As we headed west into Uptown, the loneliness of the night lifted: beer cans and drunks emerged from the shadows. The city changes character every few blocks around here, from the enclave of quiet family streets where Mary Louise lives, to an immigrant landing stage where Russian Jews and Hindus improbably mix, to a refuse heap for some of Chicago’s most forlorn; closest to the lake is where Uptown is rawest. At Broadway we passed a man urinating behind the same Dumpsters where a couple was having sex.

Mary Louise glanced over her shoulder to make sure Emily was still asleep. “Go up to Balmoral and over; it’s quieter.”

At the intersection a shadow of a man was holding a grimy sign begging for food. He wove an uncertain thread through the oncoming headlights. I slowed to a crawl until I was safely past him.

Away from Broadway most of the streetlights were gone, shot out or just not replaced. I didn’t see the body in the road until I was almost on top of it. As I stood on the brakes, steering hard to the left, Mary Louise screamed and grabbed my arm. The Trans Am spun across the street and landed against a fire hydrant.

“Vic, I’m sorry. Are—are you okay? It’s a person, I thought you were going to run over him. And Emily, my God—” She unbuckled her seat belt with shaking fingers.

“I saw him,” I said in a strangled voice. “I was stopping. What could yanking my arm do to help with that?”

“Mary Lou, what’s wrong?” Emily was awake in the backseat, her voice squeaky with fear.

Mary Louise had leapt out of the car into the back with Emily while I still was fumbling with my own seat belt. Emily was more frightened than injured. She kept assuring Mary Louise she was fine and finally climbed out of the car to prove it. Mary Louise probed her neck and shoulders while I fished a flashlight out of my glove compartment.

Assured of Emily’s safety, Mary Louise hurried to the figure in the road. Professional training pushed the four beers she’d drunk during the evening to the back of her brain. Her stumbling gait on her way to the figure was due to the same shock that made my own legs wobble when I finally found the flashlight and joined her—we hadn’t been going fast enough to get hurt.

“Vic, it’s a woman, and she’s barely breathing.”

In the light of my flash I could see that the woman was very young. She was dark, with thick black hair tumbled about a drawn face. Her breath came in bubbling, rasping sobs, as if her lungs were filled with fluid. I’d heard that kind of breathing when my father was dying of emphysema, but this woman looked much too young for such an illness.