"Assholes," he said, not elaborating on who he was giving the title to and letting it sit wide ranging. "How're ya, boy?" he finally said.

When I tried to answer, I couldn't get even a croak through the novocaine-like block. My right hand went again to the left side of my neck, a movement that was already imprinted in my postsurgical psyche.

"A through and through," he said, nodding his head to the right.

"Punk kid threw a.22 at you before you got off the knockdown. The EMS guys said the slug went straight through muscle, missed the windpipe and the carotid artery."

He told me how the slug had passed through my neck leaving an entrance wound as clean as a paper punch. The exit wound was twice as large and raggedy. The lead had then pucked into the brick facade of the Thirteenth Street Cleaners, chunking out a thimble-sized hole with spatters of Max Freeman's blood around it.

"Fuckin' kid was a real sharpshooter," he said before catching the look in my eye. Keith was like the majority of cops in Philadelphia and on every department in the country. In twenty-five years he had never pulled his gun in the line of duty. If the department hadn't instituted a mandatory range qualification a few years back, the rounds in his old-style revolver would still be rusted in the chamber. But he had seen the results of shootings. He'd known officers who had killed and seen them change. Nobody took it without changing.

"Both of 'em DOS," he said. "Crime scene guys bagged them right on the sidewalk."

He hesitated, looking away.

"Twelve and sixteen years old. Both from North Philly. Down doing Center City for the night."

He went on how the newspapers and radio talk shows were already howling about their new discovery this month that kids were carrying guns. He said a witness across the street on Chestnut was screaming that I took the first shot, cut the kid down without a warning. He said Internal Affairs had my gun and would be all over the shooting investigation, but being wounded and all, I didn't have to worry.