Having known my godfather for as long as I had, I knew buying collectible stamps wasn’t the singular and true objective of his solo outing.

Once Elena and her Prius had scooted off, I retrieved my car keys from the house and made my way to the shed out back.

“Hello, gorgeous,” I said, laying eyes on my beautiful ’68 Olds 442. “Miss me?” I apologized for smelling like environmentally conscientious electric-car betrayal and fired up the four-hundred-cubic-inch Rocket V8 engine. Three hundred ninety steel stallions ready to stampede . . .

Unfortunately for my 442, the ride was a relatively quick one that didn’t involve flexing her steel-and-iron V8 muscles. About five minutes away from Markham Street and east across the hellacious expanse of I-75 was an abandoned one-story post office. Loosely draped across the boarded-up windows was a banner: coming soon! salon marita—hair, mani-pedi, day spa! Apparently, Marita’s financing had fallen through; the banner, faded by summer sun and shredded by winter winds, had been hanging there for the past three years.

I parked in the rubble-strewn back lot, got out and took a spectator’s seat on a stack of crumbling bricks.

“You got a minute?” I said.

Tomás had a young man backed up against the building, one fist in the air. The punk’s face was already bloodied.

“Yeah,” Tomás said. “What’s up?”

Another man was on his knees and moaning, his head lolling on his thick neck as he slobbered blood and saliva into his cupped hands, which held what I assumed were several of his teeth. A third man, skinny and wearing a pair of the worst Chinese knockoff Air Jordan basketball shoes I’d ever seen, was crawling toward a discarded 9mm handgun. I quietly bet myself that he wouldn’t make it.

“You hear anything about Vic Bronson using an intermediary to buy Authentico Foods?” I asked.

Tomás jackhammered his fist into the young man’s face.

Nighty-noodles, punk.

“Yeah,” Tomás said, turning to kick the kneeling man in his missing teeth. “Don’t smell quite right.”

“If it was Bronson, it would be all over the news,” I said. “‘Sextant Properties Group Buys Mexicantown Block, Rolls Out Two-Year Development Plan.’”

Tomás pointed to the man within arm’s reach of the gun. “And when were you gonna tell me about this?”

I smiled and said, “Smart money’s always on you, mi amigo.”

“Thanks for your fucking support, pendejo.”

Tomás delivered a kick to the man’s ribs that could have launched him from Ford Field’s forty-two-yard line cleanly through the goalposts. The man was now in the fetal position, weeping and soiling himself. Tomás picked up the 9mm, ratcheted a bullet out of the chamber, let the magazine fall to the ground, then hammered the grip on a stack of cinder blocks until it was no more.

“So, I take it you have a dispute with these gentlemen?” I said.