She smiled then, a nice soft one, and touched her hand to my face. She said, “I think we’re going to turn out all right, Kenzie. Maybe the two of us get some justice while we’re at it.” The word “justice” came off her tongue as if she were trying to taste it.

I said, “We’ll see, Jenna.”

She reached into her purse and handed me a manila envelope. I opened it and extracted an eight-by-eleven black-and-white photograph. It was slightly grainy, as if it had been transferred from another type of film, but it was clear. There were two men in the photograph, standing by a cheap chest and mirror, drinks in their hands. One of them was black, the other, white. The black guy I didn’t know. The white guy was wearing a pair of boxer shorts and black socks. His hair was brown, the gray that would consume it in a tin sheath, still a few years off. He was smiling tiredly, and the picture seemed old enough that possibly he’d only been Congressman Paulson at that point.

I said, “Who’s the black guy?”

She looked at me and I could tell she was sizing me up. The wet ass hour, as it were, deciding if she could trust me. I felt like we were in a pocket the crowds of people hurrying past us, not really there but existing on a matte screen behind us, like in an old movie.

Jenna said, “What’re you in this for?”

I was considering my answer when something familiar moved out of the screen to our right, heading for our pocket, and I recognized it as if I was underwater a blue baseball cap with yellow stitching.

I said, “Get down,” and had my hand on Jenna’s shoulder when Blue Cap set himself into his stance and a hammering metallic chatter drilled the morning air. The first burst of bullets slammed through the front of Jenna’s chest as if it wasn’t there, and I ducked as they blew past my head, still trying to pull her down as her chest jerked forward at all sorts of angles. Blue Cap had his finger pulled back on the trigger and the gun at full auto, the metal stitching slicing from Jenna’s body to the cement, coming around in an arc for me. The crowd in the mall had turned into a stampede, and as I cleared my gun from its holster, someone trampled my ankle. Jenna’s body crashed down on top of mine, and cement chips shot off the ground into my face. He was firing more methodically now, trying to get around Jenna’s body to hit mine. In a moment, he’d just begin firing into her body again, and the bullets would pass through it as if it were paper and punch their way into mine.

Through the blood in my eyes, I could see him raising the Uzi up over his head, then bending it in at an angle, the muzzle a white flame. The line of bullets jackhammered toward my forehead and stopped suddenly in a white cloud of cement dust. The slim clip dropped from the gun toward the pavement and he had another one slammed home before it hit the ground. He pulled back on the bolt and I leaned out from under Jenna’s body and fired.