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to make sure it was sturdy against the wall. Then he climbed the rungs. Slowly. One at a time. At the top rung, he could just barely see out the bottom of a big window. The kid, being a little taller, would have been able to see more. Shining his flashlight out the window, Gulliver saw enough. This back wall of the warehouse was no more than thirty feet from the water. And just beyond the concrete seawall was a dock.
    “What did you see here, Ellis Torres?” he whispered to himself. “What did you see?”
    He climbed down the ladder. He needed to see the area behind the warehouse in daylight. For that, he would need[inhohat happened some help. He sent a text message to Ahmed Foster. Ahmed was a night owl, but even owls were asleep by now. Gulliver didn’t expect an answer back until later in the morning. He got Ugly and headed back to Visitation Place.
    When he got upstairs, his old-fashioned answering machine was blinking red at him. It was Keisha’s answering machine. He could never bring himself to toss it. He pressed the Play button.
    “Gulliver, hi.” It was Mia. “I’m sure you’re sleeping. I just wanted to let you know I got home okay hours ago their horns.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
    U gly went out of his mind when he came into Ellis Torres’s room. He did flips. Ran circles around the kid’s bed. Squealed. Barked. Rolled over. Then the little mutt jumped all the way up onto the bed. The kid was just as happy to see Ugly. But Gulliver could tell that Ellis’s head still hurt.
    Concussions could be really serious stuff. Gulliver knew just how the kid felt. He had had two himself. Bad ones. He never wanted another. The last one had lasted a long time. He’d had a constant headache for weeks. His thinking was confused. His memory was spotty. His vision got blurry. And when he’d moved too quickly, he got sick to his stomach.
    It was amazing to watch the two of them together. It was easy to see why people loved dogs. Sometimes it was harder to see why dogs loved people. Not so with Ellis Torres and Ugly. They were a matched pair. The kid started crying as he squeezed the dog in his arms. But things went wrong when he began rocking back and forth with him. Ellis got sick all over the bed and the dog. Not even that bothered Ugly.
    Gulliver. Detective Patrick. Detective Rigo. They all stepped out in[. iother directionto the hallway while the nurses cleaned up the mess. The reunion between the kid and the dog had made Rigo a little less nasty. He even shook Gulliver’s hand hello.
    Patrick eyed the bandage on Gulliver’s forehead. “What happened to you?”
    “Fell down. Smacked my head. Ten stitches.”
    “Makes you look tough,” Rigo said.
    Gulliver joked, “I’d have to grow two feet to look tough.”
    “Not even then.” Patrick shook his head. “Not with that face. You’ve got the face of an angel.”
    “Well, I’m the right size.”
    They all laughed at that.
    “So does the kid remember anything else?” Gulliver asked.
    “It seems like he’s remembering something,” Patrick said.
    “But then he can’t seem to say it,” Rigo added.
    “I’ve gotten bonked on the head bad,” Gulliver told them. “It can really screw you up.”
    The nurses came out of the room and told the three men they could go back inside. An African-American nurse with rich black skin like Keisha’s pointed at them. “Don’t you let that boy get all excited again. You understand me? You do and I’ll make you clean up next time.”
    “Yes, ma’am,” they said as one, nodding their heads.
    They went back into the kid’s room. Ellis was sitting up in bed. He was rubbing Ugly’s belly.
    “Thank you for finding Ugly, mister,” he said to Gulliver. “And you got him all cleaned up and everything.”
    “Got him fixed up too,” said Dowd. “He got all kinds of shots and stuff to protect him.”
    The kid frowned. “But I got no way to pay you for—”
    “Don’t worry about that, Ellis. I was happy to do it for