"I'm not that young."

"Maybe not," I said. "But I sure am that old."

Lucy gave me a very nice, almost speculative, smile and strolled off to a couple sitting a few stools away.

LEGALLY I WAS COVERED but the job wasn't over and it had turned from seeing that the subject, Tara Lear, was all right to maybe dodging guns with silencers on them and spending long nights under the bright lights of police curiosity.

This was a job that I couldn't walk away from. I could turn down loan sharks and godfather wannabes if they asked for my services. They could get angry and come after me if they wanted to try. I might have to do some fancy footwork but I could hold my own even against real-life mafiosi.

But Alphonse Rinaldo was no street hood or thug. He was the real thing, the thing itself.

At the end of my first drink I was pretty sure that Sam Strange was being up front with me. He was less likely to cross his boss than I was. He liked his job, and the protection of Rinaldo's office.

By the end of my second brandy I was confident that even the Big Man hadn't expected the crime I stumbled across. If there was impending danger Rinaldo would have told me, not for my safety but for his own interests. Why would he drag his name, albeit unspoken, into the crime scene at all?

No, it wasn't a setup. The situation had simply escalated faster than Alphonse had anticipated.

I'd taken the first sip of the third brandy when my cell phone made the sound of a far-off migrating flock of geese.

"Yes, Katrina?"

"You hadn't called," she said.

After so many years together a whole chapter of life can be reduced to three or four words. We could have discussed her new habit of waiting up for me since coming back and passing the half-century mark. She was no longer looking for a new man, she said. But even if she was-while she was there she was going to act like my wife.