“Where’s the key?” she demanded. “These are way too tight.”

Smith had been around since primitive times and reminded West of jaded, unhappy old cops who ended up working private security for corporations. West held out her hand, and he gave her the tiny metal key. West worked it into the cuffs, springing them open. The woman instantly calmed down as cruel steel disappeared. She tenderly rubbed deep angry red impressions on her wrists, and West admonished the troops.

“You can’t do that,” she continued to shame them. “You’re hurting her.”

West asked the woman to hold up drooping arms so West could pat her down, and it entered West’s mind that she ought to grab a pair of gloves. But she didn’t have a box in her car because she wasn’t supposed to need things like that anymore, and, in truth, the woman had been put through enough indignity. West did not like searching people, never had, and she remembered in the old days finding unfortunate surprises like bird claw fetishes, feces, used condoms, and erections. She thought of rookie days, of fishing cold slimy Spam out of Chicken Wing’s pocket right before he socked her with his one arm. This old lady had nothing but a black comb, and a key on a shoelace around her neck.

Her name was Ella Joneston, and she was very quiet as the police lady cuffed her again. The steel was cold but didn’t have the teeth it did a minute ago when the sons-a-bitches snaked her. She knew exactly what it was they wrapped around her wrists in back where she couldn’t see, and it bit and bit without relief, venom spreading through her, making her shake as she screamed. Her heart swelled up big, beating against her ribs, and would have broken had that blue car with the nice lady not pulled up.

Ella Joneston had always known that death was when your heart broke. Hers had come close many times, going back to when she was twelve and boys in the projects knocked her down right after she’d washed her hair. They did things she never would speak of, and she’d gone home and picked dirt and bits of leaves out of braids and washed off while nobody asked. The police lady was sweet, and there was someone in plain clothes there to help her, a clean-looking boy with a kind face. A detective, Ella reckoned. They took each of her arms, like she was going to Easter Sunday and dressed in something fine.

“Why you out here drinking like this?” The lady in uniform meant business but she wasn’t harmful.

Ella wasn’t sure where out here was. She didn’t have a way to get places. So she couldn’t be far from her apartment in Earle Village, where she had been sitting in front of the TV when the phone had rung earlier this evening. It was her daughter with the awful news about Efrim, Ella’s fourteen-year-old grandson, who was in the hospital. Efrim had been shot several times this morning. Everyone supposed the white doctors tried all they could, but Efrim had always been stubborn. The memory brought fresh hot tears to Ella’s eyes.