Her annual salary was one of the reasons I kept nurturing the notion that I could retire, or at least semiretire, within the next few months: It would help underwrite my Golden Years.

She went into the kitchen to get us something to drink and I went out onto the balcony. The night panorama was even more impressive from this vantage point. San Francisco really is a beautiful city when you see it like this, from high up, with the distance and the light-spattered darkness hiding the ugliness and the people who create the ugliness, who keep spreading it like a plague in ever-increasing numbers. Those were the people I had to deal with on a day-to-day basis. And they had put an ugliness in me, too-scars on my body that I could see when I stood naked before a mirror, invisible cankers on the inside, in the form of bitter memories and recurring nightmares, that pained me more with each passing year.

In not too many months I would be fifty-six years old; I had been a cop of one kind or another for nearly two-thirds of my life. I’d seen too much suffering, suffered too much myself. The time had come for a change, a new outlook, a saner way of living out my days. The time to turn the agency over to Eberhardt, who had no intention of ever retiring. For a while maybe I could go in one or two days a week and take care of paperwork and miscellany, just to keep a hand in, but I would draw the line there. No more field work. No more stakeouts, or prying questions, or physical skirmishes, or sudden confrontations with death. No more ugliness.

I’d already broached the idea to Kerry, in a tentative way, and she seemed all for it. In the time we’d been together, she had seen me shot up, beaten up, used up psychologically, and she’d grown to hate the kind of work I did. So why shouldn’t I retire, make us both happy? Money was no problem.