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rose limping to plunge back through the cordon that lay between him and Sally Price.
    Where was she?!
    There! There she was, on the trolley!
    She sat hindmost in a sandwich of commuters on the bottom level of a double-truck, a mousy woman almost smiling.
    “All aboard.”
    Jack limped toward the two-decker streetcar. A pedestrian cut him off. Damn near knocked him down, in fact.
    “HEY, BUDDY!” Jack challenged, but the guy just sailed past him, bounding like a goddamned deer from the sidewalk onto the streetcar.
    He was tall, this late boarder, and blond. A boutonnière fixed gaily to his vest. A new derby hat and spats.
    Their eyes met for a moment. Distant. Fleeting. But then wires sizzled overhead and Jack was still a stone’s throw away as the car began its clatter up the gentle grade toward Vine Street.
    “HOLD THE CAR!”
    Jack now charging past the chilli-dog cart. The trolley was pulling away, gathering speed—!
    “DRIVER! HOOOOOOLD UP!”
    But the electric car clacked away noisily, accelerating uphill.
    “JESUS, HOLD UP!”
    Sally turned to see a man running up the tracks, his shouts muted by the racket of wheels and rails. He looked silly back there, like Charlie Chaplin. A handsome man holding his knee in a run for the trolley!
    For a moment it seemed he might even make it. A final sprint drew Jack almost within reach of the car.
    “SOMEBODY—GIVE ME—!” he gasped at a dead run.
    But then he stumbled.
    Sally laughed out loud when she saw Jack’s comic spill, the hands splayed out to break that awkward fall onto the pavement, the Charlie Chaplin hat flying off that otherwise handsome head. Sally wasn’t the only one amused by Romaine’s painful spill. Passengers widely separated by class and income and prospects joined her hoots of derision in a shared moment of Schadenfreude. And why not? The man pulling himself off the asphalt had to be a klutz. A loser.
    Prob’ly drunk, Sally was thinking. And anyway—
    He had nothing to do with her.
    Laughter trailed down the tracks, sharp and brittle. But there was one passenger who did not share the moment. The blonde man in spats did not laugh. It was not that he had missed the antics of the fellow running to catch the trolley. No, indeed. The tall, blond passenger with the boutonnière had noticed Jack as he leapt from the street to catch Number 78. He noticed Jack just as he noticed everything on the grounds outside the prison and on the street. But Romaine’s predicament was not an object of humor for this gentleman, nor even of curiosity. Arno Becker’s peculiar attentions were focused instead on the woman he had followed from prison. She had a strident laugh, he noted. Too much scalp showing for her years. And her mouth was smeared with chilli.
    Jack Romaine raised himself on knees scraped raw, craning to spot Sally among the passengers in the trolley that clack-clack-clacked up the hill. His shouted curse died long before it reached the ears of anyone aboard. Already, passengers were returning to their newspapers and cinnamon buns, their interest in Jack’s spill waning well ahead of his shouted profanity.
    Sally’s attention, certainly, was already shifted, leaning against her woolen bag to face the damp breeze drafted by the trolley’s steady transport. She was savoring her new freedom at the car’s uncanvassed window, eager to feel the river’s air against her face. To smell its moldy aroma. Admiring the view of the Ohio, imagining herself installed on one of the shaded lawns banking that languid water-course, or sipping tea in those well-made houses whose floors and toilets she used to scrub, those homes that, until recently, she could never hope to own.
    The fifty bucks burning a hole in her rude purse? Was chump change compared to the reward to come; Alex had promised. A payoff for keeping her lips sealed.
    So many things on Sally’s mind, a maelstrom of competing emotions, expectations, and concerns. Arno Becker, on the other hand, was