The appearance of me and Rink sent a few of them fleeing back to the relative safety of their homes, but there were others who were a little bolder. They thought we were cops and they felt they had a right to harangue us for not being there to serve and protect when they needed us most.

A fat man, his large belly protruding beneath the line of his T-shirt like a cow’s udder came at me and he was just about frothing at the mouth. “You don’t care about us. You don’t care!”

Right then and there he was right: I stiff-armed him out of my way and he went down on his backside. There was a collective shout of anger. Someone shouted something about police brutality. People began to wheel around us and for a moment I thought they were going to attack us like a pack of hyenas.

“Where the fuck did he go?” Rink roared at the top of his lungs.

The pack was shredded by his anger, some of them actually taking off at a run as though Rink was about to blast them to death with the gun he waved.

“The man who killed these people . . .” I waved at the two on the ground. “Where did he go? Someone must have seen something?”

From beyond the group of neighbors I heard a high-pitched whistle. Looking over their heads I saw a young black boy on a cycle. He was pointing his finger in stabbing motions to an intersection further along. I knocked Rink’s elbow and we shoved through the crowd toward the boy.

The boy wheeled ahead of us, all the way to the corner, where he skidded to a halt using his feet as brakes.

“Up there,” he said. “See the burned-down house? He ran in there.”

I nodded thanks at him.

“You see him, shoot him,” the boy ordered. “He shouldn’t have shot that poor dog.”

Under any other circumstances I’d have found the boy’s statement absurd, but not this time. He had no love for the men Rickard had shot; in fact plenty of people would be secretly pleased that someone had done away with those blighting their neighborhood with narcotics.

Rink was slightly ahead of me, but as he approached the burned-down house he came to a halt and covered as I moved forward. I went by him, took up a covering position and then Rink moved ahead again. It was a one-two maneuver we sometimes called pepper-potting back in our military days, and the technique hadn’t left us.

We had to approach with caution. We knew that Rickard was armed and extremely dangerous, but more than that, he held a superior position. If we both entered the grounds at the same time, he could take us down with one burst of gunfire. This way, one of us would still get a chance to kill him if he got the other.