“Take the motherfucker there.”

She said, “I’m not going in there alone!” and he shot her a look.

Stormy stood up—she was slim, still brimming with vitality in her black windbreaker and torn jeans, but her fists were permanently balled up like a tae kwon do student. Jordan led and she followed, turning back to me.

“Just…follow us, dork.”

I followed. Jordan and Stormy led me through the tent village out to under the off-ramp and down a narrow side alley. The more alone we got, the more my heart thumped, stepping around the alky puke, bologna wrappers, nasty hypos. They ducked into the mouth of a construction site—rusty infrastructure, crisscrossing metal behind black netting caked in spackle.

“What’s in there?”

“You wanna see Mickey or not?”

I pushed through a rip in the fence and followed.

“Watch out,” Jordan said as we entered the guts of the unfinished apartment building. “Some of this shit is loose. I saw a beam come down and almost hit a dude.”

“We’re fuckeen idiots for even being here,” Stormy said. “They haven’t worked on this place in, like, years.”

All around us were stacks of metal planks, tiles, drywall panels piled on high.

Jordan put his knuckles to his mouth and whistled once, loud and swift. Grumbles returned from a dark corner.

Two skeletal white guys were nodding off under an open purple single-person sleeping bag. One was barefoot, his filthy blackened feet creeping out from the far end of the crumpled gold zipper.

“Where Karaoke at?”

No answers, just dead eyes.

“Well, when was he here last?”

Half a shrug. “I heard he went clucking.”

“Where, though?”

“Sorry, boss, he didn’t leave no forwarding address.”

Low laughs, two or three stragglers came out of the shadows.

“This guy’s looking for Mickey.”

“Mr. Karaoke?”

“Skinny motherfucker, Rock and Roll Mickey, he up in here somewheres?”

“White Flight’s hidin’ like a bitch.” The guy laughed—his front tooth was gold. My pulse was just lowering to almost normal when a super-tough-looking, tattooed and aged Viking, shaved head, gray tank top, stepped from the shadows.

“Whose this fuckwad.”

“He’s with us,” Stormy said. They exchanged a knowing look.

“I don’t care who he’s with, who the fuck are you.”

“My name’s Adam,” I said. “I’m looking for Mickey Sandoz.”

Stormy and Jordan went tentative—they were no match. The guy was a motorhead or batshit or both; he went right up to me like we were already mid-brawl. “I don’t like your face.”

“I’m not crazy about it either,” I said. “But it’s the only—”

He pushed me hard. “Don’t get fuckin’ funny with me, Jewboy. I don’t like your fuckin’ face.”

“Yo.” Stormy tried to intercept and he moved her hard with his arm. She went stumbling back into the rubble.

“Fuck you, asshole!” she howled as she pulled herself up.

Now the guy was revving, walking me backward over piles of garbage. “Don’t fuckin’ come around here looking for shit, Holmes, stay in your fuckin’ lane.”

Jordan said, “Dog, you need to get a grip.”

But this psycho wasn’t listening. “I want my fuckin’ money, little bitch. You find Sandoz, you tell him I’ll get paid or I’ll shoot the both of you in the fuckin’ head. Bam! Bam!”

“If I find him, I’ll—”

“Shut up, bitch.” He pushed me again. He liked pushing me, it made him smile. “Lotta people can’t stay in their lane. Learn to stay in your fuckin’ lane, bitch.” To accent this concept, he almost gave me a fast elbow to the chest but I dodged it, which sent me backward and I fell over some kind of concrete stack. Now he was standing over me. He put his gray-sneakered foot on the slabs of concrete to demonstrate its proximity to my face.

“You can’t stay in your lane, you get stomped, bitch.” Then he reached down and pulled me up by my sweatshirt. The junkies looked at the two of us like together we were a unicorn or some other half-mythical creature they didn’t yet believe in. I was trying to raise my hands, to say something like “I’ll leave,” but the wind was knocked out of me and I hadn’t even taken a punch. This crazy fuck wasn’t finished; he was positioning himself to give me a beatdown. Trying to come to my aid, Jordan almost blocked him but this only sent the guy into gonzo fury. He started ranting about how Sandoz had burned him and how he knew all kinds of shit about Sandoz that could put him back behind bars forever where he’d be somebody’s bitch and about how he was gonna kick my face in tonight if it was the last thing he did, maybe right this second.

I saw a pyramid pile of thick pipes, and in one swift move I scrambled to grab one, stood and held it out—it was heavier than I expected.

Jordan groaned.

Stormy said, “Put that down, idiot.”

But I ignored her. I said, “Let me outta here, dude. I don’t have any beefs with you. I just came here to tell Mickey Sandoz some bad news.”

“What kinda news is that?”

“His good friend is dead—was killed.”

“Who?”

“You don’t know him.”

“Who?”

“Hawley.” And then I looked at the pipe in my hand and lost a breath and trembled, and it dropped to the ground with a clank. “Devon Hawley.”

For a still moment, my attacker and the homeless posse behind him stood frozen. And then he buckled, half-lunged at nothing, balanced on a metal beam and vomited, long and hard.