The stranger nodded. There was an honor code at play here, one he knew he shouldn’t respect, but he felt it was better to play safe than sorry. He vaulted over the fender and squatted in the bed as the truck laboriously turned around in the constricted street and began slogging back up the hill. The truck belonged to Amo, so no one dared look at it, yet people seemed to part like a shoal of fish breaking for a shark to get out of its way. It pulled up to a three-story, cinder-block building. As soon as the stranger’s feet hit the ground, the truck drove away. Lean-tos, running three deep, had been constructed around the building’s perimeter, with the exception of the entry, so to reach it he had to walk down a tight alley of tin sheeting and sullen faces.

The building’s front door had long been torn from its hinges. The concrete floor was filthy, and the air inside the building reeked of garbage. He did not know which way to go until he looked up the stairs to his right. What he saw startled him with its incongruity. It was a woman wearing a white nurse’s uniform so crisp, it looked like she had just put it on. She was blond and attractive, at least from this distance, and her legs, in the white hosiery of her uniform, were shapely. Amid all this misery and ugliness, she was like an angel sent from heaven.

She beckoned him with a finger and he mounted the stairs.

The second floor was also concrete, but it was painted a subtle gray and was impeccably swept. The walls were also painted and clean. There was only one door on this landing, and as he walked through, an alarm chimed. A man dressed as a security guard rose from behind his desk, a hand going for his sidearm in a well-practiced motion.

“Sir,” the guard said even as the stranger raised his hands.

“In a holster behind my back,” the man said and slowly turned. “There’s another in my pocket.”

The guard nodded to the nurse, who unarmed the stranger. The man knew the routine and stepped out of the room and back into the hallway. The door’s threshold, though innocuous to look at, was a body scanner that had detected the taped-up revolver he’d taken off the kid and the FN Five-seveN pistol he’d been carrying. This time through, the alarm remained silent, and the guard relaxed his defensive posture. A phone on his desk rang. He listened for a moment before replacing the handset.

“Give him back his guns. He says that this one is just as deadly without them.”