He looked down at his jacket. It was liberally splashed by the dead man’s blood. So much for not getting messy. Rickard shrugged out of the jacket, took it over to a sanitary disposal bin and shoved it through the flip lid. He wiped his blade and his hands on a perfumed tissue, which he flushed down a toilet. He walked out of the room nonchalantly, making his way toward the exit. Behind him a woman got up and headed for the restroom. In seconds the screaming would start.

He tossed dollars on the table as he passed, didn’t want a cashier chasing him into the parking lot. Then he was out the door and walking quickly away from the diner.

He heard a wail, not from someone discovering the dead guy, but the distant sound of emergency sirens. Across town something major was happening. Good, he thought, a diversion while he got away from here and took up the chase for Alisha.

He found his car and clambered inside, started the engine. About to pull into the street, he had to wait while a squad car rocketed by with its lights flashing, the cop lying heavily on the siren to clear a way through the traffic.

It looked like all available response vehicles were heading downtown.

On a whim, he followed.

His apartment was in the same vicinity that all the police cars were converging on. Alisha could wait for now; he wanted to know what was happening.

He wasn’t fully sure how he felt when he arrived at the scene.

It was still a couple blocks short of where his apartment was, but if his instincts were correct, this latest emergency was tied to him, only in a way that he couldn’t quite fathom at first.

Parking outside the cordon of police cars he watched in fascination as the officers jostled for covering positions behind their cars, circling the front of a diner similar to the one he’d just left. It was obvious that a gunfight had recently taken place, judging by the pockmarks in the front window of the diner, and the people scrambling outside and collapsing on the street in shock and dismay.

The glare of the morning sun made seeing through the diner’s windows impossible. The sounds of the gun battle had stopped and now only the faint cries of the injured could be heard. Distantly he caught the strident calls of other responding police cruisers. Or maybe they were ambulances for the injured. Should get out of here, he thought. But curiosity held him in place.

His decision to wait and see what transpired rewarded him within seconds. Three men walked outside, showing empty hands. Between them they dragged a fourth man who was unconscious or dead, whom they threw down at the feet of the police.