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public information officer at home. He promised to do some digging, then called back with a bare-bones account. A BOLO (be on the lookout) had gone out for a stolen late-model Lincoln Mark VII. The driver was described as armed, dangerous, and fleeing a felony. Officers spotted a car fitting the description and tried to pull it over, but the driver fled at high speed. During the chase he lost it on a curve, crashed into a bridge abutment, and careened into a ditch. He was arrested for fleeing the police and sent to County Hospital for treatment of his injuries. Police confirmed the identity of the driver: D. Wayne Hudson, black male, aged thirty-eight. They had no information on his present condition, dead or alive.
    “What was the felony?” I asked. “Was there a gun? Was the car stolen?”
    “We have no further information at this time,” he said obliquely. “Try again in the morning.”
    Butterfly wings beating in my chest, I called D. Wayne’s home number. The last time I had seen him, he was speaking at a fundraiser for a halfway house for youthful offenders about to be paroled back into the community. He had been an earnest and eloquent advocate. His pretty wife, Alma, gracious and elegant in white silk, and their twin boys and baby girl were with him. How could D. Wayne have been dirty?
    A woman answered on the second ring. It was Alma’s sister. She was crying; it was true. Alma was at the hospital. A second brain scan had shown identical results, and they were about to pull the plug. All the sister knew was that there had been an accident. “Does he drive a Lincoln?” I asked gently.
    “Yes,” she answered, sounding puzzled by the question. At midnight I was able to get through to the intensive care waiting room. All Alma could tell me through her tears was that it was over. He was dead.
    We put a new top on the story minutes before the presses rolled at 1 A.M . Details of the accident were vague; why he’d tried to outrun police was unclear. Cause of death: pending an autopsy.
    The adrenaline rush of deadline was over, leaving me drained and dispirited. The high of the earlier story, the abduction at Suwannee Park Elementary, was gone. But I could go home, at last. Tubbs reminded me to come in early to follow the story. Even though I was the only passenger, the infuriatingly slow elevator still stopped on all five floors before sluggishly descending to the huge lobby where every sound echoed in the emptiness. I stepped out the back door and drank in the warm moist heat of the late summer night, the Miami Beach skyline stretching across the eastern horizon, lights reflected in dark water. Driving my five-year-old Thunderbird east across the causeway, I remembered promising to meet Lottie at the 1800 Club for a drink and some food. But that had been about eight o’clock. By now, she had surely given up on me and gone home.
    I was weary, I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and my panty hose were torn. I reminded myself to put an extra pair in my ladies’ room locker at the office, along with the change of clothes I always kept there. Billy Boots greeted me with eager mews as I unlocked my apartment door. He was hungry, too. I opened a can of chicken and liver cat food and spooned it into his dish. I wished dinner for me was as simple. The refrigerator yielded a bar of guava paste and a bowl of leftover picadillo covered with a fine, fuzzy mold. In the vegetable bin were a lone boniato and a mango, both withered and shriveled until one could not be distinguished from the other. I had forgotten to grocery shop again. The choice was either corn flakes or soup. Since I was out of milk I opted for the soup. The hour was too late and I was too tired to cook, so I ate it out of the can with a spoon as I listened to the messages on my telephone answering machine.
    Calls had come from my mother (“I know you’re always busy, Britt, but so am I. We’re having a huge sale, thirty percent off. Come take a look. Your