Free Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway by Sara Gran

news, Miss DeMitt. Bad news, but he’s going to be okay.”
    Andray
, I thought.
Andray’s been shot.
    Instead the EMT guy said: “Clara, Mick Pendell has had an incident.”
    “Incident?” I said. “Did someone shoot him?”
    “Overdose,” the EMT said. “We think it was intentional. He’s in Touro.”
    I felt a strange lump in my throat when I realized that sometime, no matter how long ago, Mick—or anyone—had put me down as his emergency contact.
    I hadn’t seen Mick since the Case of the Green Parrot in New Orleans. Mick had worked for Constance, like I did. Before he met her Mick was on his way to a life of domestic terrorism, prison, and bad tattoos. He started riots in the Pacific Northwest and chained himself to redwoods in California. He helped people escape from jail and firebombed politicians’ houses. But there’s a series of fine lines between fighting for a cause and just fighting. He stole from the rich and gave to the poor—first among them himself—until he tried to rob Constance. Constance was one of the rich—the Darlings had reserves to keep them flush for generations.
    Constance helped Mick see that there are never any sides. Only things we understand and things we have chosen to pretend we don’t understand. Only those we admit we love and those we pretend we don’t recognize.
    Mick was a detective. He knew it while Constance was around to tell him, and forgot after she died.
    After I hung up with the EMT, I called the hospital. I was transferred around a few times until I reached a nurse on Mick’s floor.
    “He’s stable,” she said. “They pumped out his stomach.”
    “What’d he take?”
    “No report yet but I’d guess a bunch of stuff. He on any meds?”
    I nodded and then I remembered she couldn’t see me and I said, “Yeah.” I wasn’t certain but suspected that he was taking a big mess of prescriptions: antidepressants, antianxiety drugs, sleeping pills. He hadn’t weathered the storm well.
    “Some of it hit him,” she said, “but he’ll be okay. Just, you know, got to deal with whatever made him do this.”
    She sounded sympathetic, but tired. I asked if I could speak to him. She said he was sleeping.
    “He got family?”
    Mick had no one and he had nothing. He taught criminology and ran a drop-in center for homeless children. He used to just volunteer there. Then they lost their funding and the director moved on and Mick couldn’t stand to let it go so he didn’t. His biggest donor was Anonymous and if he’d known who Anonymous was he might not have taken her money.
    Mick—my Mick, Constance’s Mick—was not going to die or come close to dying alone. I booked a flight for New Orleans the next evening. Something fluttered in my chest, some feeling of life, of direction, of being needed and busy and a part of the human race.
    A few hours later, before I started packing, Andray called. It was the only time he’d called me since New Orleans. It might have been the only time he’d called me ever.
    “Mick was in the hospital,” he said.
    “Yeah,” I said. “I heard.”
    “Oh,” he said. “You knew.”
    He sounded disappointed.
    “Thanks,” I said. “You seen him?”
    “While he was still there,” he said.
    “What do you mean?” I said. “He’s out already?”
    “Yeah. Let him out this morning.”
    “Where is he?” I asked. “Is he okay?”
    “Home,” Andray said.
    We didn’t say anything for a minute. I didn’t know how Andray was going to stay alive another year. He had been shot once since I’d been gone, his fourth bullet diving neatly into the top of his right shoulder and through the other side. No one in New Orleans had called me when it happened. I’d found out from the lama.
    I knew I wouldn’t have made it without Constance. Andray had me and Mick. Put us together and we weren’t a quarter of her. As evidenced by the fact that both Mick and Andray were very close to dead.
    “You been okay?” I asked Andray.
    He made