The bartender laughed at something in the Journal, a nasty laugh, and he said, to no one in particular, “Gold's going to a thousand, you betcha. Now we'll see what's what.”

They looked at him for a moment, then Sloan shrugged, said, “He's got a B.S. in economics.

And I do mean a B.S.”

“Not bad for a bartender… So what's the old lady think about the place?”

“She's gotten into it,” Sloan said. He was happy that an old pal could see him doing well. “She took a course in bookkeeping, she handles all the cash, running these QuickBook things on the computer. She's talking about taking a couple weeks in Cancun or Palm Springs next winter. Hawaii.”

“That's terrific,” Lucas said. And he was pleased by all of it. So they talked about wives and kids for a while, Sloan's retirement check, and the price of a new sign for the place, which formerly had been named after a tree, and which Sloan had changed to Shooters.

Even from a distance, it was clear that the two men were good friends: they listened to each other with a certain narrow-eyed intensity, and with a cop-quick skepticism. They were close, but physically they were a study in contrasts. Sloan was slight, beige and brown, tentative.

Lucas was none of those. Tall, dark haired, with the thin white line of a scar draped across his tanned forehead, down into an eyebrow, he might have been a thug of the leading-man sort. He had intense blue eyes, a hawk nose, and large hands and square shoulders; an athlete, a onetime University of Minnesota hockey player. Sloan knew nothing about fashion, and never cared; Lucas went for Italian suits, French ties, and English shoes. He read the men's fashion magazines, of the serious kind, and spent some time every spring and fall looking at suits. When he and his wife traveled to Manhattan, she went to the Museum of Modern Art, he went to Versace.