I pulled my gun, inched inside, checking each doorway with my eyes and gun in tandem. The house had that certain stillness that only comes when nothing living remains inside, but I’d been fooled by that stillness before, and I have a rewired jaw to prove it.

It took me ten minutes of laborious, stiff-necked searching to decide the place actually was empty. By this time, my skin was covered in sweat, my back ached, and the muscles in my hands and arms felt about as pliable as Sheetrock.

I let the gun hang loosely from my hand as I went more casually through the apartment, rechecking the rooms, looking at things in more detail. Nothing jumped from the bedroom and danced in front of me with a neon sign overhead that said CLUE!!! Not in the bathroom either. Kitchen and living room were equally uncooperative. All I knew was that someone had been looking for something and delicacy had not been a primary concern. Nothing that was breakable was unbroken, nothing slitable unslit.

I stepped into the corridor and heard a sound to my right. I spun and stared down the fat barrel at Jerome. He crouched, hands in front of his face. “Ho! Ho! Ho, ho, ho, ho! Don’t fucking shoot!”

“Jesus,” I said, a hard wave of exhausted relief curling over my razor-blade adrenaline.

“God damn!” Jerome straightened up, brushed at his tank top for some reason, smoothed the cuffs of his shorts. “The fuck you carrying that thing for? I ain’t seen no elephants ‘round here since I don’t know when.”

I shrugged. “What’re you doing up here?”

“Hey, I live in this neighborhood, white bread. Seems to me, you the one needs the excuse. And put that fucking thing away.”

I slid the gun back into my holster. “What happened here, Jerome?”

“You got me,” Jerome said, walking inside, looking at the mess like he’d seen it a hundred times before. “Old Jenna ain’t been around in over a week. This was done over the weekend.” He guessed my next question. “And no, man, no one saw anything.”

“I’m not surprised,” I said.

“Oh, like people in your neighborhood, they just up and volunteer information to the police all the time too, I bet.”

I smiled. “Not on their best days.”

“Uh-huh.” He looked at the mess again. “This got to be about Roland. Got to be.”

“Who’s Roland?”

He chuckled at that one, looked at me. “Yeah, right.” “No, I’m serious. Who’s Roland?”

He turned and walked out. “Go home, white bread.”

I followed him down the stairs. “Who’s Roland, Jerome?”

He shook his head the whole way down to the bottom floor. When he reached the porch, where his friends had reassembled on the steps, he jerked his thumb behind him at me as I came through the doorway. “He asking who Roland is.”

His friends laughed. I had to be the funniest white man they’d seen in days.

Most of them stood up as I came out on the porch. The girl said, “You want to know who Roland is?”