They’ll probably find a partial print on the stem, so I had to tell them. Most cops don’t give a shit about something like that. Hurley knows that Givens is a crackhead.

“I should take you to the hospital. We can talk more there.”

“It’s a good hospital? I don’t want to get my left hand or shoulder fucked up for a lifetime.”

“Inova Fairfax. It’s one of the best.”

“I know that hospital. Appreciate it.”

I drop the ice pack in the back of the ambulance. I don’t want to carry it through the crowd.

We get to his unmarked cruiser.

I notice a couple of news vans, cameras on tripods on the sidewalk. Pointed at me again.

“Is this related to the homicide at your house, Mr. Marr?” one reporter asks, a little too loud.

I don’t answer.

“I’ll sit in back with you,” Campos tells me.

I see how it is now.

His partner is already in the driver’s seat. Older guy, clean-cut, wearing a tucked-in polo shirt with an embroidered badge on it.

Campos opens the rear door for me. I scoot in.

He walks behind the car to the other side, where he sits in the back behind his partner.

“My weapon?” I remember to ask.

“The Glock nineteen on the floor in the room?”

“Yeah.”

“We’ll take care of it. Everything clears we’ll give it back, but it’ll be a few days.”

“Robert Givens’s belongings, too. I told him I’d secure them for him.”

“We got it,” Campos advises me.

I slide in the backseat with a few grunts when my shoulder hits the back of the seat.

“That’s my partner, Gibbs,” he tells me.

“Avoid the potholes if you can,” I say.

“This is Old Town, man. We don’t have potholes,” Gibbs says.

“So you said you don’t know this big boy Wyatt, but you’ve seen him before?”

“Yes. He works the door for a nightclub on Connecticut Avenue. I forget the name. Millhoff or Hurley can fill you in.”

“What were you doing at the nightclub?”

“Having a drink, like most of the other customers. Listen, I don’t know that man at all, and he didn’t belong in that room. Did he have a key?”

“Why?” Campos asks.

“Because you should ask Detective Millhoff if the stabbing victim in DC, who was Biddy’s—I mean Givens’s uncle, had a motel key on him. I’m pretty sure he’ll say he didn’t.”

“We’ll do that. And who is Biddy?”

“That’s Givens’s alias, what I like to call him. But listen, more than likely this guy was there to do the same to Biddy but found me instead.”

“So let me get this straight,” Campos begins. “You’re working the homicide-burglary that occurred at your house?”

“Which I have every right to do.”