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“Still Chinatown…pretty sure.”

“Wherein Chinatown? Can you get to a window and look outside and give us some kind of landmark?”

Another silence. I was afraid the phone had gone dead again.

“’Kay,” he said.

He’d put my number in his phone the day I met him. I’d done the same with his. I never thought he’d need it like this. Or maybe I did.

I had him on speaker. We all stood there staring at my phone.

“Money,”Ryan yelled.“Where the hell are you?”

We all waited.

“Across from where I ate,” Billy McGee said finally.

Ryan said, “Are you at a window right now?”

“Yeah…but feel like I might be sick again.”

I said, “When you look outside, what do you see?”

A long pause. I thought he had gone off to be sick again.

“You guys,” he said.

We finally spotted him in a third-floor window across the street, waving feebly at us with one hand, the other to his face, shirtless, his chest and arms covered with all his tattoos, before he disappeared.

The three of us ran across Jackson and through an open door into an ancient brownstone, up the stairs to the third floor, yelling Billy’s name when we got up there.

Nothing at first.

Then: “Here.”

His voice was coming from 3F, a few feet up the hallway on our right.

I went in first, Ryan and Cantor right behind me. We all stopped when we had eyes on Billy McGee.

“Oh, no,” I said.

Eighty-Three

IT WAS ONE DINGY ROOM,a small bathroom attached to it. Billy McGee was on the bed, on his back.

His face was a bloody mess.

There was a bucket next to the bed, with empty vials and what I assumed was a crack pipe next to them on the small bedside table. A half-full bottle of tequila was at the other end of the bed, next to his bare feet. There was blood on the front of his jeans and even smeared across the tats on his chest and arms.

Cantor quietly said, “He cannot stay here. And you, Jenny, and you, Ryan, cannot be here.”

Billy McGee opened his eyes and raised his head a few inches with what looked to be all the strength he had in him and said, “Somebody…somebody did this.”

He grimaced and said, “Beat me up.”

I looked at Ryan Morrissey, who did look as if he wanted to be anywhere on the planet except here.

“Coach…” Billy said through swollen lips,“…gotta believe me.”