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me. It’s possible. It might be she was frightened by the attack. She looked around once and then darted up the stairs and disappeared from view over the top.
    During the junkie’s jelly-slide down the stairs, a teenager shouted, a boy who worked at the marina’s gas pumps. He ran to the purse-snatcher heaped at the foot of the stairs and reached him before I did.
    Other people neared, still pointing at the man and asking their friends questions. They kept several feet away from him, however, as if the purse-snatcher carried the plague.
    “Did you see what happened?” the teenager asked me as I knelt beside the man.
    The teenager wore flip-flops and long tan shorts that went past his knees. He had a shaved head and a ghost of a mustache. I thought he’d look better with them the other way around. I couldn’t remember his name, but I knew he worked at the marina. He was a polite youth who spent a lot of time wondering if he should get a tattoo.
    Like me, he knelt by the unconscious purse-snatcher, maybe thinking about CPR or whether we should move the man and risk damaging his spinal cord. The thief had horrible acne and his skin was much too white. He also radiated a strong odor. He looked thirty, but was probably in his early twenties. Blood poured from his nose. It spread over his mouth and chin, and dripped into the hollow of his throat.
    I kept telling myself Kay had done that to him. She’d done it with a single, openhanded blow. Maybe as impressive, she hadn’t lost her balance as he’d tugged her purse from two steps down. The thief was taller and despite his wasted body, he likely weighed more than she did. As he’d grabbed her purse, Kay should have lost her balance or at least fought to retain it. Her ability didn’t make sense. Ability …didn’t she say she had new ones?
    The junkie groaned as he lay on the cement, and his eyelids flickered.
    “Is he going to be all right?” the teenager asked me.
    The junkie opened bloodshot eyes and touched his nose. When he got a good look at his gory hand, he screamed. He struggled to sit up. There was something juiced-up about him. He climbed to his feet and swayed unsteadily. Then, bent over, leaving a trail of wet red drops, he staggered away.
    I stood up and debated following him. Sometimes the Shop was tricky. Watching him stagger convinced me he was the real thing, however, a failed purse-snatcher.
    “Should we help him?” the teenager asked.
    “He almost pulled a woman down the steps,” I said. “Maybe he’s learned his lesson.”
    People watched him leave. One woman was on her cell phone. She told her friend, “I’m calling the police.”
    That was my cue to slip away. Cops, government agents, IRS accountants: I trusted none of them.
    I heard traffic noises and saw mass movement as I reached the top of the stairs. This near Fisherman’s Wharf at noon meant mobs of tourists on the sidewalks. They were packed with kids on skateboards, tanned men on rollerblades and various vendors hawking caricature drawings, tarot readings and spray-painted signs. The musicians were spread farther apart from each other, although each had a hat or a tin can on the ground for donations. The crowds were always thickest around the musicians as tourists stopped to watch and listen.
    Kay moved with the general flow of people. There were two main streams, each surging past the other in the opposite direction. I lost her at times as I followed from a distance and she often moved in front of taller individuals.
    Each time a streetlight turned green, masses of vehicles sped by. Most were tourists hunting for parking. For thirty bucks, sometimes less, a person could park his car for the day in various lots. Or he could park on the nearby streets and use the parking meters. The city meters only accepted an hour charge, however, meaning a tourist had to run back to his car and pay again for another hour or face a nearly certain traffic violation. The city needed money like