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also a natural nocturnal, someone Billy could count on not to fall face-first into the lap of a suspect halfway through an interview at six in the morning, which was not nothing.
    Wading to the sidewalk through double- and triple-parked cruisers, they passed the open back doors of an ambulance and saw a young chunky Latina sitting inside, a sepia necklace of fingerprints around her throat.
    “How she doing?” Mayo asked an EMT.
    “She’s pissed.”
    Leaving Mayo to take her statement, Billy headed to the scene of the crime, the florist shop a cramped, ramshackle affair with wind-riddled, rotten wooden moldings around the door frame and the sole display window. The low-ceilinged selling floor was covered with cracked linoleum, and the near-empty flower refrigerator was overhung by a roughly built half-loft, the squeak and groan of shifting feet up there nearly drowning out the soft jazz playing somewhere behind a battery of poinsettias and greeting card spin racks down below.
    Climbing a short flight of raw pine stairs, Billy found himself in a cell-like, three-walled bedroom, cops and medics obscuring his view of the perp, Wallice Oliver. The guy was a frail, bare-chested seventy-year-old with a pharaonic goatee, wheezing asthmatically as he sat slumped on the side of a narrow bed. The towel draped around his neck made him look like a geriatric boxer.
    As an EMT inserted a spirometer in Oliver’s mouth to gauge his lung capacity, Billy took inventory of his surroundings. In one corner a gold saxophone perched upright in its stand; in another stood a spindly desk, its blotter covered with a scatter of prescription bottles, a jar of olive oil, an ankh, a crucifix, and a Star of David. Scotch-taped to the walls were two photographs of Oliver as a younger man, one of him onstage with Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the other of him performing in Sun Ra’s Arkestra.
    Billy made his way through the milling uniforms to the bed.
    “You want to tell me what happened?”
    “I already said all that.” Oliver reared back to peer up at him.
    “Just one more time.”
    “She come in once, like around Valentine’s Day,” pausing to take a hit of Primatene Mist, “says she was looking to buy a plant for her mother, young girl, looked around, didn’t buy nothing though, walked out, then came back a hour later, asked if I needed any help in here, and to tell you the truth I just barely support myself with this, you know? So she leaves again, then comes back a third time that night, knocks on the door right as I’m turning out the lights, steps inside, drops to her knees, puts me in her mouth, says, ‘Daddy, you let me live up there, you can have me anytime you want.’ Next thing I know I’m a man again, but she’s Satan and everything in my life’s all fucked up. I had a wife was a schoolteacher, a nice crib, moved out on them both to be up here under a seven-foot ceiling with her. I can’t even straighten my back no more, and I tell you I will put up with a lot of meanness just to have a hard dick again, but the things she said to me tonight?” Oliver bowed his head, kneaded his waxy, amber fingers. “I have never been hurt by words like that in my life.”
    Leaving the scene an hour later, the rising sun accentuating the emptiness of the street, Billy heard his cell go off, Stacey Taylor again, this time a text:
    i know u r screening my calls dont

Milton Ramos
    I’m not even going to ask you who threw the shot, because I know you didn’t see, right?”
    Milton was talking to the head-bandaged Shakespeare Avenue banger, who was sitting up on his wheel-locked gurney in the trauma room of the St. Ann’s ER.
    “Where my clothes at,” the victim ducking and weaving in an effort to look past Milton, standing less than a foot away from him in the curtained-off space. “Call the damn nurse.”
    Milton gave it a beat, watching dispassionately as the traumatized tissue around Carlos Hernandez’s bullet-creased temple finally began