Riverside Park ran for half a mile along the Alder River in a green, sloping margin between the water and Elm Street, with a paved path that the town resurfaced faithfully every few years and the river undermined faithfully in between. There were oaks old enough to have opinions, a bandstand, a playground dark now and chained, benches at the intervals of a generation that believed in sitting, and at the far end, near the footbridge, a squat brick restroom building and the gravel spur where the parks department kept its trucks. At seven in the evening on a Friday it was usually a thoroughfare of dog walkers and old couples and teenagers being loud in the harmless frequencies. Tonight it was thinning out early. A man with a greyhound nodded to Tomas near the bandstand and kept walking at the greyhound's chosen speed, which was regal. Two women power-walked past him in matching visors, deep in an argument about a casserole that had wronged one of them in 2019. The lamps hummed. The river went on saying the one thing it knew.
The first sign that the evening had a different plan was a sound he filed before he identified it: a man's laugh, pitched wrong, too loud and too pleased, coming from the bend by the restroom building where the path curved out of the lamps' best reach. Then a second laugh, and a voice saying something with the word run in it, in the tone of a joke that was not one. Tomas slowed without deciding to slow. His weight settled. His breathing went down the stairs, four counts, all by itself, the way it had done in a hospital corridor and in a hundred rooms before it, and the part of him that had been a champion before Sofia, before the depot, before the belt in the photograph, stood up quietly in the back of his head and began, without any permission from the rest of him, to count the evening.
What he came around the bend and found was this. On the spur by the restroom building, five young men had a cooler open on the gravel and a scatter of cans around it, and the sprawled, proprietorial ease of men who had decided that a public place was their front room. They were in gym clothes, most of them, with the logo of Frank Oduya's gym across their chests — NORTHSIDE COMBAT in white block letters — and they had the look he could read like weather: trained enough to be confident, young enough to be stupid, and far enough into a case of beer to have mislaid the difference. On the path in front of them, backing away with his hands half up and his jaw set in a way that said he was deciding, a man in running gear, fortyish, earbuds around his neck, phone in one hand, was doing rapid arithmetic about the relative costs of pride and hospital. Tomas watched the man make the correct decision. He dropped his eyes, said something short that was not an apology and not a challenge, turned, and jogged away up the path at a pace he had not been running at before, and the five let him go with a chorus of commentary on his speed and his ancestry and the cut of his shorts, because he had not been the point. He had been a rehearsal, and he had left the stage.
The oldest of them, a stocky thirty-year-old with a shaved head and a tattoo climbing out of his collar, called something after the jogger that set the others off again, and in the turn of his head Tomas saw and catalogued all five of them the way Hector had taught him, not as villains in a story but as weights and reaches and tempers: the tall lean one, twenty-four or so, all elbows, who bounced lightly on his toes even standing at a cooler, because some men cannot switch it off; the broad one with the careful beard who held his can like a prop and laughed a half-second after the others, a follower with a performer's instincts; the shaved-head one, oldest, who led the laughing but not the group; and the one who led the group, who was not the loudest, who Tomas's eye found last because leaders in rooms like that one arrange to be found last.