I knelt down and frisked him. He had a switch knife in one pocket, another knife tucked into his sock. No wallet, no ID, but he had a thick roll of bills on his hip. I slipped off the rubber band and gave the roll a fast count. He had over three hundred dollars, the bastard. He hadn’t been looking to make the rent money or score a bag of dope.

And what the hell was I going to do with him?

Call the cops? And hand them what? No evidence, no witnesses, and the guy on the ground was the one who’d sustained the damages. There was nothing good enough for a courtroom, not even anything to hold him on. They’d rush him to the hospital, fix him up, even give him his money back. No way to prove it was stolen. No way to prove it wasn’t rightfully his.

They wouldn’t give him the gun back. But they couldn’t hang a weapons charge on him, either, because I couldn’t prove he’d been carrying it.

I put his roll of bills in my own pocket, took out the gun that I’d placed there earlier. I turned the gun over and over in my hand, trying to recall the last time I’d handled one. It had been a while.

He lay there, his breath bubbling through the blood in his nose and throat, and I crouched at his side. After a moment or two I stuck the gun into his ruined mouth and let my finger curl around the trigger.

Why not?

Something stopped me, and it wasn’t fear of punishment, not in this world or the next. I’m not sure what it was, but after what seemed like a long time I sighed and withdrew the gun from his mouth. There were traces of blood on the barrel, glowing like brass in the soft light of the alley. I wiped the gun on his jacket front, put it back in my pocket.

I thought, Damn you, goddamn you, what am I going to do with you?

I couldn’t kill him and I couldn’t hand him to the cops. What could I do? Leave him there?

What else?

I stood up. A wave of dizziness came over me and I stumbled, reached out, caught onto the wall for support. After a moment the dizziness passed and I was all right.

I took a deep breath, let it out. I bent down again and grabbed him by the feet, dragged him some yards back into the alley to a ledge about a foot high, the top frame of a barred basement window. I stretched him out across the alley on his back with his feet up on the ledge and his head wedged against the opposite wall.