“Happens out here in the yard.” Teddy leaned down and made the kid look at his face. “Didn’t want you to come back here where that kind of shit happen. But you fucked up, kid. That’s a lot of money to lose. Put me in a hell of a tight.”

The kid nodded. “Yeah, I heard about that shit. I’m sorry, man.”

Teddy opened his big arms wide and the kid fell into his clutch. Teddy swallowing him into his sweaty silk shirt, patting him on his back.

In the yard, a shirtless man clutching a long bottle staggered toward Teddy’s child security. “Teddy,” I said, nudging him.

“Get back, motherfucker,” Teddy yelled and rolled off to the yard.

I sat down next to the kid. He pulled the money back out, probably about twenty in cash, and I watched him recount it.

“Teddy told me what happened.”

He looked at me. One eye had yellow flecks in the iris and he had a very pink scar that slashed from the bridge of his nose and ran into one eyebrow. His teeth were gold.

“You want to tell me what happened?”

“What you gonna do about it?”

I watched Teddy’s fat butt jangle in his $2,000 suit as he ran off the man. The children laughed while the crazy shirtless man darted across the grass and mud field like an aimless dog.

“I helped a woman who got sent to prison for forty years because people lied,” I said. “She got stuck. No one believed a word she said. Thought she was crazy.”

He looked at me. Then back at the money.

“If you don’t help,” I said, “your boy Cash is gonna mess Teddy up bad.”

“What the fuck you know about Cash?” ALIAS asked. “He ain’t my boy.”

“What did the man who shot you look like?”