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surveillance team poked his head through the shattered doorway. He lay on his belly, eyes the size of pie plates.
    “My partner…” he stammered.
    Craig remembered the surveillance car along the sidewalk. Remembered the woman in the blue flowered dress. He rose to one knee and lifted Karen from the ground. “Get her out of harm’s way,” he said.
    The agent reached out and took her in his arms.
    “I’ll look after your partner,” Craig promised.
    The guy didn’t argue. He bundled Karen tighter and crawled back through the shattered doorway. The alarms and sirens and bells and whistles had reached a screeching crescendo, making it nearly impossible to think clearly.
    “Hey,” Jackson Craig shouted above the din.
    The young woman looked back over her shoulder.
    “We may have an officer down out there,” he shouted.
    She nodded that she heard him.
    “Cover me,” he instructed. “Whatever you do, don’t let that son-of-a-bitch come back around that corner with that Ingram.”
    “Not a chance,” she said, settling herself deeper into the bark.
    Intuitively, Craig knew he could trust her with his back. He took a deep breath and sprinted for the nearest parked car.
    __
    He dabbed at his cheek with a dirty paper napkin as he hurried along the sidewalk. He fought the overwhelming impulse to crawl into the bushes and hide and instead kept on walking, using his fingernail to pick small pieces of imbedded rock from the wound. All these gates and walls and pools and dogs...he ’ d never seen any place like this before. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Nowhere, nowhere, nowhere…
    Approaching sirens wailed from every direction, preventing him from hearing the roar of the bus until it was right in his back pocket. He forced a smile onto his face and waved at the driver, who shook his head and pointed at the bus stop up the street.
    He turned and ran, covering the distance to the bus kiosk before the roar overtook him. The bus squeaked to a halt. The door hissed open. He stepped on board.
    “ Two dollars, ” the driver said closing the door.
    He pulled out a five and tried to hand it to the driver.
    The driver shook his head. “ Exact change, ” he said wearily.
    He patted himself down but failed to find anything smaller than the five.
    “ I…I don ’ t, ” he stammered.
    An angry voice rose from the back of the bus.
    “ Let ’ s go dawg, ” somebody yelled. “ Get your white ass in a motherfucking seat. ”
    He kept looking for small change. In the back of the bus, one of a trio of Latinos rose to his feet. “ We ain ’ t got all day, Holmes, ” he shouted.
    Twenty years driving for METRO taught the driver that this was just the kind of thing that got out of hand in a heartbeat, so he goosed the gas just enough to flop the kid back into his seat, smiled inwardly and wheeled the bus out into the street.
    “ Siddown, ” he whispered to the new passenger, who pocketed the five and took the seat closest to the front door. The bus driver fed the big rig enough gas to keep everybody down.
    “ That ’ s the handicapped seat, ” the driver said. “ Find someplace else. ”
    The sweaty guy moved back a row as the bus rolled down the street. The elderly Latino woman seated opposite the guy slid all the way over to the window, trying to put as much distance as possible between herself and Mr. Sweaty.
    Above the rumbling of the diesel, sirens whooped and moaned like a pack of wolves. A blue and white Pasadena PD cruiser rocketed past the front of the bus, heading west, light bar ablaze, siren screaming. Behind them, another cruiser slid to a stop in the middle of the street, blocking the intersection.
    The passenger checked his pockets again, found the paper napkin and blotted blood from the deep scratch running along his right cheek.
    “ You ought to get that face looked at, ” the driver said, using both hands to wheel the bus around the corner. “ Thing ’ ll fester iffn you don ’ t take care of it.