“Okay, so this Abby chick—I’m sorry, ‘young woman’—she’s got a sledgehammer right cross! But I showed her a trick or two. She said my stance was a bit off and I’m dropping my shoulder. Jesus! She even said I danced like an old, arthritic lady! I get pissed, try to pop her with a lead-left combo, and before I know what the hell’s going on, she’s hammered me twice in the solar plexus! I’m bouncin’ off the ropes, and she says, ‘You always get mad this easy?’ Listen, Octavio, can I go again?”

“You’ve got a membership, Tomás,” I told him. “Go whenever you want.”

One visitor I had not counted on was Detective Captain Leo Cowling.

“Hard man to track down,” Cowling said, taking a chair and crossing his legs. “Any reason for that?”

Outside my room a uniformed patrolman stood sentry.

“Stalkers on Tinder,” I said.

“Them the ones put your mummy-wrapped ass in here?”

“No,” I said. “Yo momma did that. She likes it rough.”

Cowling proceeded to tell me why I was lucky to have been lying busted in a hospital bed for the past four days:

Seems four young professionals had been celebrating the year-end holiday season a bit too much at an office party. After their bellies were full of free jumbo shrimp, craft beer and shots of peppermint schnapps, they had decided to take selfies wearing furry red-and-white Santa hats in front of Robert Graham’s Joe Louis fist sculpture on Jefferson Avenue. The large white box with a bright red bow on top of the fist was begging for a selfie!

As the drunk revelers struck a variety of poses in front of Joe Louis’s giant bronze fist, the box managed to fall and land with a thud in front of the drunk professionals.

Detroit City Council President Lincoln Quinn’s severed head, bagged in plastic, rolled out.

“Only reason you ain’t in shackles cooling your heels in an eight-by-eight right now,” Cowling said, “is because yo buddy at the coroner’s office said the decapitation couldn’t have happened more than forty-eight hours ago. You been here four days. Leastwise that’s what these hospital folk say. Am I gonna have to roast me some nurse ass to get to solid bottom?”

“Contributions to the DR’s emergency pediatrics unit and their homeless-vet outreach program buy me a lot of goodwill, Leo,” I said. “So far it hasn’t bought me any souls. Their records are true.”

“Save for the fact you ain’t no homeless vet sleeping under no overpass.”

“There but for the grace of God,” I said. “Have you talked to Jackie Ochoa?”

“In the wind,” Cowling said. “Checked out of the Westin three days ago. Card wouldn’t go through so she paid cash.”

“That’s a lot of cash,” I said. “CCTV pick up who put Quinn’s head on the fist?”