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My heart is beating hard. The adrenaline rush has hit both sides. Parents are getting out of cars and clogging the sidewalk. Laumann jumps into the role of deputy state director, striding through the scene with cell phone to his ear, reporting the action to 911. He has been through this before, and means to assert his authority, but then on the police recording, later, in the midst of a calm recital, you will be able to hear his naked panic: “They’re going after my son!”

Two agitators have surrounded Alex, chanting, “Your daddy kills horses!”

Alex’s blue eyes are wide as he stares at one angry face, then another.

“Your daddy kills horses!”

Louder, closer, not giving way. One of them, a girl with a couple of nose rings, tries to force Alex to take a stuffed horse, dripping red.

Harassing a twelve-year-old was not the game plan.

Nobody wants to hurt a child.

But Darcy is committed to the cause.

“Free the horses!” I shout.

“Fuck you, motherfucker,” the boy yells, and hits the girl with the nose rings in the knees with his tennis racket and keeps on swinging.

Laumann’s running through the mob, awkward in a business suit and the raincoat, face contorted with desperation, screaming at someone behind me to stop. I turn and catch sight of a streaking figure—a young man wearing a backpack and a denim jacket with neo-Nazi ornamentation. I had not seen him in the staging area under the marquee, but now he is barreling like a missile directly for Alex. POP! Like a firecracker, and the child staggers, eyes in shock, splattered with blood.

The small explosion triggers utter terror. Parents there to pick up their children find themselves grabbing them and rolling under cars, or dragging them away, running wildly.

I stay where I am for one slow-motion fraction of a second as Laumann gets to his son.

“Alex, are you shot? Show me where!” he cries, frantic hands all over the boy, who is breathing hard but standing on his feet.

“I’m okay, Dad—they didn’t do anything.”

“Didn’t do anything?”

Laumann pulls Alex—he’s walking—out of the crowd. The white shirt of his school uniform is streaked with crimson, which has grotesquely stained the sidewalk, along with Laumann’s raincoat and Alex’s pale and freckled cheeks.

“I’m o-kay!” He twists away from his father’s anxious touch. “Leave me alone! It wasn’t a gun; it’s just red paint.”

But where Laumann grew up, you slaughtered your own meat, and he knows the slippery consistency and sickly iron smell. It’s blood—real cow’s blood. Filthy, unclean putrescence, degrading innocent children.

The father’s hands become fists. “They’re dead,” Laumann vows. “They are dead. Come with me; let’s wipe this off.”

Someone has found a water bottle, and now Laumann attempts to soak a tissue and cleanse his son’s face, but his hands are shaking and the tissue dissolves.

“Dad, you have to chill,” instructs his twelve-year-old soldier.

Laumann wipes his own wet eyes and whispers hoarsely, “Where are the police?”

Ten

Waiting by the window, I keep watch for the connect. Moonlight decants through the slats of the blinds the way I remember moonlight as a child—so steady and substantial, it seemed as if you could wash your face with it, a potion of radiance that seeped through the drowsing windows of the brick house in Long Beach, penetrating the gloom of my grandfather’s world.

From Darcy’s window, I can see two girl punkers with hair like crested Gila monsters locking up the Cosmic Café. Terribly young and terribly thin, one of them is pregnant. Doo-wop resounds from the African drumming center. The girls put their arms around each other, matching steps along the darkened avenue.

The war is escalating in our little world. The techs are calling the attack on twelve-year-old Alex Laumann a “blood bomb.” The best evidence for this comes from analysis of the bloodstain patterns—the “spines” of the splatter pattern on the sidewalk and on the clothing of the victim, which tell you the amount of energy transfer. The smaller the droplets,