But he’d grown into a tall, good-looking young man-a brown-haired, brown-eyed six-footer who’d been a star football and basketball player in high school. Like me, he went to Crane Junior College; unlike me, he finished.

I guess I’d always been sort of a hero to him. About six months before, he’d started dropping by my office to chew the fat. Business was so lousy, a little company-even from a fresh-faced college boy-was welcome.

We’d sit in the deli restaurant below my office and sip coffee and gnaw on bagels and he’d tell me this embarrassing shit about my being somebody he’d always looked up to.

“Gosh, Nate, when you made the police force, I thought that was just about the keenest thing.”

He really did talk that way-gosh, keen. I told you I was desperate for company.

He brushed a thick comma of brown hair away and grinned in a goofy boyish way; it was endearing, and nauseating. “When I was a kid, coming into your pop’s bookstore, you pointed me toward those Nick Carters, and Sherlock Holmes books. Gave me the bug. I had to be a detective!”

But the kid was too young to get on the force, and his family didn’t have the kind of money or connections it took to get a slot on the PD.

“When you quit,” he said, “I admired you so. Standing up to corruption-and in this town! Imagine.”

Imagine. My leaving the force had little to do with my “standing up to corruption”-after all, graft was high on my list of reasons for joining in the first place-but I said nothing, not wanting to shatter the child’s dreams.

“If you ever need an op, I’m your man!”

He said this thousands of times in those six months or so. And he actually did get some security work, through a couple of other, larger agencies. But his dream was to be my partner.