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Hospital. Someone tried to rob The Point and the crazy old
goat tried to stop them—and he almost did."
    "Only almost?"
    "Only almost."

Chapter 2
    "T he
years, I saw the years," Spike muttered, his brown eyes
glazed and unfocused, incapable of seeing anything.
"Years."
    "I know, Uncle Spike, I
know," Tess said, patting his hand. But she didn't
know. The years must be his life, fifty-some years in all, passing
before his eyes. The cliché was a good sign, she decided.
Surely, if death were near, one could be allowed a little originality.
    "The years."
    Spike's face was mottled and
crisscrossed with tiny cuts, the liver spots that gave him a slight
resemblance to a springer spaniel overwhelmed by vivid purple-red
bruises. Only his pointy bald head, rising above the fringe of brown
hair, was still white and unblemished.
    "Years," he muttered.
    "I found him?" said
Tommy, the dishwasher from Spike's bar, who framed almost
every thought as if it were a question. This wishy-washy tendency,
combined with his thick Baltimore accent and talent for malaprops, made
him virtually incomprehensible to anyone but Spike. "About
two hours ago? I came by to get ready for the Monday night crowd? I was
going to peel some hard-berled eggs because the new cook
didn't show up, being so lacks-a-daisy as he is?"
    "A robbery?" Tess had
not meant this as a question, but Tommy's inflections were
contagious.
    "Yeah, a robbery, but we
don't have much money on Mondays, not once pro football is
over? That's why they got their dandruff up? They beat him to
a pulp?"
    Tommy was right: Uncle Spike looked like a
plum gone bad, or a skinned, mashed tomato. Who did this to an old man?
But Tess knew. Amateurs. Kids. Idiots, the kind of crooks who were
giving crime a bad name. They didn't know from hold-up
etiquette, which said you didn't kill a guy in a tavern
robbery, and you certainly didn't try to beat him to death.
You didn't rob taverns at all, in fact, for the owner usually
had a sawed-off shotgun under the bar, especially if he had a
flourishing side business as a bookie. Spike had the side business,
Spike had the shotgun. Why hadn't he been able to get to it
in time?
    "Numbers," he cried
weakly, as if he, too, were thinking of his bets, which produced far
more income than the bar. And then he said nothing, eyes fluttering
closed.
    They remained frozen in this
tableau—Tess holding Spike's hand, Tommy on the
other side of the bed, rocking nervously, arms wrapped around his
body—until a young doctor came in and asked them to leave.
    Tommy, all ninety-five pounds of him,
insisted on walking Tess to her car for her protection. There were
frozen puddles in the lot and the promise Tess had sensed earlier in
the evening was gone. March, with its morning rains and wintry nights,
suddenly seemed as bitter as baking chocolate.
    "He has something for
you?" Tommy began, tentative even by his standards.
"Back at the bar? Before the paramedics took him, he said to
make sure to get it to you?"
    "He doesn't expect me to
run the bar, does he?"
    Tommy cackled and cackled, bent over double
at the thought of Tess running The Point, Spike's bar.
Between sputtering laughs, he even managed a whole string of
declarative sentences.
    "No, not the bar. But
it's at the bar.
C'mon now, and I'll give it to you. But follow me,
okay? I got a special shortcut?"
    They left St. Agnes Hospital and drove
through Southwest Baltimore to her uncle's place, using back
streets. Highways were seldom the fastest way to get anywhere in
Baltimore, at least not east to west, but Tommy's shortcut
seemed to be an unusually circuitous route, approaching The Point
through the winding roads of Leakin Park.
    The Point was dark, shuttered for the night,
shuttered forever, perhaps. Tommy took Tess in the back way, through
the kitchen—the kitchen where she had eaten her first french
fry, her first onion ring, her first mozzarella stick, even her first
stuffed jalapeño. Those had been the base of
Spike's