Where was Somers? Where had he spent the night? Did he have water? Did he have food? Had he fallen and twisted an ankle? Or worse? Hazard could picture him now; Somers would have gone to Smithfield, because it was the only logical place for a well-known local boy to hide, especially if he didn’t have a car and didn’t have unlimited cash. And Smithfield was full of abandoned homes and stores and industrial buildings. The Bordello came to mind, although the old whorehouse had burned to the ground exactly a year ago. As a boy, Hazard had been told—and had believed—that the Bordello’s basement was flooded and full of snakes. He could picture Somers now, picking his way across an ancient, sagging floor, and the rotten boards giving under his weight. Snap. And then Somers would fall. He could break a leg. He could get impaled on a splintered joist. He could get caught in old wiring and hang there, the suffocation slow, minutes and minutes of agony while his legs kicked empty air. A flooded basement with snakes sounded like a fucking walk in the park.

Hazard slammed on the brakes inches before he plowed into the 1972 Buick Estate that was idling at the red light. A horn blared behind him. For a moment, nothing made its way through Hazard’s daze, and then he managed to get his arm out the window and wave an absent fuck-off with his middle finger. A moment later, traffic rolled forward again.

Iowa Street, Illinois, Checker Ave, Indiana Street. He made himself check each street sign until he saw the right one, and then he turned, and two minutes later, he was pulling into the parking lot at Dulac’s apartment building. He spotted Dulac’s car right away, and that surprised him. Hazard assumed that Dulac had fled in his personal vehicle before ditching it and switching to a stolen car. But Dulac’s car was sitting in the parking lot. Then Hazard saw more bad news: several police cruisers sat at the curb, and as Hazard cruised the lot, one uniformed officer jogged out to a cruiser, retrieved a cardboard carry-out tray with four cups of coffee, and jogged back to the building. Hazard found a visitor’s spot and parked.

The minivan’s A/C was finally chugging, so Hazard rolled up the windows and let the cool air lick his face for a minute. The interview with Riggle and Park had been so much worse than Hazard had expected. At some level, he had assumed that the arrest warrant for Somers was a horrible mistake. Some kind of bureaucratic gaffe, maybe, that might end in a lawsuit that was quietly and quickly settled once everything got straightened out. The charge of possession with intent to distribute, though, was a felony. Even if they beat it, the damage to Somers’s reputation would probably be permanent. And they had Somers’s fingerprints on the drugs, so Hazard didn’t know, honestly couldn’t bring himself to believe fully, that they would beat it.