“Thanks for all the cards and letters,” he said.

“You told me to get lost.”

“Figure of speech.”

“You knew where I was.”

“Son, we always know where you are.”

The grin again.

He hasn’t changed much in seven months, Neal thought. His blue eyes were still beady, and his sandy hair was maybe a touch thinner. His leprechaun face still looked like it was peeking out from under a toadstool. He could still point you to the pot of shit at the end of the rainbow.

“To what do I owe the pleasure, Graham?” Neal asked.

“I don’t know, Neal. Your right hand?”

He made the appropriately obscene gesture with his heavy rubber hand, which was permanently cast in a half-closed position. He could do almost everything with it, except Neal did remember the time Graham had broken his left hand in a fight. “It’s when you have to piss,” Graham had said, “that you learn who your friends are.” Neal had been one of those friends.

Graham made an exaggerated pantomime of looking around the room, although Neal knew that he had absorbed every detail in the few seconds it had taken to hang up his coat.

“Nice place,” Graham said sarcastically.

“It suits me.”

“This is true.”

“Coffee?”

“You got a clean cup?”

Neal stepped into the small kitchen and came back with a cup, which he tossed into Graham’s lap. Graham examined it carefully.

“Maybe we can go out,” he said.

“Maybe we can cut the dance short and you can tell me what you’re doing here.”

“It’s time for you to get back to work.”

Neal gestured to the books stacked on the floor around the fireplace.

“I am at work.”

“I mean work work.”

Neal listened to the rain dripping off the thatched roof. It was odd, he thought, that he could hear that sound but not recognize Graham’s knock on the door. Graham had used his hard rubber hand, too, because he had been holding his suitcase in his real hand. Neal Carey was out of shape and he knew it.