Mr. Good(4)

Then I heard other voices. Two Mexicans were standing a few yards away, at the edge of the light.

"Habla ingles?" I called out.

"No much, no much," the taller of the two said.

I got him to hold the jacket in place and right away he and the injured man started talking, arguing it sounded like. I ran the three blocks to the store where I made a point of buying my coffee every morning because I liked the way the clerk looked. I asked her to call 911.

"Sorry, the phone’s not public," she said.

"Are you kidding?" I said.

She shook her head. "That’s the rule."

"But a guy’s been knifed or something."

She hesitated, then looked at her watch, a pink thing the size of a coaster. "My manager’s due here any minute now and he says you can’t let the phone thing get started or people’ll be asking to use it all the time." She looked over my shoulder. "Could you move, please?"

I stepped over but stayed at the counter and an old black guy in a baseball cap moved up and gave her numbers for a lottery ticket.

"So you’re not going to call?" I said.

"No," she said.

I went outside and picked up the receiver on the pay phone on the side of the building and put it to my ear even though I knew it was dead. I asked two people going into the store if they had cell phones—both shook their heads, though one had his in a holster on his belt. Then I ran back to the temp service because there wasn’t another payphone nearby and I didn’t know what else to do.

Purcell was there. He had his headlights directed onto the scene and he stood in their beams next to the injured man and the two Mexicans who were squatting over him. The shorter one, who I could now see was an older man, was crying.

"I can’t have this kind of helling going on here," Purcell was saying.

"Mr. Purcell," I said.

He jerked his head around and squinted into the headlights. "Hey, who’s there?" He recognized me. "So did you see what happened here?"

"No. I just tried to call an ambulance but I couldn’t find a phone."

He waved like he was shooing a fly. "I checked him, he doesn’t need one. It’d be a waste of the taxpayers’ money. All he’s got is a little lard sliced off." Then he put his hands on his hips and stared down at the man. He had on a white short sleeve shirt and a dark tie; I had never seen him in a coat, no matter the temperature. "Hey," he said loudly and all three Mexicans looked up at him and he spoke to them in broken Spanish. The tall one holding my jacket answered.

According to Purcell’s translation: the two Mexicans who had stayed were from the same town in Mexico as the injured man, and the older one was his uncle or cousin or something. Two days ago the tall Mexican had heard that the injured man—who looked at least thirty—had gotten someone’s teenage daughter pregnant. The tall Mexican wasn’t sure who the girl was, but he’d heard there’d been a blow up with her father.

"I didn’t think there was anybody left who cared about that," Purcell said. He took out a pack of Juicy Fruit and put a stick in his mouth. He stared down at the man, his face a brown study. I crossed my arms and hugged myself. I was freezing.