The lighting was old and bad; the back corner was dark. Pinball racket mixed with a loud game on ESPN from the bartender’s flat screen.

“It takes four?” Kyle asked, nodding over his shoulder at the booth behind him.

“That’s just what you can see,” Ginyard said.

“Would you like a sandwich?” Plant asked.

“No.” An hour earlier he had been famished. Now his digestive system and his excretory system and his nervous system were on the verge of a meltdown. He was struggling to breathe normally as he desperately tried to appear unfazed. He removed a disposable pen and a note card, and with all the nerve he could summon, he said, “I’d like to see those badges again.”

The responses were identical — disbelief, insulted, then oh-what-the-hell as they slowly reached into their pockets and extracted their most prized possessions. They laid them on the table, and Kyle selected Ginyard’s first. He wrote down the full name — Nelson Edward Ginyard — then his agent number. He squeezed the pen hard and recorded the information carefully. His hand shook, but he thought it wasn’t noticeable. He rubbed the brass emblem carefully, not sure what he was looking for but still taking his time. “Could I see a photo ID?” he asked.

“What the hell?” Ginyard growled.

“Photo ID, please.”

“No.”

“I’m not talking until I finish the preliminaries. Just show me your driver’s license. I’ll show you mine.”

“We already have a copy of yours.”

“Whatever. Let’s have it.”

Ginyard rolled his eyes as he reached for his back pocket. From a battered billfold he produced a Connecticut license with an ominous snapshot of himself. Kyle examined it and jotted down the birth date and license data. “That’s worse than a passport photo,” he said.