Here’s the morning line, bunk: The three of them have their hooks into you deep and they haven’t even met you yet. By now, they’ve marked your blood trail out of the bathroom and down the second-floor stairs. They’re already on a Northwest patrolman’s radio, asking citywide to have area hospital admissions checked for stabbing and cutting victims. They’re working back on the Fullard brothers, learning who they hang with and who hangs with them. They got your number good.

If you understood that, if you understood anything about how they work, you might have caught a cab and gone to a hospital out in the county. At the very least, you might have come up with some story a little better than that garbage you gave the admitting nurse. Cut your hand climbing a fence, you told her. One of those chain-link jobs over by the middle school off Park Heights. Yeah, right: You slipped.

But anyone can see that the cut didn’t come from no fence. Not when it’s that deep and that straight. You think that’ll play? You think the police who has just walked up to the nurses station is going to believe such weak shit?

“Landsman, from homicide,” the cop tells the charge nurse, looking your way. “Is this the one?”

You’re not about to panic or anything. They still don’t know shit: You made sure both those bad boys were dead. You ditched the knife. You didn’t leave witnesses. You’re good to go.

“Lemme see your hand,” says the cop in the leather jacket.

“Cut it on a fence.”

He checks your palm for a good ten seconds. Then he looks at the blood on your coat sleeve.

“The fuck you did.”

“I ain’t lyin’.”

“You cut it on a fence?”

“Yeah.”

“What fence?”

You tell him what fence. Motherfucker, you think, he don’t believe I got brains enough to think of a fence.

“Yeah,” he says, looking right at you. “I know where that is. Let’s go there and see.”

See? See what?

“You’re bleeding like a stuck pig,” he tells you. “There better be some blood around the fence, right?”

Blood around the fence? You didn’t think of that and he knows you didn’t think of it.

“No,” you hear yourself say. “Wait.”

Yeah, he’s waiting. He’s standing there in the Sinai emergency room listening to your little world crumble. Now he’s calling you a lying motherfucker, telling you that it won’t take but a couple hours before they match the blood stains on that stairwell to the blood staining the new bandage on your hand. You didn’t think of that either, did you?

“Okay, I was there,” you say. “But I didn’t kill them.”

“Oh yeah?” says the cop. “Who did?”

“A Jamaican.”

“What’s his name?”

Think it through, bunk. Think it through. “I don’t know his name. But he cut me, too. He said he’d kill me too if I said anything about him.”

“He told you that. When did he tell you that?”

“He drove me to the hospital.”

“He drove you here?” he asks. “He kills them, but he only cuts you and then gives you a lift to the hospital.”

“Yeah. I ran away at first, but…”

He looks away, asking the resident if he’s ready to discharge you. The cop looks back at you, smiling strangely. If you knew him, if you knew anything, then you’d know that he’s already laughing at you. He’s made you for a murdering little shitbird, tossing you into this year’s pile with about a hundred others. The Fullard brothers, crimson and rigored in the morning light of their bedrooms, are already black names on Jay Landsman’s section of the board.

You ride downtown to headquarters in a cage car, clinging to that story of yours, thinking that you can still pull this off. You’re thinking-if it can be called thinking-that you can somehow get them to believe in a mystery Jake who cut your hand and drove you to Sinai.

“Tell me about this Jamaican,” says the older, white-haired detective after dumping you in one of the lockboxes. “What’s his name?”

He sits across the table from you, staring at you with those blue eyes like some kind of walrus.

“I only know his street name.”

“So? What is it?”

And you give it up. A real street name for a real Jake, a homeboy in his late twenties who you know lives maybe a block or so from the Fullards. Yeah, you’re thinking now, bunk. You’re giving them just enough to be real, not enough for them to work with.

“Hey, Tom,” says the white-haired detective, talking to the younger cop who came into the box with him. “Let me get with you for a second.”

You can see their shadows on the other side of the one-way window in the interrogation room, watch them talking in the corridor outside. The old walrus walks away. The doorknob turns and the younger police, the Italian, comes back with pen and paper.

“I’m going to take your statement,” he says. “But first, I need to advise you of these rights…”

The cop talks and writes slowly, giving you time to get the story straight. You were over there getting high with Ronnie and his brother, you tell him. Then they invited the Jamaican in, and a little later there was an argument. No one saw the Jake go into the kitchen and come out with a knife. But you saw him use that knife to kill Ronnie, then Ronnie’s brother. You tried to grab the knife but got cut and ran away. Later, when you were walking home, the Jamaican drove up and told you to get in his car. He told you his beef was with the other two, that he wouldn’t mess with you as long as you kept your mouth shut.

“That’s why I lied about the fence at first,” you tell him, looking at the floor.

“Hmmm,” the young cop says, still writing.

And then the white-haired walrus is back in the room, carrying a black-and-white mug shot-a photograph of the Jamaican kid whose street name you gave up not ten minutes earlier.

“Is this the guy?” he asks you.

Christ. Goddamn. You can’t believe it.

“That’s him, ain’t it?”

“No.”

“You’re a lying piece of shit,” says the walrus. “That’s the guy you described and he lives right at the corner house you described. You’re pissing up my leg here.”

“No, that’s not him. It’s another guy looks like him…”

“You thought we wouldn’t even know who you were talking about, didn’t you?” he says. “But I used to work that area. I’ve known the family you’re talking about for years.”

The man gets a street name and comes back ten minutes later with a fucking photograph. You can’t believe it, but you don’t know about the walrus, about the memory he carries around like a weapon. You don’t know or you wouldn’t have said a word.

Months from now, when an assistant state’s attorney gets her hands on this case, she’ll be told by the head of her trial team that it’s a sure loser, that it’s a circumstantial prospect. Which might give you a little hope if the names on the prosecution report were anything other than Worden and Landsman and Pellegrini. Because Worden will pull rank to make a direct appeal to the head of the trial division, and Pellegrini will brief the ASA on just how this case can be won. And in the end it will be Landsman on the stand in Bothe’s court, sliding everything but the kitchen sink past your public defender, packing every answer with so much background and speculation and hearsay that at one point you’ll actually turn and look at your own lawyer in dismay. In the end, it won’t matter that the trace lab let every blood sample putrefy before the trial, and it won’t matter that the prosecutors argued against taking the case, and it won’t matter when you take the stand to tell the jury that horseshit about your murdering Jamaican. It won’t matter, because from the very moment you picked up that kitchen knife, they owned you. And if you don’t know that now, then you’ll know it when your lawyer snaps his briefcase shut and tells you to stand and swallow double-life consecutive from an irritated Elsbeth Bothe.

But now, right now, you’re still fighting it; you’re working hard to remain the very picture of tormented innocence in that lockbox. You didn’t kill them, you plead when the wagon man comes with the cuffs, the Jamaican did it. He killed them both; he cut your hand. On the way to the elevators, you scan the hallway and the office inside, staring at the men who are doing this to you: the white-haired cop; the younger, dark-haired one; the sergeant who leaned on you at the hospital-all three of them now certain and sure. You’re still shaking your head, pleading, trying hard to look like a victim. But what could you possibly know about being a victim?