"You know the rules."

"Rules."

"Without them, society would crumble. We'd have anarchy. Crime in the streets."

"Bernie-"

"Of course," I said, "I could always do a single-o tonight."

"The hell you could."

"The job wouldn't be that much harder with one than with two. I could handle it."

"Who found it in the first place?"

"You did," I said, "and you're in for fifty percent whatever happens, but you could stay home tonight and still collect it. Why run extra risks? And this way you can have your martini, or even three or four of them, and-"

"You made your point."

"I just thought-"

"I said you made your point, Bern."

We stopped talking while the waitress brought two glasses of Perrier to the table. On the jukebox, Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty were singing a duet about a Mississippi woman and a Louisiana man. Perhaps it was the other way around. No matter.

Carolyn wrapped one hand around her glass and glowered at me. "I'm coming," she said.

"If you say so."

"Damn right I say so. We're partners, remember? I'm in all the way. You think because I'm a goddamn woman I should sit home keeping the goddamn home fires burning."

"I never said-"

"I don't need a goddamn martini." She lifted her glass. "Here's to crime, dammit." She drank it like gin.

The whole project had gotten underway at the Bum Rap, and at that very table. Carolyn and I generally get together for a drink after work, unless one or the other of us has something on, and a couple of weeks earlier we'd been raising a couple of glasses, neither of them containing Perrier water.

"It's funny how people pick dogs," Carolyn had said. "I have this one customer, her name's Wanda Colcannon, and she's got this Bouvier."

"That's funny, all right."