Nodding, Rod added, “She’s got a brother, too. Six or seven years old. He’s a good kid. Interested in machinery.”

Dewey ran a hand through his shaggy white hair. “I ask for a partner and I get a family. Okay . . . I’m probably crazy, but—bring ’em along. We’ll see how it works out.”

“Thanks! Thanks an awful lot!”

“Good night. Get some sleep,” Dewey said. He started to turn away, then he looked back at Ron. “You’re really sure now?”

“About Sylvia?”

“About our partnership. You’ll come back? You won’t disappoint an old man?”

“I’ll come back,” Ron said firmly. “Don’t worry.”

Ron stayed with Dewey all the next day. Toward evening, the Muslims’ trucks started to pull out of the market area. They were loaded with food and supplies. A smudge of smoke rose toward the south, somewhere downtown of the market area, in the direction of the Gramercy turf.

“Trouble,” said Dewey. “One of the white gangs must have had a run-in with the Muslims.”

The trouble never reached the market area, and the day ended quietly. Dewey insisted that Ron stay with him another night. Ron easily agreed. The old man’s food was too good to miss. And sleeping on a real bed again was like being in heaven.

The following morning Ron started for the Gramercy turf. He passed the burned-out section. Buildings were black with smoke. Windows, doors, roofs all gone so that the daylight sifted through the still-smoldering insides of the buildings.

White warriors were patrolling the streets here and there. Either they knew Ron from his earlier trips to the market through their turf, or they didn’t care who he was as long as his skin was white.

Turning a corner, Ron saw a handful of kids sitting quietly on the front steps of an old brown stone house. One of them had the stump of a broken knife tucked in his belt. He couldn’t have been older than Davey. The children were watching the unmoving body of a boy, about twelve years old, that lay under a swarm of flies in the gutter. The corpse lay face up, chest crumpled and brown with dried blood. His eyes were open and his mouth was twisted as if he had been screaming when he died.

Ron felt his teeth clench. The local gang ought to clean up after themselves better than that, he grumbled silently. Those kids are scared half to death. Then he thought of his own retching reaction to the first corpse he had seen, back in the truck on that first raid into Chelsea turf. It seemed like a thousand years ago. Ron realized he had changed, hardened. He wasn’t certain he liked it.

The Gramercy area looked deserted when Ron got there. There was no damage, no sign that fighting had come this far downtown. But there was no one on the streets, either. Everything looked dead and emptier than usual. As he climbed the steps inside their home building, Ron wondered where everyone had gone. There was no one in the halls. No kids playing. Nobody around anywhere.