Hank Bridges sized up Heather, this girl answering the door at 6A Brooks Street. But all too fast there was Mourad, his boots a shellacked black. He was wearing a large jacket that said AIRPORT SECURITY in white block letters, and his angle of a jaw looked as if it needed to be unhooked and unlatched before he spoke.

“Can I help you?” Mourad said.

Bridges put his hand up to flash his badge, but Mourad put a finger inside the billfold, tilted the cover back up, and read it— slowly—making Bridges hold it for several beats too long. Mourad tilted his head and withdrew his index finger. He raised his eyebrows. His eyelids still looked heavy; they were hoods, really.

“I’m looking for an Aziz Arkoun,” Bridges said. “Please step aside.”

Mourad stepped aside. He said nothing. He put his arm around Heather, who was just behind him.

Bridges walked to the back of the apartment into the bathroom and pulled down the shower curtain. Then he was in the bedroom, which was in fact Aziz’s bedroom but was now adorned with a ruffled yellow bedspread. He upended the bed and it rested on its side while Mourad and Heather sat in the living room. There was nothing in the closet, but he tried to kick in the sliding plywood doors and they made a splintering crack: once, twice. Then it was Heather and Rafik’s room, which was now Heather and Mourad’s room. There the closet was crammed full, the doors open, and Bridges pulled dresses and skirts and pants off all the hangers, whoosh, in a destructive abandon that reminded Heather of ripping paper off packages. They heard him pulling up the greasy, flattened wall-to-wall carpet from the floor and pulling it, like a giant canoe, out of the bedroom and into the living room where they sat, holding hands.

Bridges pulled the carpet past them in the living room and out the front door. It grabbed onto things and toppled other things as he went. Heather wanted to get up and look out the window to see what in the world he was doing with the carpet, but Mourad whispered no. Mourad could not believe they would be so lucky as to have this be all that Bridges would do. He concentrated on reminding himself to say as little as possible when he came back. Those who talked too much, he knew from work, always talked, after painful-to-hear meanders, into lies.