Silverstone shrugged and shook his head as Moylan came in with a report of roof sniping, monitored on the police radio.

“I may as well stay in Emergency,” Meomartino said.

Adam assigned the ambulance crews and placed himself in Meyerson’s ambulance with Spurgeon. Their first pickup was an anticlimax: on the Expressway, a three-car collision, two people injured, neither seriously.

“Your timing is lousy, you know that?” Meyerson said to one of the drivers as they carried him to the ambulance.

But when they returned to the hospital they found that things were quiet. The reports of gunfire had been incorrect. The police Tactical Force continued to mobilize, but nothing had happened.

Next time they went out it was to Charlestown, to bring in a girl who had stepped on a broken bottle.

But the third dispatch was to Roxbury, where there had been a shooting in a bar.

“I ain’t goin’ out there,” Meyerson said.

“Why not?” Spurgeon asked.

“I don’t make that kind of money. Let the bastards kill each other.”

“Off your ass,” Spurgeon said.

“It’s up to you,” Adam said mildly. “If you don’t drive tonight you’re through around here. I’ll see to it.”

Meyerson looked at them. “Boy scouts,” he said.

He got up and walked slowly out of Emergency. Spurgeon thought that perhaps he would walk right past the ambulance, but he opened the door and got behind the wheel.

Spurgeon let Adam sit in the middle.

Some of the store fronts on Blue Hill Avenue were boarded up. Most were dark. The lighted ones had hastily-painted lettering splashed across the windows: SOUL BROTHER, BLACK OWNED, OWNED BY A BROS. They passed a liquor store already looted almost clean, a carcass stripped by ants, children emerging from the glassless windows carrying bottles.

Spurgeon’s heart broke for them. Mourn, he said silently. Don’t you know how to mourn?

Not far from Grove Hall they ran into their first mass of people, so large it spilled across the road for half a block, like cattle, groups milling from one side of the street to the other, pushing and shoving. The sound flooding through the open windows was a carnival roar, shouted insults and Mardi Gras laughter.

“We won’t get through this,” Meyerson said. He honked.

“We’d better turn off Blue Hill Avenue and go around them,” Adam said.

Behind them the road was already closed off by bodies.

“Any other ideas?” Meyerson said.

“No.”

“Boy scouts.”

Under the street light some of the men and boys began to rock a parked car, a black four-door sedan. It was a heavy model, a Buick, but in a little while it teetered back and forth like a toy, two wheels lifting off the ground after every push and then crashing down again, until finally it went over to screams and cheers and a scramble to get out of the way.