“I think you’re pretty smart,” I said comfortably. “You hid out right under your parents’ noses for two days. You found me, and that’s not so easy for a suburban kid who gets driven everywhere, to navigate a city like Chicago at night.

“Here’s the problem. I don’t mind putting you up, but your father is on my case in a serious way, and if he came here looking for you I wouldn’t have any way to keep him from taking you: you’re a minor child and I have no legal relationship to you. Is there anyone you can go to who would stick up for you with your dad? A teacher, or an aunt? Your grandparents?”

He shook his head, miserable. “I’m like this really weird person in my family. Even my grandmother keeps telling BB he’s too soft on me. If I ran away to her she’d probably put me in handcuffs and take me to military camp herself.”

Mr. Contreras cleared his throat. “He could stay with me, doll. I got that sofa bed.”

Robbie turned white but didn’t say anything.

“Is it the dogs?” I asked. “They look ferocious because they’re huge, but they’re pretty gentle.”

“I know it’s sissy to be scared of dogs,” he whispered, “but it’s one of the—BB—some of his clients work with rottweilers, he thought it would be funny—it made everyone laugh—Nicola, she tried to get the dogs to leave and one of them bit her.”

“What did he do?” My hand on his shoulder had clenched reflexively into a fist, and I had to force the fingers to relax.

“He brought them home with him. Also the handler. It was kind of when he started running Carnifice. This will kill you or cure you, that’s what he’s always saying to me. So he sort of, well, he didn’t really sic the dogs on me, tell them to attack me, just to corner me, in the family room, I was watching television, they stayed there and stayed there and I—I couldn’t help it, I had to go to the bathroom so bad—”

His shoulders started to heave again. I kept my arm around him but drank some cocoa myself to try to keep my own stomach from turning inside out on me. Family night at the Baladines. Fun for everyone.

“Now listen here, young man,” Mr. Contreras spoke roughly. “I been a soldier, I been a machinist, I spent my life with men who could take your daddy apart and line up all his arms and legs in a row and not even work up a sweat, and let me tell you that is not how a real man acts, setting a dog on his kid.”