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ripped the knife from him. He screamed, thrashed, painted the floor with his blood. The EMTs produced a needle. He bit at one of them. A cop wrenched his head back.
    The injection only took seconds to work. When he was out they went to work bandaging his wounds.
    After they had stopped most of the bleeding they wheeled him to the ambulance and sped off. The police took statements and searched his open apartment. The gruesome show was over and the crowd disappeared behind closed doors.
    Dennis walked a tall redheaded woman to the elevator. Mike stared at the blood on the floor. His face had gone bone-white and cold. The image of red-on-white blurred into and out of focus.
    Is this what we’re filled with?
    The blood stole him, pulled him into its pattern. The walls melted away and he was left in darkness.
    A pool of light washed in, gleaming across the porcelain of a bathtub. Steam rose like fingers from the water. The red-on-white branched out over the tub, into the cracks of the tile on the walls and floor. In the water a crimson flower bloomed and grew until it pressed against the tub’s walls. It kept growing, forcing bucketfuls of bloody water over the sides and across the floor, under the doorway, down the hall, staining the tan carpet as it made its way to the stairs, blossoming wider as it covered the walls of the house, so much blood, he would have never guessed that she had had so much blood inside of that tiny body, that she—
    Dennis squeezed the back of his neck. “You alright?”
    “Huh? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I didn’t even know the guy, right?”
    “I’m sorry you had to see that.”
    Mike was silent.
    “Hey. Let’s get out of here and let them clean the hall up. We can go get a bite to eat or something and then unpack later.”
    “I don’t think I could eat anything right now.”
    “Still…”
    “Oh. Yeah. Okay.”
    Mike headed out the door. Dennis took one last look at the hallway before following him.
    No one noticed the fat red cockroach scurry through the blood and under Lloyd’s door.
     
    * * *
     
    The mop bucket squeaked like a dying rodent as it wound its way down the hall. The front wheel was warped and Reynaldo had to fight to keep it from slamming into the walls. He ground his teeth together as it squeaked along. He hated that sound more than anything, more than he hated his wife’s nagging or his children fighting. No matter how many times he tried to repair it, or how many times he begged Rudy for a new bucket, he was always left listening to the bent wheel.
    It could be worse, he reminded himself. He could be back in Juarez, shoveling shit from clogged toilets at pennies a day for gringo tourists. At least the plumbing worked here and his pay was decent. Not great, still below minimum wage, but under the table. Rent was free, so that was something. Not bad for an illegal groundskeeper.
    Groundskeeper? Fucking janitor is more like it. Most of his time was spent cleaning up messes. The closest he came to “groundskeeping” was cleaning the pool and supervising the landscaping crew that maintained the yard. Lately, it had mostly been the messes. They were often mundane—a burst pipe, a leaky roof—but sometimes they were strange, like today. Too many of those involved blood.
    He plunged his mop into the suds and splashed a figure eight on the tile. At least it was only blood this time. He knew how lucky he had been last time. He had buried the garbage bag in the field with Mr. Henry’s clothes. He never opened it to see what was inside; he had long ago stopped being curious.
    When the hall was clean he pushed the bucket back to the elevator and down into the basement. There he dumped the contents into a large sink. He turned off the light, undid the locks on a forgotten door, sat in a cold steel chair, and lit a cigar. It had been a long week and he needed this.
    He reclined in the dark, letting the cigar’s earthy taste roll around in his mouth, and waited. He grew impatient and