“Could we get out of this cramped bedroom? I just know you’re not going to be comfortable talking to me till we do.”

I nodded. “The living room. You know the way. You came in through there.”

“I did at that. It was a tricky fucker, too. You want me to turn on the hall switch?”

“Know where it is, do you?”

“Fuck, yes. I been in here three times.”

“Really? I’d have thought you were good enough to get by on once.”

He laughed. “We better stop tryin’ to impress each other and go in the other room and talk like civilized people.”

“Good idea,” I said, and we did.

I kept the nine-millimeter on him, but I didn’t make a big thing of it. He had decided to try and talk his way out this, and I wanted to encourage that view. But I watched him. Close.

“You mind if I smoke?” he asked, sitting on the couch beneath the open stairway to the loft.

I had pulled the kitchen stool around and was sitting on that. I liked being up a shade higher than him.

“I don’t mind,” I said.

“You got any cigarettes around this joint, then? I didn’t bring mine in with me.”

“No.”

“No?”

“I don’t smoke myself, and I don’t keep cigarettes in my house.”

“Why not, for Christsake?”

“They’re bad for you.”

He thought that was funny, or pretended to. He laughed and shook his head for thirty seconds and said, “You got anything to drink?”

“Coke, Dr Pepper, Seven-Up.”

“And what else?”

“I got some wine, but I’m saving that for New Year’s Eve.”

That tickled him, too, or anyway he laughed about it. “Shit, man, you live like a fuckin’ nun.”

“Monk.”

“Whatever. But that’s how you live. If you call this living.”

“It beats what your partner’s doing.”

That stopped him, for just a moment, and he said, “You been waiting for this, haven’t you? You were ready for us.”