When I got home, I tried calling Ben, but he didn’t pick up. I needed to apologize, to clean up the mess. I found Jung in my apartment with Barb. She was in the kitchen making pancakes and bacon, a Santa Claus apron over her shorts and T-shirt. She smiled when she saw me, but the smile quickly died when she really took me in.

“What happened to you? Why do I smell tires?”

Jung popped up from a stool, an anxious look on his face. Thankfully, he was not naked. “What happened? Did you get him?” He sniffed. “It’s smoke. You smell like smoke.”

I snagged a couple slices of bacon from a plate, turned around, and headed for the shower. “Long story. Shower first.”

“I’ll make you a stack,” Barb said.

I gave her a thumbs-up. I was out of sorts, done in and running against odds. I’d lost my only witness, though Stella Symonds likely wouldn’t have made it to Spada’s trial, anyway. And he was out there. Somewhere. What was his next move going to be? I was confident he couldn’t get to Jung, at least not easily, and there was no way he’d try and kill anyone else, not with the police looking closely at him now. What other option did he have other than to run? I tried calling Ben again from my bedroom, still no picking up. What was I going to do to fix this?

I stood in the shower, water raining down, washing away the soot and dirt and smoke. How selfish of me to think I’d been the only one affected by the shooting. I’d taken a bullet, taken a life, but Ben had been there right beside me. He saw me go down and there wasn’t a thing he could have done about it. Did he think what happened was his fault, his miss? We’d never really talked about it. I didn’t, so he didn’t. I figured we both had shoved it down, moved on. Maybe he hadn’t? Hell, maybe I hadn’t. Was that why he couldn’t stick with a new partner? Is that why I charged ahead thinking, without him, I was the only one I could rely on? I lathered up and rinsed a half-dozen times before I could no longer smell the chop shop. What a couple of messed-up people we were, Ben and me. Fear crawled around in the bottom of my stomach, not for Spada, but for what the future held for the two of us. Dressed, I stood in the center of my bedroom until I found my equilibrium, then padded to the kitchen for pancakes.