I slowed again and could feel a kind of calm come over me. Something about the anonymous nature of it all. Something about still being in the dark. About having Silvina’s journal to defend. How I told myself this was probably the guy who had taken the hummingbird. How I felt that loss like the hummingbird had been alive. Grave-robbing after the grave had already been robbed once.

Slowed still more. I could hear his heavy tread now. What if he had a gun?

But I was angry. A kind of rage building up and spilling over. Too much of this skulking around. Too much of it. The guy watching the house. Fusk with his threats. Larry in the hospital and me unable to connect the dots, recognize the significance. I was bigger than the man following me. I was more dangerous. Why should I be the one to run? Why bother? It was tiring. It was a role that wasn’t me. Just something people thought I should be.

I stopped, pretended to dig around in my purse, as the man approached. Twenty feet, ten feet. I didn’t look up. I don’t know if I imagined him lunging at me or he’d just arrived in my space. But I hit him with my purse anyway. I hauled off and “went for the country mile,” as Dad would’ve said.

Shovel Pig, full force, smashed into his face, and he staggered back, holding his head with both hands, bent over. I rushed him, pulled his head forward and down with my hands behind his head … while I brought my knee up into his chin.

That made a sound. I even felt it in my knee. When I hit a person, they don’t forget it. I don’t know any other way.

He dropped to the sidewalk, rolled over, tried to get up. I kicked him in the chest, and he came to rest against the wooden fence, which buckled but held.

“Who the hell are you?” I screamed in his face. “And why the fuck are you following me?”

I had my pepper spray out and was threatening him with it. Which felt like anticlimax. But I don’t think he knew what was happening yet. He looked around, in his rumpled suit, like someone was going to stop and save him. But it was quiet. Or no one wanted the trouble. Or the neighbors were used to this kind of trouble.

I repeated my question.

He looked up at me through a bloody eye. A trickle of blood from a split lip. His left eye already had a black circle around it.

“Stop looking for Silvina,” he said. Local muscle? He had an accent like he’d grown up here. “Stop looking for Silvina. Or you’ll pay.” He had a good chin to be so coherent already.

I lunged like I was going to kick him again, and it felt good when he flinched, held up his hands. It was like being back in the wrestling ring. Me circling an opponent, looking for the opening. Them already down, at a disadvantage.