Five

April's eyes were closed. When she'd gone down like a wet noodle, the back of her head smacked the sidewalk hard. Two explosions went off at once. Her skull, like a baseball connecting with a bat. Her lungs, already screaming for air, further deflated on impact. April was no character out of a cartoon flattened by a steamroller who bounces right back. Uh-uh. All her training went for nothing that night. She didn't fight right. She didn't fall right. And when she fell, an evil dragon snatched the breath right out of her and flew away with it.

Seconds passed. She wanted to say, "I'm okay," get up, find her shoes, and get out of there. But her chest didn't rise. Her lungs didn't fill. There was commotion all around. She also had the sensation of a large animal, some beast from Chinese mythology, circling her body, breathing on her hotly. Marking her. She would have avoided that beast at any cost. But the grip of death held her as strongly as if her attacker still had her by the neck. She could not catch that breath the dragon had stolen.

The weight of defeat crushed her, and she could feel herself letting go. The next thing she knew was the screaming agony of air forced into her lungs. And Mike was talking her back into the world.

"Come on, querida. You're okay. You're okay." He said it over and over. "You're okay. You're okay."

Irritation filled her. What the hell did he know about that? She was not okay.

"You're okay," he said again.

A memory filtered through the black. April had heard those words her first year on the job when she'd been in uniform on foot patrol in Brooklyn. She'd just come on duty when there was a radio call of a shooting nearby. There, at the improbable hour of eight a.m., a young mother and her child on their way to nursery school had walked into a dispute between two males-what cops called a fight. April and her partner had been the first uniforms on the scene. They'd found the woman sitting on the sidewalk cradling her dead child in her arms, crooning, "You're okay. You're okay."

"You're okay," Mike told her in the same voice, then "Mirame." Look at me. As if he needed proof.

She didn't want to look at him. She wanted to float away on the cloud that had come for her. But her mother, the Skinny Dragon, reminded her that the heavens were the territory of angry ghosts and dragons. If she died right now, she would not be so lucky as to fly away with the harps and angels.

Did you get him? She formed the words, but no sound came out. The dragon that stole her breath had kept her voice.

Mike whispered in her ear. "The ambulance is here. We're moving you. You did good, querida; he didn't break your neck. You're going to be fine."

That line they always used finally opened April's eyes, and she came back to the horror of being a vic, lying on the ground. Somebody's jacket under her head. Probably Mike's. Poppy Bellaqua was holding her hand. She may not have a broken neck like her boss, but she knew she hadn't done good, not at all. Chief Avise was standing above them, arms crossed over his chest, shaking his head at her. She'd messed up.

Six

Aieeyyee." Sai Yuan Woo hit the ceiling when Mike came to tell her that her only child was in the hospital again. The shriek said it all. Last time shot in head. What now?

The skinny dragon that was April's mother could wake the dead with that scream. She wouldn't stop long enough to listen when Mike tried to explain what happened or why he'd come at the early hour of five a.m. He'd come at that time for multiple reasons. He'd wanted April to benefit from a few hours of sleep before the assault of her parents. But he had to come before anyone in the sizable Chinese extended family claimed by the Woos was up watching TV. They didn't have any actual blood relatives left, but the large circle of friends and acquaintances from the villages of another world called each other sisters and uncles and cousins and thought of themselves as such. This prodigious fake family watched the local news twenty-four/ seven, always on the lookout for trouble.

Skinny Dragon Mother would never have forgiven Mike if she'd heard that April was in the hospital from someone who'd seen the story on the morning news. It was his job to tell her before anyone else. He'd let them sleep as long as possible, but he himself had pretty much worked all night.

Mike had a reason for staying up all night. Alfredo Bernardino had been overweight and in poor condition. The attack on him was bad enough. But a second nearly fatal attack only a few minutes later on a black-belt champion in the middle of Washington Square added a few lethal details to the story. The killer was not just lucky. He was highly skilled and fearless. The man was a trained killer who could break a man's neck in the blink of an eye. Damn right he'd been up all night talking to Bernardino's children and getting organized.

Now he wasn't in the mood to listen to Skinny Dragon Mother yell bloody murder at him in Chinese. Never mind that he was telling her April was fine. Skinny screamed so loud she woke her husband, Ja Fa Woo, a chef in a fancy Manhattan restaurant who'd just gone to sleep a few hours ago.

Muttering in Chinese, he stumbled out of the bedroom wearing shorts and a T-shirt with the logo of Midtown North on it, April's precinct.

Skinny, who was dressed in black pants and a thin padded jacket, spun around to her husband and screamed at him for a while. He screamed back. At least he could understand her. Mike didn't interrupt what sounded to him like a dogfight. Finally Ja Fa Woo acknowledged him.

" 'Lo, Mike. What happen?" he asked.

In the early days of their courting, whenever Mike came by to see April, her father used to lean over and spit on the ground. But now he bobbed his head in respect. Mike was an important man. Almost son, so he gave him an almost bow in the middle of his wife's tirade.

Mike bowed back and went through the story again, because Skinny always got her facts mixed up.

"Somebody dead?" Ja Fa asked.

"Yes, somebody is dead. But not April." Some other cop. Her old boss. Mike left that out. "April is fine. Just a little shaken up."

"Then why in hospital?" Ja Fa demanded.

"Aieeeyee!" At the word hospital Skinny's wail went up again.

"Something wrong?" Gao Wan, the Woo's upstairs tenant, padded into the kitchen. He, too, was wearing a T-shirt and shorts.

Mike repeated his sanitized version of the story. The three of them conferred in Chinese while Mike stood there trying to reassure them. As expected, his worst fears were realized when they insisted that he drive them to St. Vincent's immediately because they had no other way of getting to the hospital fast enough to suit them, then drive them back to Queens when they were ready to come home.

Mike nodded. "I'll get you there and back," he promised. Of course he would. And April would kill him for bringing them. With the Woos he couldn't win. Either the parents would be furious because he didn't do enough, or April would be furious because he did too much. Today, because he'd almost lost her, he would err on the doing too much.

Mother, father, and tenant ended their discussion and disappeared to get dressed and collect important items for April. Immediate action for them took a long time. The minutes spun out into a very long wait. It was an hour and a half before they squeezed into his wheezing Camaro for the trip into Manhattan.