Once he hit the street, Harry stopped running, forcing himself to adopt an easy walk. He slowly headed back the way he and Sarah had come originally. He gritted his teeth as he walked, trying to look nonchalant. It wasn’t easy. After what he’d just seen Harry wanted nothing more than to run away screaming.

The scarred man with the knife had seen him, He’d looked right at him. He’d seen Harry’s face and knew that he had witnessed what had gone down in the alley. Harry’s heart was pounding and his head felt hot. He was witness to a crime and in his experience a witness was not a safe thing to be.

But what exactly had he witnessed?

He shook his head and pushed away the vision of the big gunman turning into so much black powder. He also had to forcibly push the image of Sarah staring up into the sky with sightless eyes, He had to calm himself. He had to think about the situation at hand.

First things first, he thought. Have to try to look casual and blend in. That shouldn’t be too difficult. A young, brown-skinned, okay-looking East Indian man would not look out of place wandering the streets of the Big Apple.

The only problem was his tee shirt

It was bright blue with a lemon yellow logo on the breast. The logo was designed specifically for the Ontario New Hope Evangelical Church’s Mission to the Homeless and it showed a dove with a twig in its mouth winging its way over a cross with the sun rising behind. Harry’s jeans and sneakers were nondescript enough but the godawful ugly tee-shirt was as distinctive as a neon sign and it had to go.

Harry had cash. It wasn’t his.

It had been collected from the good parishioners of the New Hope Church for the express purpose of helping the homeless on the streets of New York. Sarah had it in a leather belt pack. Before he’d scampered out of the alley he’d unzipped the pack and pulled out the cash, trying not to look at the pool of blood that had been growing from underneath the back of her head onto the alley’s dirty concrete. He stuffed the cash into his front pocket and ran.

He had felt a twinge of guilt at that. Not about taking the money (he’d already justified that with the fact that he was now one of New York’s homeless and needed help getting off the streets) but about leaving Sarah’s body in the alley. He tried not to think how long it would take for her to be discovered or how many rodents would be gnawing on her remains by nightfall.

Harry spied a store with an open front that sold candy bars, gum and scarves. He saw a rack with tee shirts. Bingo.

Harry stepped up to the rack and grabbed a black tee-shirt with a Megadeth logo printed on the front. It would do.

As he made his way towards the cash register his foot kicked something on the floor. It was a black leather wallet with a logo he didn’t recognize – a stylized red ‘W’ – on the floor below a wire mesh tray filled with faux leather wallets.

He’d need a wallet for the cash. He picked it up off the floor, then grabbed a pack of Beeman’s gum before cashing out.

The man behind the cash register was an older Asian man. The man scanned the tee shirt and the gum but couldn’t find a price tag on the wallet. “Five bucks,” he shrugged.

Harry handed over the cash and walked out. He ducked into an alley, exchanged the New Hope Church for Megadeath, stuffed the cash into the wallet and popped a stick of gum into his mouth. He stuffed the old tee shirt into a garbage can on the street and kept moving.

As he walked Harry heard sirens wailing in the distance. Some sort of emergency was still going on north of where he was. He could see the occasional fire truck making its way up distant streets. He decided to head South.

He needed to find a bus depot. He had enough cash to buy a Greyhound ticket back to Toronto. The only problem would be what story to tell about what happened and why.

Harry had joined the church mission as part of his community service. The community service was a condition of his parole. The Church group had gone to a lot of trouble to include him in the mission, filling out forms and consulting with his parole officer. Harry was determined to stay out of trouble.

Being witness to a murder wasn’t staying out of trouble. Particularly when one of the murderers knew what you looked like.

Hauling his ass back home was clearly the right thing to do from a survival standpoint, but he’d have to be careful how he sold it to his parole officer.

His parole officer was a plain looking woman with a bleeding heart. Harry had learned quickly that she was a sucker for the right kind of sob story. He could sell his flight back to Toronto as blind panic. It wouldn’t be too far from the truth.

The only problem was the money he’d stolen from Sarah’s corpse – the money he’d stolen from the church. That was a bit of a problem. He could hear her asking the question: “If you were that scared then why did you stop long enough to take the money?”

Harry’s stomach rumbled. He needed a quiet place to think.

Read the rest here:

The Shattered Men: An Excerpt

or buy the book!