McGowan understands. She even almost applauds it. Only, in this case…

“No fucking way.”

Those pictures are burning a hole in her jacket pocket, straight through her phone. They’re filling that pocket with the impossible shapes a face could become if enough pressure is applied.

Bare hands.

“No way.”

She instinctively looks to the bare hands of Samhattan’s worst as they jaywalk without looking either way, as they smoke who-knows-what on apartment stoops, as they clasp hands and look over their shoulders and have no idea the unmarked car riding slow is the very thing they’re hoping to avoid. But Carla McGowan doesn’t have time for the petty right now. It’s that goddamn team photo, is what it is, taken from the wall in Tammy Jones’s bedroom. That’s got her worried in a way she hasn’t been worried for some time.

Hastiness.

She can smell it. It’s not upon her yet, no, but it’s come to Samhattan.

And with it: cold, fast concern. Hurry worry. She better find out who did this right now, or something like it is going to happen again.

To another member of the team.

She thinks of the most recent book she bought at Third-and-Fourth Eye. Your Mind, Your Land suggested thinking of your mind as a dry-erase board. How no thought is permanent and therefore no thought is ultimately destructive. There’s a long passage where the author equates anxiety with an unwanted houseguest and how it’s okay, even prudent, to ask certain guests to leave.

McGowan tries to wipe her mind clean, to cancel the party before the guests arrive.

Up ahead, Chuck Larson lumbers up the street in his Samhattan blue. Chuck’s the oldest cop on the Samhattan beat. The poor man has been up and down Fifth Street for some thirty years and probably should have retired half that ago. But she thinks he must get something good out of it. And she knows him well enough to look past the set jaw and cold-eyed mask he wears as he patrols. Most of the locals probably see through it too. The Samhattan Police put Larson here for the exact reason one would guess: with so much shit going down on Fifth Street, you’ve got to at least pretend to be doing something about it. Whether Larson actually is, that’s another matter. McGowan believes he means well. He’s single. And probably has nowhere else to be. Hell, she’s the same way.

“Yo, Chuck,” she says, pulling up to the curb. The old-timer carries his club like he’s patrolling 1940s Chicago. His faux toughness softens as he looks over his shoulder and sees who it is.

“Carla McGowan,” Chuck says. “I’ve always loved your name. It dances with itself.”

He steps to the passenger window and bends at the waist. Chuck is a tall man. Easily six-foot-four. Carla thinks of Tammy Jones and the size of the bare hands that could have done that to her. The word “pumpkin” comes to mind. Like when Carla left her pumpkin on her porch all the way into February and the pulpy, rotting remains froze in the form of a battered face for weeks.