“Now you a doctor?” Peaches shakes his head. “You a strange girl. Woman,” he adds, correcting himself. He gives a little eyeroll when he says it, but I ignore it. Baby steps.

Peaches continues to look at me, like he’s evaluating something. “I know who you are,” he says.

“And who’s that?”

“You the girl Luco Stevens grabbed.”

It’s like Peaches just tore a hole in my brain and hauled out my memory of that night, black and wriggling. Luco dragging me kicking and screaming into an abandoned house two blocks from where I’m standing right now. Luco backhanding me across the face when I refused to settle down. Luco raping me in that house, in front of his goons, just before sticking a needle full of heroin into my arm.

I realize I’m squeezing the CZ and force myself to relax so I don’t accidentally fire a round into the porch. “Is that a problem?” I ask, hearing the rough waver in my voice and hating myself for displaying weakness.

Peaches keeps looking at me. “I watched Luco grow up here,” he says finally. “He was no good. Got what he deserved in the end, probably.”

“Goddamn right,” I say.

We say nothing for a few seconds, the silence sitting heavily on the porch. Through a curtained window I see the kitchen light go out. Mrs. Daniels is going to bed.

“My uncle and you,” I say. “What’s the deal?”

Peaches takes a breath, exhales out his nose. “Like I said, he asked me to do somethin’ for him. Find somethin’.”

“Find what?”

“You’ll see,” Peaches says. “I made a call.” He glances out at the street, and I follow his glance. Two cars are pulling up to the curb behind my bike, an old Town Car and an older Malibu that looks like it was rolled here end-over-end from Alaska. A black Mercedes SUV is already parked in front of my bike. The Mercedes must be Peaches’s ride.

I gesture to the porch door. “After you.”

Billy lumbers to his feet, eyes still weeping from the pepper gel, and stomps past me out the door and down the porch steps into the yard. Peaches follows, and I bring up the rear, holstering the CZ. I leave the sawed-off on the porch. Dreadlocks is still in naptime.

By the time we get to the street, four men have gotten out of the Malibu and stand in a semicircle in the street, on the far side of both vehicles. A tall man in a Five Stripes jersey gets out of the Town Car, holding an Uzi. He opens the rear passenger door and steps back.