“What you are is shit-faced. Now stop making an ass out of yourself and go back in the bar.”

I turned around and walked toward the colonnade, the sun like a wet flame on my skin. I looked back over my shoulder at Dallas, who was now busy with his work, hefting bags of money and carrying them into the bank. My face felt small and tight, the skin dead, freeze-dried in the heat.

“Something wrong, Dave?” the bartender asked.

“Yeah, my glass is empty. Double Beam, beer back,” I said.

While he poured into a shot glass from a bourbon bottle with a chrome nipple on it, I blotted the humidity out of my eyes with a paper napkin, my ears still ringing from the insult Dallas had delivered me. I looked back out the window at the armored car. But the scene had suddenly become surreal, divorced from any of my expectations about that day in my life. A white van came out of nowhere and braked behind the armored car. Four men with cut-down shotguns jumped out on the sidewalk, leaving the driver behind the wheel. They were all dressed in work clothes, their hair and facial features a beige-colored blur under nylon stockings.

“Call nine-one-one, say, ‘Armed robbery in progress,’ and give this address,” I said to the bartender.

I unsnapped the.25 automatic that was strapped to my right ankle. When I got off the barstool, one side of the room seemed to collapse under my foot.

“I wouldn’t go out there,” the bartender said.

“I’m a cop,” I said.

I thought my grandiose words could somehow change the condition I was in. But in the bartender’s eyes I saw a sad knowledge that no amount of rhetoric would ever influence. I walked unsteadily to the front door and jerked it open. The outside world ballooned through the door in a rush of superheated air and carbon monoxide. The street I looked out upon was no longer a part of South Florida. It was a wind-sculpted place in the desert, bleached the color of a biscuit by the sun, home to carrion birds and jackals and blowflies. It was the place that awaits us all, one we don’t allow ourselves to see in our dreams. The.25 auto felt as small and light as plastic in my hand.