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River Parkway, I decided, as I peeled out into the wet street once again.
    Back down in the real Bronx. The one without the
ville.
    After hammering it down the parkway for ten minutes, I noticed that the center-doored colonials that bookended the parkway had been replaced by less quaint, gritty tenements. Steve McQueen would have been proud of the fishtailing stop I made before I ran into the ER entrance of Our Lady of Mercy on East 233rd Street.
    I heard vociferous complaints as I cut to the head of the long triage line in the packed, grimy waiting room.
    “Have you had any anonymous beating victims in the last hour?” I yelled to the first nurse I could find.
    She replaced the bloody dish towel over the barbecue fork stuck in the hand of the Hispanic woman beside her before she looked up.
    “He’s in three,” she said, annoyed. “Who the hell are you?”
    More shouts followed me as I rushed through the open door behind her. I found number 3 and ripped back the green plastic curtain around it.
    “Ever hear a knockin’, bitch?” a near-naked black kid asked me in a malevolent tone as he attempted to cover himself with the hand not cuffed to the bed rail. A big white bandage was wrapped around his head, and a big white uniformed cop was sitting by his feet.
    I felt something shift ominously in my stomach.
    If Scott wasn’t here, I thought . . .
    Then where the hell was he? And where was Paul?
    “Yo, Earth to lady,” the Bronx uniform said to me with a snap of his fingers. “What’s up?”
    I was fumbling for a lie when I heard two loud beeps cut from the static of his radio.
    He ignored me for a moment as he turned it up. The words were too garbled for me to catch everything, but I heard something about a white male victim, along with an address.
    St. James Park. Fordham Road and Jerome Avenue.
    White male? I thought. No way. Impossible. Had to be a coincidence.
    I closed my gaping mouth as the cop directed his suspicious stare back at me.
    “So you’re saying this isn’t where I hand in my urine sample?” I said, backing away.
    Minutes later I was flooring it, heading south down the Bronx River Parkway. I’d just swing by, I told myself as I rocketed off at the Fordham Road exit. No biggie. It was almost stupid, really. Because Scott couldn’t be at some Bronx crime scene. Because he was right now at a hospital, being treated for some cuts and bruises. Minor cuts and bruises, I reminded myself.
    I rolled west up Fordham Road. I passed under a sign above a broken streetlight that proclaimed, “The Bronx Is Back.” Where had it been? I thought, staring at the steel-shuttered Spanish clothing stores interrupted by the occasional Popeye’s Fried Chicken or Taco Bell.
    I made a hard right onto Jerome Avenue.
    And slammed on the Mini’s brakes with both feet.

Chapter 16
    I’D NEVER SEEN SO MANY NYPD cop cars in one place. They were on the sidewalk, under the elevated track, parked like a wagon train in St. James, a block-square concrete park. Every one of their blue and red and yellow lights was flying full throttle. There was so much yellow crime-scene tape, it looked like Christo had decided to do a yellow-and-black installation in the Bronx.
    Keep going, a voice whispered in the back of my mind. Some ER doctor is sewing Scott’s stitches right at this very moment. Or, who knew? Maybe Paul had already dropped him back at his place.
    Get out of this wretched place right now. You’ll get into trouble, big trouble, if you stay here.
    But I couldn’t go. I needed to be sure. I needed to act responsibly. Starting right now.
    I rolled directly toward the commotion.
    The thin, silver-haired cop directing traffic around the light show gave me a look of eye-boggled shock as I stopped my car almost on top of him.
    He was reaching for his cuffs when I opened the door and all but fell out of my car. When I went into my handbag, he changed his mind and went for his Glock instead.
    But then I took it out.
    Took out