"The man has

  a big toe where his thumb should be.  I can't handle this." Just a little bit older.

  I put a foot on a deck step as a front step.  Took out a fresh piece of gum and a new sheet of looseleaf.  Made my arm pull one foot in front of the other.  Had to push an invisible steady as the railing proved barely attached.  Get into the houses.

  The man grinned, missing some of those too, he held up two hands and wiggled TEN FINGERS, he said.  TEN.  FINGERS.  He poke squished an index finger onto the looseleaf.  Left a big fat smudge of dirty.  "Write that."

  I sighed and looked back at the house door.

  "So you just shoot 'em and leave?" A police officer was asking a dark haired girl who'd been a "candy striper".  "That's the job."

  We need his information.

  A kid had asked, "Can't you just look in his wallet?" Then the kid laughed and laughed remembering himself and his bicycle gang having found the piles, money, IDs, jewelry.

  "You don't need to make this difficult on yourself."

  "Yeah Mister."

  "You think it would hurt?"  The man had wielded head to talk to me.  

  A beautiful woman pointed at one of dozens of boxes of things and

  "Are those newspapers?" She asked the man.  He turned head and squinted at her.

  It took a good fifteen minutes for the man and woman to make it the three feet to the box of newspapers.  Someone throwing a lightswitch on made the man cower beneath arms dramatic but flabbily covering his wince.

  Don't wave it around

  Shut the light off please.

  She carefully lifted the man's arms up into the air "Like a safety call.". 

  Tsk.  "Indeed.  That too."

  The slow dance was questions and vagueness.  "Who sutured you?"

  "What's the date on the fifth paper in the pile?"

  They took the toe off the man's hand at the round dining table.  Put it in a necklace box on top of the square piece of fabric.

  No one could quite figure out why the process was going faster and faster, the rate of turnover