One thing I had learned while working with Chris was that it was so easy to fool people into giving you information you shouldn’t have. And once I found out he was discharged, it wasn’t hard to follow him from his apartment to physical therapy.

You don’t just go charging into someone’s workout session when it’s been three months since you last saw him. Instead, I found his car in the parking lot and sat on the hood, holding a manila envelope in my lap, my feet crossed at the ankles and rhythmically thumping against the bumper.

He’d parked under a cottonwood tree, and I enjoyed the shade, along with an intermittent breeze that blew the smoke out of my clothes. Summer was on its way out. My peers had long since packed and headed off to freshman orientation at whatever schools they’d chosen. They were stuffing their valuables into plastic tubs and vying for bathroom space in their dorm rooms and doing icebreaker exercises on campus quads.

And I was wasting time, waiting for my recently attacked unofficial-as-hell partner in justice to hobble out of the hospital and talk me down off the ledge . . . again.

After what seemed like forever, I finally saw his form making its way to me. He was walking with a cane now—how ironic, I thought, given that this whole ordeal had started with a cane—his limp pronounced, but his gait quick. He paused when he saw me, raised his hand to shade his eyes, then continued his journey.

“Hey,” I said, when he got close enough to hear. Like it was nothing to run into each other here after all this time.

“You’re sitting on my car.”

I glanced down. “You’re right. I’m so sorry. I’d hate to do something to take away the aesthetics of your bullet holes there.”

He stared at me, his face giving away nothing. I hated this. Normally, he would have a smart-ass comment to throw right back at me. This new and unimproved Martinez was so serious.

“Fine,” I said, sliding off the car. I took a few steps toward him, holding out the manila envelope. “I just wanted to let you know that I can’t do it. I thought I could, but I was wrong. I can’t. Sorry. I know you’ll be disappointed, but I’ve gotta look out for numero uno, you know? And numero uno is not interested after all.”

At first he just stared at the envelope, looking from it to me and back again. Then he reached out slowly and pulled it out of my hand. “What is this?”