I heard the high, hard tapping of hooves on pavement and couldn’t help but smile at the thought of a horse-drawn hearse. The villains of the Westside love tradition.

Fragments of conversation slipped in from outside, achingly ordinary chatter about music classes and boxing and when will the damn summer end. It was so wonderfully ordinary. We must have passed onto the Eastside. I heard tinny music, cheap laughter, and two children having a vicious argument about whether the Giants would beat the Yanks in the World Series. The season ends tomorrow, I realized. I should have gone to a game.

At an intersection, a busker tortured a saw into something approaching music. It took a few bars before I realized that he was playing the song that haunted Brass Aiken. I pounded on the side of the coffin.

“What is it called?” I shouted. “What is that damned song called?”

He didn’t answer. The hearse pulled away, the music faded into nothing, and it occurred to me that it might be the last song I heard before I died.

Where would I be interred? Some little family plot near Second Avenue? One of the new cities of the dead that sprawled across Queens? Or would I rate a place in one of the grand old vaults of Green-Wood? I wondered how they would mark my grave, and if Hellida would have any way to find it. She would feel cheated if she never got a chance to deliver that final heartbroken reminder that she had been right all along.

I wrapped my fist around the hammer and attacked the hole in the wood. Sawdust filled my mouth, but I did not let the coughing fit slow my arm. Soon the hole was big enough for my fingers, and then my fist. I pushed my arm through the jagged wood. I could not find the latch. The hearse stopped moving. I yanked my arm back inside, tensed my legs, and clutched the hammer. The door opened, and the coffin slid out of the trunk and thudded painfully to the ground.

“My coffin!” cried the driver. “You crazy girl—what have you done to my coffin?”

The lid creaked open, and I saw my captor: the man called Ugly, without his ax. He smiled at me, the guarded grin of a man who has just loosed a starving tiger. I pounced.

It does not take a big hammer to break a kidnapper’s nose. He fell backward into the dirt, clutching his face, blood spurting through his fingers. I stepped back, unsteady on cramping legs, and he charged, head down and feet wobbling. I clipped the side of his head, and he staggered off to the right. I shook out my legs, looked to the south, and saw we were certainly not on the Eastside.