After four minutes another patrol car and an emergency medical transport came to a stop in front of Authentico Foods. I crowded the EMTs as they belted Tomás to the gurney and loaded him into the ambulance.

“How’s he doing?” I asked.

“No fucking clue,” an EMT said as she strapped an oxygen mask over Tomás’s nose and mouth. “If I had to guess, not very good. Who the hell are you?”

“His—friend.”

“Looks like maybe you should take better care of your friends,” she said, closing the doors of the ambulance. Lights flashing, siren blaring, the emergency medical transport sped off, my friend—my godfather—inside.

“We’re gonna need a crime scene tech,” someone behind me said. “We got a stiff upstairs.”

8

8

He was in emergency surgery at Henry Ford Hospital for an hour, which was how long it took to dig the bullets out of his shoulder and his hip, the one in the latter lodged dangerously close to his liver.

The doctors would have tried to do more in surgery, but Tomás had taken blunt force to the back of his head, and there was swelling of his brain. Once his bullet wounds were addressed, they put Tomás in a medically induced coma in the hope that the swelling would abate. The human body is, for the most part, an amazingly resilient machine.

The human brain? Not so much.

In his hospital room, Tomás—unconscious, breathing through a tube and connected to all manner of beeping, dripping and eerily glowing machines—was handcuffed to the side rails of his bed. A DPD patrol blue stood dispassionately at the door.

“This is bullshit,” I told Detective Captain Leo Cowling. We were standing near a nurses’ station.

“What’s bullshit?” Cowling calmly blew steam from his cup of vending machine coffee. “That I had to leave a hot piston pumping to come down here and talk to yo high-yellow ass? Is that what you mean by ‘bullshit’?” He was wearing a tan car coat over a black cable-knit turtleneck sweater, expensive jeans with creases that could carve beef and black Reebok trainers. The only thing he was wearing that didn’t look quite right was a gold detective’s shield on his belt.

“They checked his gun at the scene—”

“And yours.”

“Neither one was fired,” I said.

“So, you think old man Ochoa shot your running buddy before he turned the gun on himself?” Cowling said calmly. “What are the chances of that?”

“You’ve got a gold shield,” I said, irritated with Cowling’s smug attitude. “Figure it out, goddammit.”

“Oh, you can bet your ass I am well motivated to find out what’s going on,” Cowling said, “since you and the Cisco Kid were strapped where the dead man’s business was broken into.”

Unnerved and exhausted, I heard myself say, “He—Tomás—he’s my godfather.”