“Rebecca Moreno. You haven’t busted Heriberto because you were in love with her and you’re afraid that if Heriberto goes down, so will Sam.” He made a pssh noise and went back to staring out the window. “Were you selling, too?” The question seemed ludicrous, even to me, but it had to be asked. “Were you helping? Was the hit-and-run maybe just a drug deal gone bad?”

“Of course not,” he said, dropping his empty cup into the cup holder in the center console. The scent of coffee wafted up to my nose and made me salivate. I needed a cigarette, bad. “I wasn’t selling anything. And I was never in love with her, Nikki.”

“You were just, what? Getting revenge?”

“At first, yeah. It was about the fact that she was Leon’s sister. But after a little while, it just didn’t feel right to use her like that. We were more like . . .”

“Friends with bennies. Charming.” Although, after how I’d treated my relationship with Jones, I supposed I couldn’t get too uppity about it.

“Big sister, little brother,” he corrected. “She worried about me. She knew the things the gang was trying to have done to me. She tipped me off, over and over again, and I managed to stay alive somehow, and I started to realize how stupid it all was. People dying all the time, and what for? She got me out of that world, Nikki. She is the reason I’m a cop today. I haven’t even talked to her since I moved out of the neighborhood. But I’ve seen her around. I knew about Sam. I still cared, and sometimes the best way to care about somebody is not busting them when you really want to bust someone bigger than them.”

“So that’s what you were doing? Waiting to bust the big guy? And it never occurred to you that the big guy could also be the one who ran you over?” The Angry Elephant logo appeared on my right—orange, lunch-meat pink—and I pulled into the lot.

“I think I was buying,” he said as I parked the car.

“You were what?”

“I think I was buying. I have little pieces of memories, and in them, I’m buying. From Sam. From some other boys.”

I shook my head. “No way. I don’t believe it. It’s wrong. It’s a wrong memory.”

He opened his door and got out. “You don’t have to believe it for it to be true.” I got out, too, and he eyed me over the roof of the car. “I wasn’t taking them, Nikki. Or selling them. I was putting them somewhere. I just can’t remember where. Or why.”