I could smell the kid, see his face, his eyes closed there at the bottom of the stairs. Maybe they’d shot him right there, but they hadn’t. They slapped him around and then shot him. The same guy (or plural) who had gone after the kid would be after me, I thought. But what could the kid tell them? He didn’t know anything. That’s why they’d slapped him around, and worse. I could see him there, could feel his breath on the back of my hand, could see his eyes moving under the thin skin of the lids.

I had to focus on the sound of the coffee maker, the pound of the filter as the old grounds got knocked out, the hiss of the steamer, the names called out to come get their cup. I tried to think about what name I would use, and when it came time, I forget what I had decided and said, “Frank,” without even thinking. It bothered me.

I stepped outside and walked down the block. Mobley came out of nowhere and stopped me.

“Do you have it?” he said.

I shook my head.

“You’re in a pinch,” he said. “I’m here to make sure you don’t make things worse.”

He made a call on his phone and handed it to me.

“What did you do?” Froehmer said.

“I didn’t do anything.”

“A kid? You don’t know what you’ve done.”

“I didn’t do that,” I said. “I don’t have a gun. You know that.”

“If they find out…They won’t need a gun to pin this on you if they find out you were in there.”

“I was careful,” I told him.

“But you didn’t get the thing.”

“Somebody beat me to it. Whoever got the kid got the thing. And it wasn’t me.”

It was a long enough pause that I thought maybe he was gone. He wasn’t.

“Were you down there nosing around?”

“I talked to some neighbors,” I said. “I wanted to find out about Frank.”

“I told you to leave that to me. If you’d taken care of business first you wouldn’t be in this mess. A lot of people can put you there. You know what that means?”

I knew.

“They saw the guy come out of the house, with Frank.”

“They got it wrong. Way wrong. They didn’t have anything to do with this. And now a kid’s killed. You know what that means?” I knew.

“What were you telling these people, knocking on all these doors? Did you tell them who you were? Did you tell them you were a cop?”

“I didn’t say anything. I never said that. I didn’t say anything.”

“They’re going to come and find you,” Froehmer said. I didn’t know if he meant the people responsible for the kid, or the cops. It didn’t matter.