Her face was ivory, the blood gone from her lips. Brian cowered behind her. I stood straight. “I have to hold it, Mother.”

She began shrieking and then her palm cracked across my face.…

Ice water ran down my face and neck. “Can you hear me?” she asked.

I heard myself moan, tasted blood, warm and salty. “Let me take you to the hospital,” she was saying.

“Where am I?” The words came slurred to my ears.

“Your car. You crawled here.”

I tried opening my eyes. Terry leaned through the window with a rag and a green jug of water, her features swimming.

“No time …”

“Please, you’re not seeing me, I can tell. There was this crack when he hit you.”

She sounded scared. I rolled my neck on the car seat, trying to focus until I could make out the building. From upstairs a bearded man looked down with his palms pressed on the window. “Get out,” I said. “Go to the police.”

“I can’t. Not now.”

White sun cut into my eyes. I propped myself against the wheel and jabbed at the ignition with my key until the motor snarled. The world had shrunk to the size of my windshield, with Terry pleading from the side. Her face fell away.

My car was crawling onto Twentieth Street as horns blasted and my head screamed. In slow motion I drove to the police station, to sleep …

Rough hands shook me. “Drugs and whiskey,” he rasped. “You look for poison in your sports car instead of Jesus in your heart.”

It was no dream. I raised my head, squinted into the red worn face of a wrinkled stranger with rotten teeth and craziness in his eyes. He stopped waving his Bible up and down. “Give me a hand,” I murmured.

I cracked open the door and fell sideways until he caught me. I let my feet slide out, pulling up by his lapels. His breath stank. “So you’re who he’s got left,” I said.

His eyes, clear, white, and glassy, seemed only to see distances. “He’s coming, brother.”

“Come on,” I managed. “Help me inside.”

He clutched my elbow as I walked up the stairs, stopping every few steps, his breathing a low asthmatic whistle. At the top I rested on the glass door. “Thanks.”

He looked through me. “He’s coming,” he wheezed, and teetered away, shouting at passersby.

I walked leaning forward through a long tunnel toward a door I remembered. I opened it, falling. Rayfield disappeared.

I awoke lying on a metal desk with my suit coat folded under my neck and a paramedic watching me. I could smell iodine, felt explosions in my skull. “I fell,” I said absently.

The paramedic answered, “You were hit.”

“You stupid bastard,” said Rayfield.