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months.”
    “Do you get along with Elaine?”
    “Yeah, Laney’s all right. Good heart. Kind of a messed-up lady, but a good heart.”
    “How’s she messed up?” They had reached a small park carved out of the shoreline, and found a bench.
    “Booze,” he answered. “She makes—let’s say she makes bad decisions when it comes to men. There’s a guy she was with. He’s been gone over a year and she still thinks he’s coming back.” Alex cupped a hand as if to make an announcement across the lake. “He ain’t.” He waved off the sarcasm, leaned onto his knees as he looked out at the water. “She just needs a break, really. She needs someone to take care of her.”
    “So it’s you and Ronnie.”
    “Ronnie’s my guy. Only one I trust. Good role model.” Alex lightened up. “This guy, he’s a junior, he’s already got a scholarship to Mansbury College. Smart, smart, smart. And he’d give his right arm for me.” He looked at Shelly and then beyond her. “He saved my life once,” he said.
    Shelly drove along the south side of the city, her stomach in knots and her head full of dark images. The thing about this city, you could drive two miles in this direction or that and find completely different neighborhoods. There was a pocket, about three square miles, almost directly south of the city’s downtown, that contained tree-lined streets and small bungalows. The area was known as Mapletown, consisting almost entirely of city workers—firefighters, cops, teachers, and other civil servants—who were required to live in the city boundaries but wanted to get as far out as possible. Mapletown looked more like a suburb than the city proper. But there was a decent influx of minorities in the community over the last ten years—moving into a decent neighborhood was not, after all, the exclusive province of white people. Shelly recalled the cries from minority leaders that realtors were steering blacks away from Mapletown, that homeowners had a silent pact to sell only to other whites, which had prompted a federal investigation by the Justice Department. Lawsuits had been filed, subpoenas issued, but at the end of the day, all that Shelly knew was that Mapletown was slowly integrating.
    Alex lived on one of Mapletown’s tree-lined streets. Shelly liked the character of the old homes, contrasted with the cookie-cutterdevelopments sprouting up in the city neighborhoods north of the river, where every new townhouse looked the same. Here, the homes were different heights and sizes, though most were limited to small lots. Alex’s home was midway down the street, a faded red-brick bungalow with a decaying yard in midwinter. She opened a screen door that looked as if it had been the object of a great deal of work to keep it fastened.
    The boy answering the door, she presumed, was Ronnie. He was taller than Alex. His eyes were a bright, watery blue that stood out from an olive complexion. His hair was a thick black, combed back to expose a high hairline. He was wearing a ragged flannel shirt open to his navel, over a white undershirt and blue jeans, no socks or shoes. His face was washed out, presumably from tears and distress and sleep deprivation.
    “How?” Shelly had asked him. “How did Ronnie save your life?”
    Alex smiled quietly. “A couple of years ago. I was a freshman. Me and a couple of my buddies were drinking. We didn’t have much experience with it, so we were pretty lit. Anyway, one of these guys gets the bright idea to hot-wire a car and go for a joyride. We drive it awhile and my buddy almost crashes it. That woke us up. So we ran like hell. Left the car where it was, on some random street corner.”
    Shelly opened her hands.
    “Anyway, turns out, that car belonged to someone who, uh”—his face brightened—“a guy whose car you don’t want to hot-wire. This guy was affiliated.”
    “He was in a gang.”
    Alex nodded. “He found out who did it and he wasn’t pleased. This is the kind of