I kicked back, hard, hit the shin, felt the hands slacken and jerked away. Bernie was on the ground, a hulk of a kid on top of her. I jumped on his head, cracked it against the sidewalk, kicked his kidneys. Two punks grabbed me but Bernie wriggled free.

“Run. Get to the train!”

Passersby were scattering. No one wanted to be part of a gang fight.

Bernie took off down the street and I kicked, punched, shouted, took a heavy blow to the stomach, ducked one to the head. I was gasping for air, kicking, lunging. I was nearly spent. Keep fighting until there’s no fight left.

A spotlight swept the street, found us.

“Stop what you’re doing. Hands in the air.” A police loudspeaker.

The blows stopped. The two punks hesitated and then took off across the open ground. I leaned over, hands on my knees, gulping in air. My nose was bleeding and my left eye was swelling shut.

The patrol unit came over, guns out. Bernie Fouchard ran past them and flung herself against me.

ROAD TEST

“Vic, Vic, you’re okay.”

I stood, wincing as my wounds hit me, folded her against me. “I’m okay, better now you’re safe.”

“I was so scared, I was afraid they would kill you and find me and kill me. But I ran in the street and found a police car. You’re not okay, you’re bleeding into my hair, I can feel it.”

I kept her close to me, bleeding nose or not. One of the officers started talking to his lapel mike, the other shone a flash across the vacant lot, then at the punk whose head I’d jumped on.

“What happened here?” The officer knelt, fingers on the creep’s neck, feeling for a pulse.

“Three punks jumped us. This one had my goddaughter on the ground. I managed to break free long enough to get him off her. Is he dead?”

“Nope. Pity. He’s an Insane Dragon, you can tell by the tattoos.”

Under his floodlight I saw the dragons circling the creep’s arms. He even had a dragon head on his neck, the tongue licking toward an ear.

“You need a doctor, but we need a statement, too,” the cop added.

Three more squad cars pulled up, half-blocking Commercial, their strobes pulsing like so many giant fireflies. Three officers picked their way through the rubble in the vacant lot. One of them stood in the road, directing traffic around the squad cars. Now that the police were here, passersby were starting to gather, to murmur versions of the fight to each other.

Two officers kept an eye on the growing crowd: there might be any number of Insane Dragons eager to take action against someone who’d brought down one of their own.

An SUV pulled up behind the squad car and Vince Bagby came over to the sidewalk. “Christ, Warshawski. You get involved in World War Three?”

“Sorry, sir, this is a crime— Oh, Vince—it’s you. Hey, man. You know her?”

“Boom-Boom Warshawski’s cousin, Knute. She was just at our Say, Yes! meeting with this young lady. That your Mustang that got slashed out front, Warshawski? That sucks. You should’ve come back and gotten me to give you gals a lift. This street isn’t safe after dark, you should know that.”

Vince’s arrival moved the police machinery a bit faster. Within a couple of minutes, Bernie and I were in the back of a squad car, heading to the Fourth District. The responding unit wanted to take us straight to a hospital, but I knew what that would mean: a long night in an ER far from home. I promised we would get to a doctor as soon as we were back north.

Neither Conrad nor my dad’s old crony, Sid, was on duty this evening, which meant we gave our statements without a lot of extraneous name-calling or chitchat. A sergeant brought me an ice pack for my eye and nose, and reiterated the responding unit’s urgent recommendation that I get medical attention. There are legal reasons for that aside from humanitarian ones: if either Bernie or I had serious injuries from the attack, it upped the charges against the Insane Dragon and his buddies. It also made the state’s case stronger in court.

Bagby hung around the station until we were done, telling Knute he would drive us home. I didn’t like it; I would like to have had a cast-iron assurance neither he nor Scanlon—or Thelma or Cardenal—had played a role in slashing my tires as a prelude to assault. However, Knute accepted the offer gladly. Spring nights in South Chicago, they could ill afford sending a squad car twenty miles across town to deliver us.

During the drive, Bagby tried to make conversation, but I was phoning: Lotty, to let her know we were coming to her hospital’s emergency room; Mr. Contreras, who was predictably distressed; Jake, ditto, although less volubly, and finally, hardest call, Bernie’s parents.

“We’re going to pack you up and send you back to Quebec tomorrow,” I said to Bernie as I typed in the Fouchards’ number.

“No! I’m not going.”

“Cara, I endangered your life tonight— Arlette? Hi. It’s V. I. Warshawski in Chicago . . . Not so good. I took Bernie with me to Boom-Boom’s and my old neighborhood, which is serious gang turf. We were attacked and we were lucky—”

Bernie leaned over from the backseat and grabbed the phone from me. “Maman? C’est moi.” The conversation went on in French, which I don’t speak.

“Out of curiosity, what were you doing at Say, Yes!?” Bagby asked.

“Admiring Scanlon’s organizational ability,” I said. “Energetic guy. Runs the insurance agency, keeps tabs on the kids, helps out Nina Quarles’s law clients while she’s scavenging rags in Paris.”

“You may be beat up, but you keep your sense of humor. I admire that,” Vince said. “Rory’s a good guy. Never married, gives everything to the community.”

We were on the Ryan, all sixteen lanes moving at headlong speed. Bagby was a good driver; all those years wrestling trucks into submission, he could talk and maneuver around knots of cars without losing track of either.

I leaned back against the headrest, holding the ice pack the cops had given me against my face. Lotty had been brusque on the phone, but she agreed to get me priority seating at the hospital. You’re safe? The child is safe? I’ll try to be thankful for that.

“Who’ll take over the agency when Scanlon retires?” I asked Bagby.

“Can’t imagine Scanlon quitting,” Bagby said. “As to who will take over the business, hard to know. I think he keeps hoping one of the kids he’s grooming in Say, Yes! will have the right combination of skills.”

“And your daughter Delphina will take over Bagby Haulage?”

“She’s got to stop thinking about boys and start thinking about business. Or maybe she’ll think about a boy who wants to go into trucking. How about you? You have a kid to take over your agency when you retire?”

“Nope. But maybe young Bernie will when she gets tired of hockey—she’s tough enough.”

“You have a husband who’s going to be shocked by your broken nose?”

“Are you asking whether I’m married, or whether my husband is shockable?” I said.

Vince laughed again. “Married?”

“No longer.”

Bernie handed me back the phone. She’d finished her conversation with her mother, but Arlette wanted to talk to me.

“Bernadine wants to stay in Chicago. Me, I say no. Pierre will fly to Chicago as soon as possible: he is scouting in Florida right now. But please, please do not let her go near these gang neighborhoods. I know she is imagining that she is—oh, what is the word, I don’t speak enough English anymore—where you imagine someone else’s spirit is living in you—”

“Channeling?” I suggested.

“Yes, yes. She thinks she is channeling Boom-Boom, but I cannot have her living the life you and Boom-Boom did. Comprends?”

“Yes, I agree, which is why I don’t want her to stay on.”

Bernie announced loudly from the backseat that she was fine, she had ras-le-bol with the discussion. Arlette and I finally bade each other an uneasy good-bye, neither of us happy with me or the situation.