Sleeping Dogs by Thomas Perry

business.”
    “He’s going to bleed to death if you don’t.”
    “No,” came a frightened moan from the man sprawled on the seat. Ackerman could see that he was stiff and shivering now, going into shock. The word no might have referred to anything he had heard, felt, seen or remembered, but it seemed to affect the salesman, who said, “Get in with him.”
    Ackerman climbed into the back seat and closed the door, then squatted and leaned his back against it to stay out of the blood. He took off his necktie and tightened it around the young man’s thigh as the car pulled out. He looked at his watch. It was just eleven-thirty now. In ten minutes he would have to loosen the tourniquet to keep the leg alive. “Is there a hospital we can get him to?”
    The salesman sounded furious. “Okay, you popped that fucking Jamaican, but you don’t know nothing.”
    “He’s your friend. It’s up to you.”
    The salesman leaped to adopt his point of view. “That’s damned right, and that’s why we’re taking him to the emergency room.” He was a born leader. “Don’t worry, B-Man, I’ll get you there.”
    The salesman was calming down now, driving with reasonable attention to whatever was in front of the car.
    Ackerman waited and watched, counting the minutes. The wounded man was now limp and probably comatose from the loss of blood. As the car moved uptown, he wondered if the salesman had changed his mind, but the kid spoke again. “We’ll take him up where they won’t piss their pants if they see a black man with a hole in him. But I got to throw the Jamaicans off. If they know he’s hit, they’ll come right to his room and cut him up.”
    Ackerman used the tall buildings that floated by to orient himself. The Honourable Meg and her friends used the term “culture shock” to describe the feeling he was experiencing now. A day ago he hadn’t been thinking about coming back to the United States, and now he felt as though he had been shot out of a cannon and landed here. It all looked the same, but it wasn’t, and he was beginning to suspect that he wasn’t either.
    “What do you think?” the salesman asked Ackerman.
    He held his watch up until a passing streetlight swept across it, illuminating it like a photographer’s flash. There was still five minutes before he had to loosen the tourniquet. The salesman was nervous and wanted support. “Sounds okay. If you can get him there in five minutes it’ll help.”
    The street vendor had said nothing since getting into the car. Now he was leaning back in his seat as though he were asleep. “What’s wrong with your buddy?”
    “Oh, shit,” said the salesman. “He’s hit too.”
    “Why doesn’t he talk?”
    “He doesn’t know any English. The B-Man knows a little Spanish.”
    Ackerman looked down at the man sprawled across the seat. He was sweating and shivering and looking gray in the face. He might live, but he wasn’t going to do any translating tonight. Ackerman leaned over the seat and put his head over the other man’s shoulder. He could see that a bullet had hit the man’s arm, and blood had soaked the front of his blue shirt. He looked closer. It was a clean hole punched through the left bicep, about the size of a double-ought buckshot pellet. But he could tell that that wasn’t what had hit him; a stray round had clipped him when the salesman had hosed down the neighborhood with the Uzi. At the time he had noticed that only about half the magazine had hit the car. It was probably just as well that they hadn’t called for an ambulance. The ones nearby could be filling up now with people who had been sitting in their apartments watching the late news. “It looks like only one shotgun pellet,” he said. “He’s not in danger, but he’ll need some help, too.”
    The salesman didn’t seem to recognize the absurdity of the theory that twelve pellets in a five-inch pattern had left only a single small puncture. “It’s just down there,”