After a massive bout of second-guessing, he was finally able to convince himself he had done a reasonable job eliminating the compromise from the gunfight. He’d done the obvious thing, anyway: he dumped his vehicle before returning to his safe house. He hated to do it; he needed a car, but the Ford Escort was compromised, and that made it useless to him. Even though he knew it had not been picked up on a camera at the market itself, after the shoot-out he was certain the police would begin looking at area traffic cam footage. In no time they would identify a gray Escort driving out of the area, and the time stamp on the video would match the distance from the crime scene and then the cops would draw the obvious conclusion that the driver of the Escort had been involved.

He didn’t dare drive the car back to his storage unit to hide it, because he knew anyone monitoring traffic camera feeds could simply follow the Escort’s route from where it was first seen all the way to the neighborhood around the storage facility. This would compromise the location, just as the car itself had been compromised. Instead, Court had driven the Ford to the east, obeying the speed limit and stopping at the necessary red lights, and then he parked the car in a dark lot on the edge of Howard University. He struggled to climb a rickety fence and then he dropped down on the other side. Once here, he was able to move out of the streetlights through residential backyards for a block.

When he stepped back out onto the street he wore a different cap, no raincoat, and a brown oversize thermal shirt; his backpack was under his clothing and hanging on the front of his body, giving him the look of an overweight man.

Twenty minutes later he sat on a bus alongside immigrant restaurant or factory workers either beginning or ending their workdays, and just before dawn he walked back up Arthur Mayberry’s driveway with his keys in one hand and his backpack in the other. As he headed to his basement apartment, he glanced up into the windows of the two-story brick home and nodded a greeting to the elderly African American, who stood there watching from the second floor.

Arthur just eyed him suspiciously. He did not return the greeting.

As soon as he entered his place Court reset his defensive measures and then he went straight to the closet behind the door, lay down on his blanket, and rested his head on his go bag. His sticky bandages needed changing but he wasn’t in the mood to play Florence Nightingale on himself this morning. He told himself when he woke up he’d clean up his wound, but it could wait a few hours more.