So I walked out of the doughnut shop and headed in the direction of Brentwood’s. I decided to leave the Virtue in the parking lot. Pulling up behind Lawrence’s Buick might attract unwanted attention on the street. There was a hint of autumn chill in the air, and I pulled my shoulders up, as if that would somehow keep me warm.

I came around the corner onto Garvin, half a block down from the men’s shop, and looked for Lawrence’s aging Buick with the brand-new rear window, not that a brand-new window was something that stood out. A quick scan of both sides of Garvin turned up nothing. The street was lined with several parked cars, but there was almost no traffic, and there was a slight drizzle starting to come down. Within a couple of minutes the street was damp and shiny.

As I walked up the street, nearly to Brentwood’s, I tried to think of other scenarios that could have delayed Lawrence. What if he wasn’t planning to come at all? What if there’d been some arrest in the case, just in the last couple of hours, and Lawrence had gotten a call about it from his contacts in the police, so there was no point in staking out Brentwood’s tonight?

Just then, a massive black SUV appeared at the top of the block. Its headlights, resting high atop the huge grill, cast a wide beam down the street.

“Jesus,” I whispered.

I sidled up against an unlit storefront, beneath an awning, as the SUV began to move slowly down the street. Then, inching along, I rolled myself around a corner and found myself in a three-foot-wide alley directly across the street from Brentwood’s. The SUV glided past, as if moving through a tall, narrow frame. I poked my head out, watched as it went up the street, turned right at the next corner, and disappeared.

I got out my cell and tried Lawrence’s cell again. Even before he’d finished his short message, I was shouting, but in a whispering kind of way, into my phone: “Man, you gotta get here! It’s going down! The bad guys are here! They’ve just gone by once and I think they’re coming around again! I’m in an alley right across the street! Where the hell are you?”

I hit the button to end my call. Even in the cool night air, I felt myself breaking into a sweat.

The cops, I thought, maybe I should call the cops. Get them out here fast, because I had a feeling, I just had a feeling that the next time these guys came around in that Annihilator they’d—

I heard the roar of the engine for only a second, then a huge crash. The sound of shattering glass and crumbling brick and twisting metal.