City of Sins. Daniel Blake

corridor, back flat against the wall.

      The intruder’s shadow was moving slowly across the living-room floor.

      Toward Patrese.

      Patrese raised the Glock, sighting down the barrel in the gloom, and flicked the safety catch off.

      The noise of the catch wasn’t much, but it was enough. The intruder’s own gun spat flame twice, the reports shockingly loud in the night stillness, and Patrese was firing back through sheer reflex, quicker than thought: certainly quicker than the realization that the warm wetness and dull pain in his right bicep meant he’d been hit.

      His right hand was numb. He switched the Glock to his left, trying to see beyond the dancing orange starbursts in his vision, retinal imprints of the muzzle flashes.

      The intruder turned tail, sprinting back out of the house like a scalded cat. Gritting his teeth against the gathering pain in his arm, Patrese gave chase.

      A motorbike engine rasped into life outside. Patrese burst through the screen door, knowing he was too late. The bike was already fifty yards away, fishtailing slightly as it headed up alongside the canal wall toward the lake.

      No rear plate, Patrese saw. Not that it made much difference; he’d have needed eagle eyes to read numbers on a moving target at that distance in the dark.

      No point in giving chase, either. By the time he’d got his car keys and persuaded his ageing Trans Am to start, the bike would be halfway to Baton Rouge.

      Next door, Wetzel came tearing out of his house.

      ‘Franco? You OK? Man, you need me to take a look at that arm of yours.’

      Wetzel hadn’t had time to call the cops, Patrese realized. He must have just heard the shots and come right on out in the middle of the night, with no heed for his own safety. Stand-up guy.

      Patrese winced as Wetzel checked his arm over, humming to himself.

      ‘Lot of blood here, man,’ he said at last, ‘but just a flesh wound. Passed straight through the fleshy part of your arm. Missed your muscles by, oh, about six feet.’

      Patrese laughed. Charity Hospital’s doctors were, through grim necessity, the very best in America at dealing with gunshot wounds. Army doctors regularly did some of their battlefield training there.

      ‘Probably find the bullet somewhere in your plasterwork,’ Wetzel added.

      ‘Cameron, can I borrow your phone?’

      ‘Sure. You lost yours?’

      ‘Not at all. But my house is now a crime scene. I can’t go back inside till the CSI boys have been round.’

      ‘At this time of night? The neighbors are going to love you.’

      It was dawn by the time the crime-scene techs had been and gone, and Wetzel was wrong: their neighbors didn’t much care, since half of them seemed to have been out partying at the time Patrese had been attacked. What else were they going to be doing on a summer Saturday night in New Orleans?

      Patrese could, perhaps should, have been partying too, but instead he’d gotten an early night; officially because he thought there might be some advancement in the Cindy/Rooster case at any moment, and unofficially because he still wasn’t sure how well he was fitting in here in New Orleans.

      That Southerners were different was an old cliché, but, like most clichés, it was so because it was true. Patrese had wanted a break from Pittsburgh, but now he was gone, he was beginning to remember all the things he loved about it. On a July night in New Orleans, with the thermometer never getting below eighty, he felt himself hankering for those Pittsburgh February days when the air’s so cold it feels like it’ll tear the skin from your face, for the rough grumpiness of people trudging round in six layers and still shivering. New Orleans loved people, and people loved New Orleans; but a city that was special to everyone was special to no one. Pittsburgh would always be Patrese’s; New Orleans never would.

      He’d rung Selma to tell her what had happened, and she’d come round; just in time to see the crime-scene techs find the bullet which had passed through Patrese’s arm, and another which must have just missed him. Both of them embedded in the corridor wall, and both of them 40-caliber rimless Smith & Wesson.

      ‘As used by the NOPD,’ Selma had said.

      ‘And the FBI,’ Patrese had replied.

      And half the criminals in New Orleans too, they knew. If law enforcement rated a piece of ordnance, it was never long before the bad guys followed suit.