Gravois to Arsenal. Arsenal to Kingshighway. Some asshole had double parked on the south side of Tower Grove Park, and North jacked the wheel to the left. The Caravan lurched and spat and hissed. It felt like he was driving the equivalent of a cement truck. Not that the Chevelle had been the most responsive car in the world, but at least the Chevelle had muscle, had looks, had style. It all went back to that one bad night in Clayton.

North cranked his own window down; April air, humid and green from the park, flowed over him. His thoughts tangled together the mess that was Matty Fennmore and that night in Clayton. True, North hadn’t wanted to take Matty’s job because he worried about how it would affect Shaw. North hadn’t wanted to take the job because he didn’t like Matty, didn’t like the way Matty touched Shaw, didn’t like the way Shaw’s eyes glowed like a cat’s in the dark. But most of all, North hadn’t wanted to take the job because it would be the first job on which he, North, was a sidekick. His license was suspended until the appeal was granted, and he was relegated to trailing Shaw like a dog on a leash.

And that, more than anything else, was why North had bitten the bullet and agreed to take the case. It hadn’t been Shaw’s speech about going home and turning off the lights that had persuaded North, not really. It had been the realization that he, North McKinney, was a cowardly bastard. And it was the recognition that this situation was entirely of his own making.

At this hour, on the stretch leading up to I-44, Kingshighway was a parking lot, and the April air soured as it carried exhaust into the Caravan. North grimaced. He eyed the low thistle of skyline. He thought about Clayton.

That whole night when North’s life had turned to shit was off kilter. The background details were clear: North remembered the humidity of the early summer evening sticking his white shirt to his chest, the purple haze of sky, the diffuse granularity of the security floodlights in the moisture-rich air. But the night should have had a focus. A center. It should have been centered on Marvin Hanson, the guy who jumped alimony and child support and had broken his ex-wife’s arm on his last visit. The night should have been centered on the wrecking bar in his hand, on the whistle of metal through the air as Marvin swung and dug a nasty trench across North’s cheek. It should have been centered on the Sig P238, on the way it bucked in North’s hand, and on the cheap, Halloween-store effect of blood splotching the front of Hanson’s tank. Only it hadn’t been an effect. It hadn’t been a cheap, Halloween-store trick.

Instead, though, that humid night spun on the wrong axis. It spun around Shaw. It spun around his lean frame spilled at the bottom of the parking garage stairs, a bloody abrasion on his temple, his hazel eyes open-shut-open like a telegraph North couldn’t read. The whole night spun around what seeing Shaw like that, thinking, if only for an instant, He’s dead, had done to North: gone through him like a backhoe, ripping up everything in North right down to the bone. The rest of the night—Hanson, the wrecking bar, the bloody furrow under North’s eye, the Sig, and the trick flower of blood—all took place second stage. Even when the criminal charges showed up. Even when Hanson pulled North into a civil suit. Even as the suit dragged on, the bills growing like weeds. Even through all of that, at night, sleeping on the couch when Tuck wouldn’t let him in their room, through all of it, North could only see the tangled limbs, Shaw’s delicate frame at the bottom of the cement steps, and his breath would turn into fish hooks, and he knew he’d shoot Marvin Hanson if he had it to do over again.