She hesitated, then looked at her watch, a pink thing the size of a coaster. "My manager’s due here any minute now and he says you can’t let the phone thing get started or people’ll be asking to use it all the time." She looked over my shoulder. "Could you move, please?"
I stepped over but stayed at the counter and an old black guy in a baseball cap moved up and gave her numbers for a lottery ticket.
"So you’re not going to call?" I said.
"No," she said.
I went outside and picked up the receiver on the pay phone on the side of the building and put it to my ear even though I knew it was dead. I asked two people going into the store if they had cell phones—both shook their heads, though one had his in a holster on his belt. Then I ran back to the temp service because there wasn’t another payphone nearby and I didn’t know what else to do.
Purcell was there. He had his headlights directed onto the scene and he stood in their beams next to the injured man and the two Mexicans who were squatting over him. The shorter one, who I could now see was an older man, was crying.
"I can’t have this kind of helling going on here," Purcell was saying.
"Mr. Purcell," I said.
He jerked his head around and squinted into the headlights. "Hey, who’s there?" He recognized me. "So did you see what happened here?"
"No. I just tried to call an ambulance but I couldn’t find a phone."
He waved like he was shooing a fly. "I checked him, he doesn’t need one. It’d be a waste of the taxpayers’ money. All he’s got is a little lard sliced off." Then he put his hands on his hips and stared down at the man. He had on a white short sleeve shirt and a dark tie; I had never seen him in a coat, no matter the temperature. "Hey," he said loudly a