone. Her lively eyes glazed over, rolled back, and her knees gave way.

I reached out to grab her, but I was too late.

Keiko dropped to the pavement with a moan that made my heart buck. I couldn’t believe what had happened, and I couldn’t understand it. Had Keiko suffered a stroke?

Yuki screamed, then crouched beside her mother, slapping her cheeks, crying out, “Mommy, Mommy, wake up.”

“Yuki, let me in there for a second. Keiko. Keiko, can you hear me?”

My heart was thudding hard as I placed my fingers to Keiko’s carotid artery, tracked her pulse against the second hand of my watch.

She was breathing, but her pulse was so weak, I could barely feel it.

I grabbed the Nextel at my waist and called Dispatch.

“Lieutenant Boxer, badge number twenty-seven twenty-one,” I barked into the phone. “Get an EMS unit to Maiden Lane and Grant. Make it now!”

Chapter 4

SAN FRANCISCO MUNICIPAL HOSPITAL is huge—like a city in itself. Once a public hospital, it had been privatized a few years back, but it still took more than its share of indigents and overflow from other hospitals, treating in excess of a hundred thousand patients a year.

At that moment, Keiko Castellano was inside one of the curtained stalls that ringed the perimeter of the vast, frantic emergency room.

As I sat beside Yuki in the waiting room, I could feel her terror and fear for her mother’s life.

And I flashed on the last time I’d been inside an emergency room. I remembered the doctors’ ghostlike hands touching my body, the loud throbbing of my heart, and wondering if I was going to get out alive.