No writing on it. Sealed. I had no clue how it had gotten into my bag. I ripped it open and pulled a photograph out. It was an 8×10 glossy of a man. He was standing on a street corner, looking just past the photographer. He looked like he didn’t know he was being photographed, like someone had happened along with their cell phone camera and snapped his picture. He was possibly midthirties to early forties, and nice looking in a button-down kind of way. Short brown hair. Fair-skinned. Wearing a dark suit. I didn’t recognize the street corner or the man. Somehow on the trip home, I must have picked the envelope up by mistake-maybe when I stopped at the newsstand in the airport.

“Who’s that?” Grandma asked.

“I don’t know. I guess I snatched it up with a magazine.”

“He’s kind of hot. Is there a name on the back?”

“Nope. Nothing.”

“Too bad,” Grandma said. “He’s a looker, and I’m thinking about becoming a cougar.”

My mother cut her eyes to the cupboard where she kept her whiskey. She glanced at the clock on the wall and gave up a small sigh of regret. Too early.

I dropped the envelope and the photo into the trash, chugged my coffee, grabbed a bagel from the bag on the counter, and ran upstairs to change.

Twenty minutes later, I was at the bonds office. I use the term office lightly since we were operating out of a converted motor coach parked on Hamilton Avenue directly in front of the construction site for a new brick-and-mortar office. The new construction had been made necessary by a fire of suspicious origin that totally destroyed the original building.

My cousin Vinnie bought the bus from a friend of mine, and while it wasn’t perfect, it was better than setting up shop in the food court at the mall. Connie’s car was parked behind the coach, and Vinnie’s car was parked behind Connie’s.

Vinnie is a good bail bondsman but a boil on my family’s backside. In the past, he’s been a gambler, a womanizer, a philanderer, a card cheat, and I’m pretty sure he once had a romantic encounter with a duck. He looks like a weasel in pointy-toed shoes and too-tight pants. His father-in-law, Harry the Hammer, for all purposes owns the agency, and due to recent scandalous events involving misappropriated money, gambling, and whoring, Vinnie’s wife, Lucille, now owns Vinnie.