They were rioting downtown, had been for months, one long sustained battle with the police, tear gas launched into crowds, garbage can lids against beanbag rounds, park benches torn up for barricades. William Fitzgerald was restless and dissatisfied, his grubby soul as unsettled as the city during that long, warm winter. Revolutionary times did not suit him; their despair was too operatic, their hopes too apocalyptic. People bunkered down, entrenched themselves within the unbreachable walls of their virtues or their vices, and that was bad for business.

Most of the work that came his way had the stink of the political about it, this reformer disgraced, that police chief encouraged to overextend herself. The most recent of his clients sat across from William Fitzgerald, the pure fire of his convictions burning in his face. We’ve spent too long building this society, the young man assured him, we can’t let the socialists tear it all apart. He drew out that word, socialists, long and lingeringly, the way another man might have breathed cocksucker.

William Fitzgerald let him have the impression that he agreed with him.

It was very important to him that William Fitzgerald agree with him. They’re being manipulated, of course, just like the undereducated and the gullible have always been manipulated by totalitarian regimes. They swallow the lies they’re spoon-fed, the useful fools, regardless of facts, regardless of logic. Still, they’re dangerous, even if they’re good little robots.

None of it mattered to William Fitzgerald. Politics was politics, and money was money.

William Fitzgerald is hunched resentfully over the wheel of his car, tailing a client, when the Wheels pass through the city. He feels them coming before he sees them, feels them in the stillness that settles over the city and fans his skin like the gentle wings of a hornet. His client pulls over and William Fitzgerald waits a few cars back, smokes a cigarette and watches the sky slowly change.

The Wheels are huge, three, four stories tall, yellowed with age, mellow and lustrous like soft amber. They are full of eyes, great gentle bovine eyes, and they watch William Fitzgerald as he watches them. They move through the city without turning, move in all directions without turning, and the eyes watch William Fitzgerald as he watches them. When they start to slip into the forest of downtown, he shifts his car into gear and follows them. His client when he passes her is slumped forward against the dashboard, a thin ribbon of blood running down her neck from her ear. William Fitzgerald follows the Wheels, their placid eyes watching him watching them. When they have covered the whole city, passed down every street and up every alley they rise without turning and are gone into the sky. William Fitzgerald leans forward to watch them go.

When they are gone he looks down and sees his client. As she pulls out into traffic he moves to follow her. Her hand rises to brush at her neck.

William Fitzgerald is taking pictures of Randy and his newest girlfriend when there’s a tap on his window. It’s a cop; he wants to know what William Fitzgerald’s up to, thinks he’s a peeping tom. His whole solid cop body radiates righteous indignation, outraged modesty. “Move it along, now,” he says, “move it along.”

William Fitzgerald hands him his license. The cop gets if anything more offended, looks hard at William Fitzgerald, wants to run him off, wants more than anything to take him in. “Nice job,” says the cop, and works it so that he spits a little bit on the b in job, just enough that William Fitzgerald has to wipe his face, but not anything that couldn’t be accidental. William Fitzgerald smiles, it’s all the same to him.

He gets the cop’s name and badge number, though, and slips it to Randy’s wife’s divorce lawyer. When the cop takes the stand and swears his way through his story, William Fitzgerald is hunched in the back of the courtroom, smiling to himself, invisible again.

Clytie wasn’t happy with the story William Fitzgerald handed him. His face didn’t change much and his voice stayed soft and even but his horse’s teeth clamped together so the muscles at the corners of his jaws bulged out and the breath that came between them was fouler than ever. “Sorry to hear, sir,” he said. “Indeed. Very terrible news, very sad. But these things happen. Indeed they do.”

William Fitzgerald sat through all this and fed him what he knew about where she’d gone and what he’d picked up on her. Clytie wasn’t impressed, but he nodded his head and thanked William Fitzgerald anyway, jaws grinding together audibly in the space between the turning of the ceiling fan, and paid him the remainder of his fee.

William Fitzgerald watched him move off down the street from his window. Clytie walked like he was crippled, legs stumping along unevenly, shoulders humped high by his ears. That his client was angry didn’t bother William Fitzgerald much if at all, but the way Colleen had disappeared ate at him. William Fitzgerald ran the bills against each other and decided he’d go back to the religious district and see what he could find.

A man named Nick Clytie had hired William Fitzgerald to follow a young homeless girl around the city. Clytie was an old man with a horse’s square yellow teeth and breath like rotten meat. He wore a black hat with a blue suit and insisted on shaking William Fitzgerald’s hand after paying the retainer. “The personal touch, sir,” he said, grinning and breathing in William Fitzgerald’s face. “A forgotten art.” His hand was cold and clammy.

None of this was calculated to endear him to William Fitzgerald, but since he wasn’t accustomed to liking his clients much in the first place, he took Clytie’s money and bonhomie and agreed to follow the girl. Clytie wouldn’t say why he wanted her followed: “Oh, no, it doesn’t matter, I just want her followed. Ee-hee-hee.” His laugh was high and nervous. It sounded like sex to William Fitzgerald, or anyway blackmail.

He’d been following the girl around town for close to a week. She drifted from one overpass to another, glassy-eyed and quiet, and wandered through the parks. She didn’t seem to eat anything, but he never saw her shooting up either, or smoking, so it didn’t seem like it was drugs. She spent twenty minutes talking to a mural in the old religious district, and his eyes were on her the whole time, but at the end of it she walked into the wall like it wasn’t there and disappeared.

There was no door there, just a bare patch of wall. The graffiti that covered the rest of the block stopped there; not painted over, just not there. William Fitzgerald put his hand on the clean bricks and wondered what he’d tell Clytie.