I thought about Bart Simpson, my mutt, who preferred the heat of my house to the winter wind, and said, “My house.”

“Why do you have a dog if you don’t bring him with you?”

“That is a good point and I’ll remember it.”

As I walked along the uneven sidewalk, I noticed several sets of eyes on me and reached in my pocket to feel the familiar weight of my commemorative Navy knife with a combat blade. Generally, I only use it to open boxes and cut the straps on bundles of papers, but I had used it to defend myself. I briefly thought about my Beretta back at the house, but I was never one of those guys who felt like he needed to carry a gun all the time. That’s how a place like this city got to be a place like this city.

The spot where Pete died was on the steps of a three-story brick brownstone that looked abandoned. The vacant lot next to it had been used as a dumping ground for God knew how long. Plastic bags were stuck on the sagging chain-link fence and piles of trash blew all over the lot. An old pickup truck rusted near the back fence.

A line of young men on the porch of the house next door watched me. Despite the cold, a couple of them sat on a sagging couch wearing nothing but wifebeater undershirts. They were showing off how tough they were.

I had to shake my head and mutter, “Idiots.”

There was still evidence of the crime scene right on the steps leading up to the front door of the house. I saw pieces of police tape, and the dark stain on two of the steps had to be blood. No one bothered to clean places like this very thoroughly after a murder. It was the same everywhere. Only this was a place where someone I knew had died.

I crouched down to examine the stain and looked up to see if I could figure out what had happened. The little I had learned on the internet about the shooting said that Pete was unarmed and stumbled onto the stairs with two gunshot wounds to his abdomen. At the time, people had been renting the house, but they had all fled the night of the shooting. It had been nothing but a drug house for the past decade, and no one seemed to be able to do anything about it. The whole situation made me ashamed of my brother and how he made a living.

As I crouched there, drawing the attention of the neighbors, a dark-blue Ford Crown Victoria pulled to the curb directly in front of the house. All it needed was lights on the top to advertise it was a police car. I stood slowly and turned as the car door opened.