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was no stranger to knuckles. His look was perfect for the job and he came highly recommended by Joe. They had been buddies back in the old LAPD days and had both left the force under less than sterling circumstances. I didn’t ask and they didn’t tell.
    “Lalo’s okay,” Joe told me with a smirk the day he introduced us, faking a punch to Malloy’s meaty shoulder. “For a Hispamick.”
    “A what?” I had asked.
    “His daddy was Irish,” Joe explained. “And mama’s Mexican. A Hispamick.”
    Malloy himself seemed neither amused nor annoyed by the joke. He just shrugged and put his big hands in his pockets.
    He’d been driving my girls for almost two months and I still didn’t really know him all that well. He wasn’t an easy guy to get to know. Came in, did his job and left. Solid, but not much for casual conversation. I felt really strange calling him in the middle of the night like this, but there just wasn’t anyone else. It took me several wrong numbers to get him on the line. He picked up on the first ring.
    “Malloy,” he said, like he was still answering the phone at the Homicide desk.
    I had no idea what the hell I was going to say to him.
    “Malloy,” I repeated, feeling like I had forgotten how to speak. “It’s... I...”
    “I’ll call you back,” he said suddenly and hung up.
    Baffled, I stared at the dirty blue receiver in my hand, then slowly put it back on the cradle. I leaned over the handle of the shopping cart and maybe grayed out for a little while, but then the phone rang, scaring me and making me jump. It hurt.
    “Malloy?” I said into the phone.
    “Angel,” he replied. I could hear traffic in the background. I figured he must have gotten the number off caller ID and then gone out to a payphone. “You wanna tell me what the hell is going on?”
    I felt suddenly sure I really was going to black out. What the hell was going on? I didn’t even know where to begin.
    “Angel,” Malloy was saying. “Angel, are you there?”
    I tried to tell Malloy about the blonde and the briefcase full of money and Jesse and the blue Civic. I can’t imagine I made much sense, but eventually Malloy got the gist of it.
    “Did you call an ambulance?” he asked.
    It took me a minute to answer that. Did I call an ambulance? Things were getting woozy and confusing and I just wanted to lie down.
    “Yeah,” I eventually said, or must have because then Malloy was telling me to get the hell away from the mercado, to hide from the ambulance.
    “Hide from the ambulance?” I said. Nothing seemed to make any sense. “But why...”
    “Angel,” Malloy said. “If you let them take you to the hospital, you’re going to be arrested for the murder of Sam Hammer.”

7.
    “Angel,” Malloy was saying again. “Angel.”
    His voice sounded so far away that I thought I was still on the phone until I felt his hands on me, wrapping a rough blanket around my body and lifting me like a tired kid. I have no idea how I got away from the phone and the mercado but I did. I also had no idea how Malloy found me, but he did. I’ve never been so happy to see anyone in my life. I would have kissed him if my lips hadn’t felt like I’d just kissed a belt sander. He bundled me into the passenger seat of his blocky old SUV.
    Things went all non-sequential and confusing again. The next thing that seemed solid was me in a doctor’s office. I was lying on one of those examination tables with the paper that rolls down to cover it fresh for each patient. There were stirrups, like at the gynecologist. My trash bag dress was gone and I was wearing one of those backless deals they give you in the hospital. I seemed relatively clean and odor-free, but the cacophony of pain made it hard to concentrate.
    I rolled on my side, briefly breathless from the effort. That’s when I noticed a tan leather locking restraint hanging from the nearest stirrup. I frowned and looked around.
    There were three other restraints hanging from