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    Evans ignored me and glared at Stroud. “Why?” he said. “Because you’re a sneaky, lazy, stupid Rom who isn’t worth the powder to blow you to hell or the match to touch it off with, that’s why. Because you’ve screwed up this operation from day one, and you probably drove over something to blow that tire, too. And because if you don’t, I’m going to kick your skinny little ass around the block a few times, just to keep my foot from going to sleep. Is that enough ‘whys’ for you?”
    I wondered what a Rom was, but I figured it wasn’t a good time to ask.
    “Your time’s gonna come,” said Stroud. But his voice had no conviction, and he was already putting the key in the trunk lock.
    “And when it gets here, I’ll kick your ass, then, too,” said Evans.
    He had taken a step away from me, to intimidate his partner better, and I was considering what to do about that when Stroud popped open the trunk on the Chevy and got instantly sucked into it like a dust bunny into a vacuum cleaner pipe.
    “What in hell…” said Evans.
    I didn’t care what in hell. I clipped him in the back of the knee, the way I had wanted to do to Stroud on the stairs, and as he was dropping to the pavement, I pretended his head was a soccer ball and the car was a goal net. I didn’t know how hard I kicked him, and I didn’t care. Three seconds later, I was around the corner and running like a scared rabbit.
    I turned into an alley a couple of blocks away and chanced a look back. Nobody was following me. I slowed down to a trot and then a walk, looking for a place to hide among the trash bins, piles of junk, and service doors. I liked what I saw. Lots of back doors in that alley, and lots of fire escape ladders. Too many places for a pair of pursuers to check by themselves, unless they already had a glimpse of their quarry.
    The smell of fresh rain mixed with that of old garbage, plus something else that took me a minute to identify, something sweet and vaguely oily. Glycol, I decided. Antifreeze.
    Parked tight to a brick wall a half block away was an ancient ton-and-a-half truck with the back of the cab cut off and a square, homemade, windowless van body crudely grafted to the frame. The sides were badly warped plywood, covered with faded-out slogans and biblical quotations, done in an amateur sign-painting hand. Or maybe they weren’t exactly biblical. One said, “He that bloweth not his own horn, Neither shall it be Blown.” Another was something, mostly unreadable, about strumpets sounding at “the crank of dawn” and the “Horn of Babylon” having something to do with the “Car Lot of Jerusalem.” Across the back was one that had been renewed several times, in several colors. It simply said, “Yah! Is My God!” The plywood looked grateful for any paint it could get. Near the front of the vehicle, green fluid trickled down onto the pavement and formed a small stream that meandered towards the center of the alley, producing the smell I had noticed. If the truck wasn’t already a goner, it was definitely bleeding to death. Yah, with or without exclamation mark, was clearly not the god of radiators. I decided the truck looked like a good blind, and I followed the slimy green path.
    Sitting on what was left of the rear bumper was a black man who could have been any age except young, reading a battered paperback that had no cover, and absent-mindedly stirring a pot of something on a Coleman camp stove. He looked up at my approach, huge, fierce eyes peering through a tangle of dark locks.
    “Praise Yah!” he said, putting plenty of breath into it.
    “Yeah?”
    “You pronounce it wrong, pilgrim.” His voice had a rich, melodic quality. It wasn’t strident enough for a preacher, but it definitely got your attention.
    “There’s a lot of that going around.”
    “You making fun of me, asshole?”
    “No.”
    “Lucky for you.” He grinned, the whitest teeth I’ve ever seen accenting his dense beard. Then he