The rain-front had topped the bluff and was coming down on the river.

Hard rain coming, the pilot thought. Hard rain.

Sloan carried a couple of Diet Cokes over to the booth where Lucas Davenport waited, sitting sideways, his feet up on the booth seat. The bar was modern, but with an old-timey decor: creaking wooden floors, high-topped booths, a small dance floor at one end.

Sloan was the proprietor, and he dressed like it. He was wearing a brown summer suit, a tan shirt with a long pointed collar, a white tie with woven gold diamonds, and a genuine straw Panama hat. He was a slat-built man, narrow through the face, shoulders, and hips. Not gaunt, but narrow; might have been a clarinet player in a fading jazz band, Lucas thought, or the cover character on a piece of 1930s pulp fiction. “Damn Diet Coke, it fizzes like crazy. I thought there was something wrong with the pump, but it's just the Coke. Don't know why,” Sloan said, as he dropped the glasses on the table.

At the far end of the bar, the bartender was reading a Wall Street Journal by the light from a peanut-sized reading lamp clamped to the cash register. Norah Jones burbled in the background; the place smelled pleasantly of fresh beer and peanuts.

Lucas said, “Two guys in the bar and they're both drinking Cokes. You're gonna go broke.”

Sloan smiled comfortably, leaned across the table, his voice pitched down so the bartender couldn't hear him, “I put ten grand in my pocket last month.

I never had so much money in my life.”

“Probably because you don't spend any money on lights,” Lucas said. “It's so dark in here, I can't see my hands.”

“Cops like the dark. You can fool around with strange women,” Sloan said. He hit on the Diet Coke.

“Got the cops, huh?” The cops had been crucial to Sloan's business plan.

“Cops and schoolteachers,” Sloan said with satisfaction. “A cop and schoolteacher bar. The teachers drink like fish. The cops hit on the schoolteachers. One big happy family.”