“Wait a minute,” said the man in the middle, speaking up for the first time. “I’ll tell you what you wanna know.”

Coletti waited half a second before telling the dispatcher to disregard his call. When he did, the man in the middle threw off his blanket and the detective got a good look at him.

His salt-and-pepper hair was in a crew cut, and he hadn’t shaved in days. He looked fit and strong, but there was something uneasy about his manner as he reached into his shirt pocket and lit a half-smoked cigarette.

“You’ll have to excuse my friends,” he said while exhaling the acrid smoke. “They get kinda nervous when cops come around.”

“You look a little nervous yourself,” Coletti said.

“Post-traumatic stress disorder. I had a Humvee blown from under me by a roadside bomb near Tikrit. Watched three guys die right next to me.” He took a long drag of the cigarette. “Stuff like that can make a man a little anxious. I guess that’s why I sleep out here. It’s safer than a shelter, cleaner than the VA, and you can always see what’s comin’.”

“Did you see what came last night?”

“Yeah, I did. I acted like I was asleep, though.”

Coletti furrowed his brow. “Why?”

“Because Bobby does drugs and I don’t wanna deal with the guys he hangs around. Most of the time I just stay under my blanket. That’s what I did last night. At least, until the guy said who he was.”

“That’s enough, Frank,” said the one with the pockmarked face.

The third man said the same thing with his eyes.

Coletti looked at the three of them and laughed nervously. “What are you guys so scared of?”

The man with the pockmarked face spoke in a conspiratorial whisper. “The guy said he was the angel o’ death. You’d be scared o’ that, too.”

Coletti had been scared of it for a decade. He couldn’t tell the men that, though. In truth, he couldn’t tell anyone.

“It was about two in the morning when he showed up,” said the one they called Frank. “He stood about four feet away. Bobby was the first one to notice him, and he didn’t have enough sense to be afraid.”

“What was there to be afraid of?” Coletti asked. “The way he looked? Did he have something in his hands?”

“No,” Frank said. “It was his voice. It was rough and soft at the same time. When he talked, it was like he was whispering loud enough for the world to hear. It was scary.”

“Do you remember what he said?”

“He offered Bobby money to deliver a note to some art gallery, and he told him there was more where that came from. Seemed too good to be true, if you ask me, but I guess when you’re on drugs, you don’t think about that.”