Somewhere on the other side of Syracuse he fell asleep with the rumbling belly of the bus and woke only briefly during the stop in Albany. At quarter after four in the morning, they rolled up into the Port Authority, easing to a stop amid the throng of buses. Groggy and rubbing his eyes, Dwayne stepped down into the crowd, struck by the smell of cleaning solution and urine, awash in a sea of human flotsam, and pushed his way toward the escalators and the streets of Hell’s Kitchen.

In an instant, hands grabbed either arm and his feet flew out from beneath him. He went face-first onto the floor, smashing his nose so that blood gushed into a pool he choked on.

“Stay down!” someone shouted.

Dwayne felt a hand grip his neck and the cold muzzle of a pistol against his temple. Around him a widening circle of nameless faces gaped and shrieked and the cold edges of handcuffs-something he’d felt before-bit into his wrists.

“We got him! We got the son of a bitch!”

Beneath the overpowering smell of Old Spice, Dwayne’s nose caught the distinct sharp edge of Black Velvet. Tiny red and purple veins webbed Jeremiah Potter’s cauliflower ears and nose, and a dusting of dandruff coated the shoulders and collar of his old blue suit coat. From where he sat, Dwayne could see the lint and spatters of food obscuring the lenses of his lawyer’s thick round glasses. The judge repeated Potter’s name, and Dwayne nudged him with an elbow so that the lawyer let out a snort and jerked upright to life. While his eyes had never closed, Dwayne felt certain the public defender had grown so skillful at his craft that he could sleep through court without ever being accused of it.

Potter stood and examined his notes, flipping back through the pages of doodling while his caterpillar eyebrows convulsed. So far he’d drawn a Viking, two nude mermaids, and a lion smoking a cigarette.

He scowled and stared at the prosecution’s witness for a moment with his own lips trembling before he said, “Detective Billick, isn’t it possible that the blood on my client’s knife came from someone other than the victim?”