“The man was selling bootleg liquor. Or haven’t you heard that’s against the law? We just wanted to talk to him, break up his stock, shut down his place. It was his choice to fight back.”

“Disrespecting a thug cop is no reason to die.”

“And who are you to care?” I didn’t have an answer for that. I don’t think he really wanted one anyway. He held the pistol tighter and pointed it my way. “Now come on out of this tree, so I can take you over to the precinct without you getting hurt.”

“It’s my tree. I was here first.”

“Girl, don’t make me pull this trigger.”

“Go ahead. I don’t think you can hit anything that moves.”

That made him laugh. It wasn’t a nice laugh, and it wasn’t a pretty laugh, but it was a useful one. When he laughed, he blinked. He didn’t see my hands let go of the branch, or my feet, sailing through the crackling autumn leaves, directly at his head. A grunt thudded out of him when I made contact. We fell together, the branches knocking us sideways, scratching our faces, slowing us just enough that when we landed, we did not die. The ground knocked out my breath. By the noises he made, he was alive, but not much more than that.

I took his pistol, which looked the same as the one I had been dragging around, and opened the chamber after a few seconds of fiddling. I dropped both bullets into my pocket, hurled the gun toward the fountain, and strolled out of the park.

Lamb leaned against the side of his burning church, picking glass out of his knees. His clothes were streaked with blood, and soot covered his face, but his teeth shone yellow when he smiled.

“I’d have thought you’d have taken care of that one quicker,” he said, “the way you knocked this boy down.”

Koszler squirmed along the sidewalk like a roach on its back—legs pumping air and bloody fingers searching uselessly for a handhold. Horrible heaves escaped his mouth when he saw me coming his way.

“Do you want him to die?” asked Lamb.

“No.”

“Then let’s shred that uniform and bandage him as best we can.”

At first, Koszler writhed away from our touch, but Lamb and I were strong enough to hold him down. Where it wasn’t hot with blood, his skin was getting cold. Lamb ripped the uniform into strips, yanked out the biggest shards of glass, and tried to blot the wound.

“Now don’t you wish you’d left me some liquor?” Lamb asked the patient. He gripped the pistol by the barrel and rapped it on Koszler’s head. “I’d like to crack that rotten egg you call a skull.”

“Die, old man,” spluttered Koszler. “Remember who made you kneel.”