“It waited and waited,” the hooded figure said in a strange, creaky little voice, and for just a moment I had a glimpse of the face in the depth of his hood. Then a car came around the corner behind me, and its headlights splashed him. He squirmed away from the glare. An instant later he was sprinting away down Marshall Street, his bare feet slapping the pavement like raindrops on a window. I hesitated only a moment, trying to decide whether to chase him, but the guy was very fast, and within a couple of seconds he was around the corner and gone, headed toward Beeger Square. I dropped to my knees to help Walter stand up, but he was limp and didn’t respond when I asked him if he was hurt.

I rolled him over. His shirt and coat were soaked in blood, purple beneath the streetlights, and it was pooling where he had lain, some of it already running over the curb and into the gutter like spilled paint. His face was white, his lips blue. The people in the car pulled to a stop beside us so I begged them to call 911, then I ran back to the Compasses to get help. By the time I got back to Walter the first SJPD squad car had arrived, and the fire department emergency van showed up only a minute or two later from their new station a few blocks away. It didn’t make any difference, though. My angel co-worker had already stopped breathing, and although the paramedics did what they could to field-dress him and bundle him quickly into their ambulance and head off toward Sequoia Emergency, lights flashing and siren moaning, it wasn’t going to change anything. Walter Sanders, or at least the body he’d been given, was as dead as vaudeville.

But as I stood there letting the shocked questions of the Compasses’ regulars wash over me, I was hardly even thinking about Walter. I assumed he’d be back, maybe as soon as tomorrow, decanted into new flesh by the boys upstairs and with a story to tell that would fascinate anyone who hadn’t been around tonight. As it happened I was wrong, but I wasn’t to know that for a while.