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floor, then back into the hallway. Then back at his office floor, his brows knitted. It was clear he was undecided what to do about the intruder. Maddy and I exchanged shrugs, and one voice rose above the others.
    “ Listen , motherfuckers! My name is Lytton and I’m here to see my fucking brother !”
    “Ford doesn’t have a brother, motherfucker!” the tough construction or biker guy yelled back.
    “Who is that?” Maddy finally asked.
    Apparently the guy—Lytton—was no threat, for Ford was sticking his pistol back into his jeans by the time Lytton busted through the knot of men and gained entrance to Ford’s office.
    I was frankly surprised how mildly Ford reacted to a presumed stranger busting into his inner sanctum. He allowed this pissed-off, fuming giant of a man to back him up against the door. Ford looked more mystified than angry when the guy poked him in the chest with a forefinger. A guy with waist-length hair who looked like his craggy face should be on an Aztec pyramid—I remembered him as Tuzigoot—grabbed the stranger’s shoulder, yelling,
    “Boss! I told this fucker you didn’t have any fucking brother. You want us to take him out?”
    “No, hold it,” Ford said. Ford did wrench Lytton’s finger away from his chest, tossing it aside like a grenade, and he got himself away from the irate guy, walking farther into his office. But he didn’t tell Lytton to get lost, or to fuck off, or anything like that.
    Lytton poked the air. “I’ve got a bone to pick with you, asshole,” he roared.
    It was then that I noticed—Ford and Lytton did bear more than a slight resemblance to each other. Lytton’s shoulder tattoo of a stylized eagle even resembled Ford’s shoulder ink of his club’s skull and bones. Of course Lytton didn’t wear a cut, but his figure was the same fine, muscular, long-limbed beauty of Ford.
    Lytton had the same aquiline Roman nose with the same bump in the middle. The same full, lush lips, bowed as though an angel had pressed her finger beneath his nose. The same satiny black brows. You almost had to blink twice to make sure you weren’t looking into a mirror.
    Lytton wore the plaid shirt with the rolled-up sleeves that could be the mark of any engineer or worker. His Nikes told that he could have even been a computer nerd, like so many of the boys I had grown up with. But the way he yelled was anything but nerdly. He had power and passion and enormous conviction of his words when he bellowed,
    “You lying, sleazy motherfucker! You knew I was your brother this entire fucking time and you couldn’t be bothered to slink on down to the res and mingle with the rest of us dirt worshippers and tomahawk chuckers!”
    Ford held his hands up, palms toward Lytton. “Wait, just wait one fucking second here. I’ve never seen you before in my fucking life.”
    “Of course you haven’t! Because when you found out we had the same father, you refused to fucking acknowledge me so you could get his entire fucking inheritance!”
    There was a brief silence then. You could practically hear everyone in the room—and rubbernecking out in the hallway—gasping in shock.
    Lytton even stood still, panting, his arms hanging at his sides. The vein in his temple throbbed with emotion.
    That was when my heart broke for him. He was tormented, stomped into the mud by shitty parents, too.
    I stepped up to Lytton and laid a calming hand on his upper arm. He looked down at me as though I was a piece of already-chewed gum. I was arrogant enough to think that maybe I could help, having mediated many a tense situation or argument in Africa. Those things usually involved a dead goat or a calabash, but some of those arguments got pretty heated, too. Africans had Uzis.
    I said, “Lytton, why don’t we get to the bottom of this in a calm manner? Ford isn’t someone you want to piss off. Maddy here’s a nurse, but I don’t think she has her doctor bag with her.”
    That did seem to calm Lytton down. At