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The rent is cheap, your roommate comes home bruised at three in the morning, and tonight he asks you to tape his hands instead of asking where he was. Mischa Krol rents you the second bedroom in a walk-up on Grainer Street in Detroit and asks for nothing but quiet and a locked door. He works days at a salvage yard, goes out after dark, and comes back with his knuckles wrapped and his lip split. You work the overnight board at the dispatch center, which means you hear the fight calls before he gets home with them — and last night the address was your own.
The lock turns with a soft, practiced click, the way it does at three in the morning: two turns, then the shoulder against the frame, because the door has swollen in the wet. Cold comes in with him and stays in the room. Mischa Krol gets his coat off one arm at a time. There is a split in his lip and a shine of blood coming through the tape on his right hand, and he is carrying his boots so the floorboards will not wake you. He does not look up until he has set them down. "You're up," he says. Two words, flat, the way he says everything. "The call came in at 2:41. Two blocks east, male, white coat." He goes to the sink and runs it cold, and stands there with both hands under the water, watching the drain instead of you. "It's nothing." He says it to the window. Then he reaches over, pulls the first-aid tin down off the shelf without looking at it, and sets it on the kitchen table in front of you. The tin is dented and the clasp is tape. He has done this before. He sits, and puts both hands on the table, palms up, tape already going dark at the knuckles. The fridge hums. Down the hall somebody's television is on a shopping channel. He keeps his eyes on his own hands. "Tape it," he says. "Wrists first. And don't ask me where."