At least, that is, until the end of the first boring week of surveilling, when he drove past my tree-shrouded spot on Clark Avenue near Porter. He slowed down enough to toss two lovingly wrapped fried-egg-and-bologna-on-toasted-challah sandwiches out of his passenger side window and onto the hood of my car before driving off to a parking space near Authentico Foods.

I called him around midnight. “Thanks for the sandwiches.”

“Don’t think I ain’t still mad at you for taking Ducane’s word over mine, tu pequeña mierda,” Tomás said.

“You don’t get over things easily, do you?” I said.

He disconnected.

For the next thirty minutes, the only activity I observed was a young couple steaming up the windows and testing the shocks of a rusted blue Chevy Impala. Tatina and I had done the car thing once in the middle of a Norwegian winter just outside St. Hanshaugen Park. She has a MINI Cooper. I got a two-day charley horse, and my back was out for a week. Still, I think I performed admirably.

I was about to call it a night when a DPD patrol car, lights flashing, raced west the I-96 on Vernor Highway.

Then another whipped past.

My stomach muscles clenched, and a chill shot through me.

I followed.

Both patrol cars were stopped at angles on Vernor in front of Authentico Foods.

I got out of my car just in time to see one of the blues kneeling by the prone body of a man.

Tomás.

“This is eight delta eight! Officer Hennesey!” the cop shouted into his shoulder walkie. He cradled Tomás’s head. “I need an ambulance at—Jesus! Where the fuck is this?”

“Eight seven nine one five West Vernor Highway!” his partner shouted.

I took a knee by Tomás.

He’d been shot twice, an ugly wound in the shoulder, the other in his side near his hip. His blood steamed as it pooled on the cold concrete sidewalk.

The back of his head was bloody.

“One white male—”

“He’s Mexican-American,” I said absently.

“Who the hell are you?” the cop cradling Tomás’s head shouted at me.

“I’m his friend, goddammit!”

“You do this?”

“No.”

Tomás’s breathing was shallow.

“Sir,” the cop’s partner said, his hand resting on the grip of his holstered weapon, “I need you to back off—”

“He’s my godfather!”

“I’m not asking.”

An eternally long four minutes: I thought about losing my parents. Losing friends in Afghanistan. The possibility of losing my godfather on what was nothing more than a fool’s errand. The recoil of every gun and every bullet I’d ever sent, every bomb’s shock wave that had rippled through my body, every drop of blood seeping into sand. I thought about Elena and the fallacy of a widow’s forgiveness. All as I watched Tomás lying on a cold street, dying.